Oct 22, 2026
Contemporary student housing with unique architecture in Tanger, Morocco. by Sulaiman Afrij via Pexels
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What kind of humans should universities help develop?
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For much of the modern history of higher education, universities have been remarkably confident about their purpose. They existed to educate. They produced and transmitted knowledge. They conducted research. They prepared professionals. They contributed to economic and social development. And, in the case of the research university, they increasingly became engines of scientific discovery and innovation.
Today, however, some of America’s most prestigious universities appear to be suffering from a crisis more fundamental than declining enrolments, political attacks, federal funding uncertainty or the arrival of generative artificial intelligence. They are asking themselves what they are for.
In April this year, Yale University published the report of its Committee on Trust in Higher Education. In July, Vanderbilt University adopted a formal statement on “The University and Its Purpose”, following an earlier Vanderbilt-WashU statement of principles. Now Cornell University has entered this increasingly important conversation with a 238-page report from its Committee on the Future of the American University, released on 22 September.
These are not merely institutional strategy documents. Taken together, they represent an extraordinary moment of self-examination among some of the most powerful institutions in American higher education. And the Cornell report is particularly significant because it shifts the question.
Yale asks how universities can recover public trust by reaffirming their fundamental academic mission: to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge. Vanderbilt identifies three core purposes; pathbreaking research; transformative education and the covenant between universities and society.
Cornell goes one step further. It argues that knowledge, research and education must ultimately be integrated around a human capacity: sound judgement. That difference may seem semantic. It is not.
It goes to the heart of what universities should mean in an age when information is abundant, artificial intelligence can generate plausible answers instantly, public trust in expertise is fragile and graduates must make decisions in circumstances for which there are no predetermined answers.
The question for universities everywhere is therefore no longer simply whether they should become more ‘relevant’. It is whether they have become so preoccupied with producing knowledge, credentials, rankings, research outputs, employability and technological innovation that they have forgotten the human capacities for which those things are supposed to matter.
From trust to purpose
The Yale report begins from the erosion of public confidence. It notes that American confidence in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024, according to Gallup, although trust improved somewhat in 2025.
Yale identifies high costs, admissions practices, concerns about political bias and self-censorship, grade inflation, technological change and bureaucratic expansion among the factors contributing to distrust.
But Yale’s deeper diagnosis is that universities have suffered from a diffusion of purpose. They have been expected to be selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. The result, the report argues, is an institution trying to be everything to everyone and consequently becoming less clear about what it promises to do.
Its response is therefore deliberately conservative in the best institutional sense of the word: return to the core. “Universities exist to preserve, create and share knowledge,” Yale declares.
This is not a rejection of change. Yale explicitly links the reaffirmation of its mission to academic freedom, open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, affordability, improved teaching and broader public access. But knowledge remains the centre of gravity.
Vanderbilt takes a somewhat broader route. Its July 2026 statement, “The University and Its Purpose: A declaration of first principles”, identifies three core purposes: pathbreaking research; transformative education; and the covenant between universities and society.
These are supported by principles including academic freedom, excellence, the freedom to teach and learn, free expression and civil discourse, access and affordability, and global engagement alongside national security.
The Vanderbilt formulation is particularly notable for explicitly placing the university in a relationship with the nation. Its statement says American research universities principally serve as engines of opportunity for Americans and contributors to national prosperity and vitality, while recognising the benefits of international students, scholars and collaboration.
It also takes a much more explicit position on institutional neutrality and the relationship between scholarship and political ideology. The university says research universities should pursue truth through reason, argument and evidence and should not pursue a particular political vision of social change.
Cornell shares some of this concern about political polarisation and public distrust, but its conceptual architecture is different. Its report asks not only what universities produce but what kind of human beings the university should help develop. That is where ‘sound judgement’ becomes central.
Judgement is the product?
The Cornell committee defines the university’s core purpose as fostering “a human-centred and integrated learning ecosystem that cultivates sound judgement”. This is a deceptively powerful proposition.
Knowledge can be stored in libraries, databases and increasingly sophisticated machines. Information can be retrieved instantaneously. AI can summarise, translate, generate arguments, write code and produce images. Even some forms of research and discovery are increasingly assisted by machines. But knowing something is not the same as knowing what to do with it.
A doctor must decide between imperfect treatments. A policy-maker must choose between competing public interests.
An engineer must weigh safety against cost. A business leader must decide whether an innovation should be deployed. A citizen must evaluate competing claims in a political environment saturated with misinformation. A teacher must determine how to balance the needs of individual learners with the demands of a curriculum and how to foster understanding in students who learn at different speeds.
None of these decisions can be solved by AI-generated information alone. They require judgement.
Cornell defines sound judgement as the capacity to make informed and ethical decisions when rules do not neatly apply and every available choice may have disadvantages. It connects judgement to domain knowledge and critical thinking but argues that it also requires the ability to weigh competing considerations – ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘why’ – and to act despite uncertainty.
This is where Cornell’s argument becomes especially relevant to the AI era. The university cannot compete with machines simply by providing more information. Nor can it survive by pretending that AI does not exist. Instead, the university must cultivate capacities that make human beings better users – and sometimes deliberate non-users – of technology.
Cornell therefore recommends reclaiming decisions about technology use and non-use as institutional and pedagogical decisions. The question should not be whether students happen to have access to AI but whether a particular technology helps or undermines the educational purpose of a particular activity.
This is a much more interesting approach than the familiar debate between ‘embrace AI’ and ‘ban AI’. The real question is: what should humans still learn to do themselves?
Transactional vs transformative HE
The report’s implications for university education are equally important. Cornell argues that universities have increasingly become transactional. Students and families ask what they will receive for the money and time invested. Institutions respond with credentials, career preparation and measurable outcomes.
But if higher education becomes primarily a transaction, the logic of the market eventually dominates the educational experience.
Why take a difficult course outside one’s major? Why risk failure? Why spend another year at university? Why read a difficult book when a machine can summarise it? Why engage with someone whose views are deeply different from one’s own? Why learn something that has no obvious labour-market value?
Cornell’s answer is that precisely these experiences may be central to education. The report calls for a ‘transformative education’ that develops four capacities: sound judgment; constructive work across differences; civic-mindedness; and meaning-making.
This perspective also shapes Cornell’s response to the pressure to make higher education cheaper and more efficient. The committee is cautious about treating online-only education or shorter degrees as straightforward solutions.
Its underlying argument is that the time students spend with teachers and peers, the experience of working through difficult problems, making mistakes, revising ideas and learning through sustained relationships are not inefficiencies to be eliminated. They are part of the educational experience itself.
In that sense, Cornell challenges the increasingly common assumption that a university’s function can be reduced to delivering content as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Three reports not saying the same thing
It is tempting to put Yale, Vanderbilt and Cornell together as evidence of an elite American university consensus. That would be misleading. They share concerns, but their conceptions of the university are distinct.
Yale begins with knowledge. Its fundamental proposition is that universities exist to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge. The central institutional challenge is to restore trust by doing this work well, protecting academic freedom, improving affordability and access, strengthening intellectual pluralism and demonstrating public value.
Vanderbilt begins with purpose and institutional principles. Research, transformative education and the university’s relationship with society are its three pillars. It places unusually strong emphasis on free expression, institutional neutrality, excellence and the relationship between scholarship and political ideology. Its statement has the additional force of being adopted as official university policy by the Board of Trust.
Cornell begins with learning and judgement. It sees the university as an integrated ecosystem in which teaching, research, public engagement and institutional community are connected through deliberation. The outcome is not simply more knowledge but human beings capable of using knowledge wisely.
This distinction matters. Knowledge asks: ‘What do we know?’ Research asks: ‘What can we discover?’ Education asks: ‘What can we learn?’ Cornell adds another question: ‘What should we do with what we know?’ That may be the most consequential question universities face in the age of AI.
The university and society
One of the most important questions running through Cornell’s report is the relationship between the university and the society that sustains it. This is not simply a question of public relations or demonstrating ‘impact’. It is a question of institutional purpose.
Universities have traditionally understood their responsibility to society in several ways: by creating knowledge, educating people, addressing public problems, preparing citizens and contributing to cultural and economic life. Yet these responsibilities can easily become fragmented. Research may be rewarded primarily through publications and citations, teaching through student satisfaction and completion rates, and public engagement through easily counted measures of ‘impact’.
Cornell’s broader argument points towards a more integrated relationship. A university should not simply produce knowledge and then transfer it to society. It should also listen to society, learn from it and allow public problems to influence what it teaches and researches.
This matters because public trust cannot be restored simply by explaining universities better.
Universities also need meaningful relationships with the communities around them. People are more likely to regard an institution as valuable when they can see how its knowledge, teaching and research connect with questions that matter in their lives.
The implication extends well beyond Cornell. Universities everywhere are under pressure to demonstrate their public value.
But public value should not be reduced to graduate employment, research income, patents, rankings or economic contribution. A university also contributes by creating spaces in which difficult questions can be examined, evidence can be tested, differences can be encountered and society can think about its future.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to make universities more visible to society. It is to make the relationship between universities and society more reciprocal. The university should not only ask: ‘What can we give society?’ It should also ask: ‘What must we learn from society?’
What does this mean outside America?
This is where the three American reports become much more interesting. Their institutional contexts are unmistakably American. Their financial structures, political controversies, federal research funding systems, admissions practices and histories cannot simply be exported.
But their questions are global.
Universities everywhere face pressure to justify their costs. Governments increasingly ask universities to produce employable graduates, commercial innovation and measurable economic returns. Students ask whether degrees are worth the investment. Employers complain about graduates’ preparedness. Faculty face growing administrative demands.
AI is changing teaching, assessment and research. Public confidence in experts is under pressure. And universities are increasingly caught between demands for institutional neutrality and demands that they respond to urgent social and political problems.
These are not exclusively American problems. In many countries they are already more acute. Consider universities in lower- and middle-income countries. Their challenges are often fundamentally different from those of Cornell, Yale or Vanderbilt.
The issue may not be a nearly US$100,000 annual cost of attendance or the politics of elite admissions. It may be inadequate public financing, overcrowding, weak research infrastructure, graduate unemployment, migration of talent, poor academic preparation, political interference or the expansion of private providers.
Yet the question remains: ‘What is the university for?’
If the answer is simply ‘employment’, universities become training institutions. If it is simply ‘economic development’, they become instruments of national economic policy. If it is simply ‘research’, they risk becoming knowledge-producing organisations detached from the communities that finance and sustain them.
If it is simply ‘social transformation’, they risk confusing education with advocacy. If it is simply ‘national prestige’, rankings can become the ‘hidden curriculum’.
Cornell offers another possibility: the university as a place where knowledge, experience, disagreement, research and relationships are brought together to cultivate human judgement. That idea is portable even if Cornell’s institutional model is not.
The danger of importing the American solution
There is, however, a danger in treating these reports as a blueprint for the rest of the world. Universities are historical institutions. The American research university emerged from a particular combination of liberal education, private philanthropy, land-grant institutions, industrial development, federal research funding and postwar scientific expansion.
Other systems have different histories. A university in Nepal, Kenya, Brazil, India or South Africa cannot simply reproduce the governance structures or financial models of an American Ivy League institution. Nor should ‘sound judgement’ become another fashionable graduate attribute inserted into a curriculum without changing how students actually learn.
If universities continue to reward memorisation, examination performance, publication counts and credential accumulation, adding ‘judgement’ to the mission statement will change very little. The Cornell report itself is more demanding than that.
Judgement requires practice. It requires students to encounter difficult problems, competing interpretations and genuine uncertainty. It requires opportunities for failure. It requires relationships in which disagreement can occur without destroying the community. It requires faculty who themselves have the time and institutional freedom to teach in these ways.
This is particularly relevant for systems where the lecture, examination and textbook remain dominant. A university cannot claim to cultivate judgement while providing students with no meaningful opportunities to exercise it.
Academic civics: Cornell’s overlooked idea?
One of Cornell’s most intriguing contributions is its idea of academic civics. The report argues that members of complex universities often exercise governance responsibilities without sufficiently understanding how their institutions work.
Faculty participate in curriculum decisions, appointments, tenure, resource allocation and other forms of institutional governance, yet may have little understanding of the university as a whole.
Academic civics would help faculty, staff, students and administrators understand the institution they collectively govern. This deserves global attention. Universities frequently teach students how to become citizens of a country but rarely teach their own academic communities how to become citizens of the university.
Shared governance cannot work simply because institutional rules say that faculty have a voice. It requires institutional knowledge, historical memory and the ability to see beyond one’s department or discipline. In an era of increasingly fragmented ‘multiversities’, this may be as important as any structural reform.
The deeper question is not trust
The three reports are often described as responses to the crisis of public trust. But trust may be the symptom rather than the disease. A society loses trust when an institution’s promises and practices diverge.
A university says it values critical thinking but rewards conformity. It says education is transformative but measures success primarily through employment statistics. It says research serves society but communicates primarily with other researchers. It says it values students but designs learning around institutional convenience.
It says it prepares citizens for democracy but provides few opportunities for serious disagreement. It says AI is transformative but cannot articulate what human learning should look like when machines can produce the outputs students were previously required to create.
The Cornell report’s contribution is therefore not simply another attempt to repair public relations. It asks universities to reconstruct the relationship between purpose and practice. That is much harder.
A question for universities everywhere
There is a temptation in moments of crisis to respond with structural reform: merge departments, redesign degrees, create new centres, cut costs, adopt new technologies, revise admissions, change governance. Those things may matter.
But the Cornell report suggests that institutional reform without a renewed purpose risks becoming rearrangement rather than renewal. The most important sentence in the report may therefore not be one of its nearly 70 recommendations. It is the proposition that the university is a human-centred, integrated learning ecosystem whose distinctive contribution is the cultivation of sound judgement.
For Yale, the answer begins with knowledge. For Vanderbilt, it is organised around research, education and a covenant with society. For Cornell, knowledge becomes meaningful through judgement.
The goal is not to eliminate differences but learn how to live and work constructively with them. They demonstrate something that universities themselves should remember: there is no single formula for the institution called the university.
But there is a question that every university should be able to answer. Not: ‘How many graduates did they produce?’ Not: ‘How many papers did they publish?’ Not: ‘How much research funding did they attract?’ Not even: ‘How high did they climb in the rankings?’ But: ‘What can a person do, understand and become after spending several years in our institution that they could not have done, understood or become without it?’
That question becomes more urgent, not less, when machines can provide information at almost no cost.
The future university may therefore need to protect something that sounds old-fashioned but is becoming increasingly scarce: the time and institutional space to think before responding; to disagree without retreating into opposing camps; to encounter ideas and perspectives that challenge what we already believe; to test claims against evidence; to live productively with uncertainty; and to make judgements and decisions for which no algorithm can ultimately assume responsibility.
Perhaps this is where the enduring value of the university lies – not in how much information it can deliver but in how deeply it can transform a person’s capacity to understand, imagine, judge, question and act.
The American university is now conducting an unusually public argument with itself. Yale says: ‘recover trust by remembering what knowledge is for.’ Vanderbilt says: ‘restore the principles that protect research, education and the university’s relationship with society.’ Cornell says: ‘integrate these functions around the cultivation of human judgement.’
The rest of the world should not copy any of them mechanically. But universities everywhere should listen to the question underneath all three: If we cannot clearly explain what human beings need universities for in an age when information is abundant and artificial intelligence is increasingly capable, why should society continue to invest in them? That is not an American question. It is the defining question for the university everywhere today.
Min Bahadur Bista is a former professor of education at Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and a former education specialist with UNESCO, with experience across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. He currently works as an independent education consultant, specialising in education policy, governance and reform, and writes on global education issues.
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