Steve Fuller was Columbia University’s Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1981, from which he received an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science. Charlie Standen, who is himself currently pursuing an M.Phil. at Clare College, Cambridge, interviewed him in April 2025 for a new Clare College-based magazine, Running Dog. What follows is the interview as it will appear in that (hard copy only) magazine with permission of Standen, with Standen posing the questions and Fuller providing the answers. … [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: Martin Pettitt via Flickr/Creative Commons

Charlie Standen (CS): What are the problems that you see as inherent in the massification of the universities that occurred in the 1960s (epitomised in the UK by the Robbins Report)?

Steve Fuller (SF): First, it’s worth recalling the admirable aim of the Robbins Report, which was to loosen the control that Oxford and Cambridge still exerted over higher education in the UK. This went beyond the selective nature of their admissions process. They were also slow to recognize the significance of much of the applied and social sciences—and interdisciplinary studies more generally. Robbins promoted new universities specifically designed to highlight these subjects. My own university, Warwick, in many ways epitomizes what Robbins was trying to do. However, as you suggest, the proliferation of new universities in the 1960s (and again in the early 1990s) resulted in ‘massification’. The US standard of 60% of 18–25-year-olds attending university was a policy commonly pursued across the developed world by the 1990s. In the UK that was triple the percentage from the 1960s. It required a shift in the political-economic justification for the public funding of universities.

Before Robbins, even though relatively few people attended universities, its public funding was justified through a kind of Keynesian ‘multiplier effect’, which meant that each newly trained professional added value that circulated throughout society. In effect, the public is well served by funding a steady supply of elites such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, civil servants, etc. However, the argument for having as many people as possible attend university was based on our supposedly moving into a ‘knowledge-based economy’, in which a university education will boost anyone’s lifetime productivity in the ‘jobs of the future’. This shift in justification also motivated the drive for tuition fees as a ‘human capital investment’, the return on which the individual will reap through greater lifetime income. However, the increasing number of un- and under-employed people with university degrees undermines this hypothesis. And advances in artificial intelligence imply that this trend is unlikely to be reversed. In fact, it might well get worse.

My own prognosis is that the higher education sector in the developed world is a bubble ready to burst. All that’s needed is a cluster of universities to declare bankruptcy and/or a critical mass of university graduates suing their institutions for falsely advertising the value of their degrees.

CS: Why is Humboldt so important to you in understanding the trajectory of the modern university and its potential reform?

SF: As both promoter of Kantian Enlightenment and Prussian Education Minister, Wilhelm von Humboldt reinvented the university—specifically the University of Berlin in 1810—as a place inhabited by people who are at once educators and researchers. That was a bold move. Before that time, academics were seen as merely people in the business of training the next generation of elites. The knowledge they imparted—of theology, law, medicine—was presumed to be largely settled or subject to relatively narrow variation.

What we now call ‘research’ tended to happen outside universities, and often such researchers were explicitly anti-university. Humboldt’s innovation was to unify the two antagonists by reimagining education as presuming that the future is open and therefore need not repeat the past. In that case, the ideal person to teach the next generation of society’s leaders is someone who spends their time pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, effectively inviting students to join a collective journey into the unknown.

Following Kant, Humboldt believed that philosophers were best suited for this role, which at the time was often portrayed as ‘Romantic’. The sociologist Max Weber is (rightly) fashioned as a twentieth century Humboldtian, who offered a more sober assessment of the romance of inquiry. In any case, the fate of the university as a distinctive institution depends on its ability to attract and cultivate this ideal academic personality—for which there seems to be little incentive in our times.

CS: You have written about the lack of identity of the modern university. What identity would you like to see it assume (and is this in keeping with what you predict will happen)?

SF: As my previous answers suggest, I would focus on the academic personality as the source of the university’s identity. This is especially relevant now because academic expertise is under fire from many quarters. So, it has become reasonable to ask, ‘What is the added value of attending a university?’ My answer is exposure to the academic personality, which is someone of great learning who can make it interesting, useful and even exciting to students. In particular, students should see what it’s like for someone to convey difficult and complex ideas and arguments in normal speech.

Too often, even today, students think of academic knowledge as something they just need to master for purposes of an exam or essay—and then they can forget about it. PowerPoint—and now AI—only reinforce this tendency. However, if students are exposed to people for whom academic knowledge is a form of self-expression, then they might consider it as something worth retaining for life. Unfortunately, universities don’t really value the academic personality. They don’t even think much about the kind of person they attract to academic posts. If they did, there would be a greater emphasis on cultivating a pedagogy that brings out the best in the academic, material and students, so they all see themselves as engaged in a common quest to understand the world.

CS: Could you explain your critique of Thomas Kuhn and path dependency in the context of the university?

SF: At the heart of Kuhn’s theory of science, which remains the most influential after more than fifty years, is the idea of ‘paradigm’, which among the many things means that progress in science is always a matter of trying to complete the worldview that was initially laid out by some founding figure; hence we speak of a ‘Newtonian paradigm’ or a ‘Darwinian paradigm’. These figures are ‘founders’ in science not because they are the first to arrive the ideas for which they are known. (They usually aren’t.) Rather, it’s because they attach ideas to methods that enable successful problem-solving: The ideas are made to do some systematic intellectual work that may even have practical value. But all this requires institutionalization, which is where the universities enter the frame.

Although Kuhn proposed his account of science as, in some sense, ‘universal’, he is really imagining a world in which academia is the principal training ground for producing professional scientists of the sort that operate according to a ‘paradigm’. That’s largely a nineteenth century invention, in which universities started to function explicitly as arbiters of disciplinary propriety, whereby if one wants to be a ‘physicist’, there is a certain way of going about it, which involves learning it from the right people in the right places. This is what I mean by ‘path dependency’, a term that economists after Brian Arthur use to describe a formally similar phenomenon in the history of technology, which explains why only one template tends to dominate in markets for mass-produced goods.

At the outset, there are usually several competing templates, some of which seem to work more efficiently, etc. Nevertheless, one competitor ends up controlling supply chains and consumer access, which results in path dependency. For the last two centuries, universities—in both their educational and credential functions—have provided the sort of path dependency that sustains Kuhnian paradigms. Whether universities carry on in that capacity in the future—and whether the paradigms they sustain can exist otherwise—remains to be seen.

CS: Is there a sense in which the academic path dependency (i.e. academics arbitrarily banded around certain ‘trendy’ topics of research, citing each other, creating intellectual ‘bubbles’) that you have been critical of is necessary to allow for what you refer to as ‘deviant’ interdisciplinary research that blurs boundaries between different fields? I suppose what I’m asking is, do we not need academic taboos in order to transgress them?

SF: That’s an interesting question. The most straightforward answer is that it’s easier to blur boundaries if they exist in the first place!  Disciplinary boundaries serve to prescribe askable questions and adequate answers, so that discipline’s putative subject matter stays within the limits of its practitioners’ competences. It would thus be ‘taboo’ to suggest those competences are not adequate to solve the discipline’s standing problems. Indeed, you would be expelled from the paradigm.

You become a ‘deviant interdisciplinarian’ once you realize that such boundaries are the products of historical contingencies reinforced by institutional inertia—another way to talk about path dependency. There are even significant cross-national differences in how disciplinary boundaries are drawn, especially the farther one moves from the natural sciences, which in turn reflect more specific institutional histories.

Are such boundaries necessary? Maybe in a practical ‘division of labour’ sense, since clearly not everyone can work on everything. However, problems arise when this social fact becomes ontologically inflated, and people start to think that disciplinary boundaries cut reality at the joints.

CS: Why did you see it as important to defend the teaching of intelligent design in American schools in the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District case, especially as a non-Christian yourself?  More generally, why the interest in the Christian idea that we are ‘created in the image of God’? As a transhumanist, I find it interesting that you place emphasis on the dignity conferred onto humanity via a creation narrative.

SF: First, I think of myself as at least a cultural Christian, since I was a product of Jesuit education prior to entering university. However, I have not been a church member throughout my adult life. For most practicing Christians, that’s not ‘Christian enough’, and I respect that judgement. I would say that my style of Christianity is like that of the US founding fathers, who dissented from the established churches and tended to minimize the distance between the human and the divine, in the spirit of the Arian heresy, which in turn informs my views about Transhumanism.

In any case, my participation as an expert witness in support of intelligent design in the Dover trial starts from what I take to be an obvious historical fact, namely, that the modern conception of science as the search for a ‘Grand Unified Theory of Everything’ rests on the idea that reality is ‘intelligible’ in the deep sense of being comprehensible as a set of rational principles (aka ‘laws’) that correspond to the terms in which it has been brought about and is maintained (aka ‘creation’). Indeed, Newton and other physicists—including self-avowed atheists—have spoken about ‘getting into the mind of God’, a phrase that I think should be taken literally. At least, that provides the best explanation for why our thinking about reality in these terms—which is unique to the monotheistic cultures—turns out to have been so fruitful over the recent centuries. And the underlying assumption is to be found in Genesis, namely, that humanity is created in God’s image—and so, to put it bluntly, we are born already thinking like the deity, albeit in a diminished capacity due to Original Sin. This is why scientific inquiry is both so important and so arduous.

I also think that Transhumanism doesn’t make much sense unless we start from the same set of premises, which stresses humanity’s exceptional standing in nature. Put another way, Transhumanism is scientism on steroids.

CS: Can you explain the concept of the upwinger, and would you describe yourself as an upwinger in regards to university innovation? For example, the application of AI to social epistemological reform.

SF: I originally introduced ‘upwinger’ as part of a binary with ‘downwinger’ to describe a ‘ninety-degree rotation of the political axis’ (from leftwing/rightwing). The leftwing-rightwing dichotomy, which has centred ideological differences for more than two centuries, presupposed that society’s problems are most directly addressed by taking control of the state. Thus, elections would be focal sites of ideological confrontation. However, in the twenty-first century the state has increasingly lost its political salience, not least as evidenced by the low voter turnout among young people. Instead, there is now a more ontologically fluid debate about humanity’s relationship to the earth—are we restricted to our Homo sapiens existence? It basically reflects the internet replacing more staged forums for political debate, such as Parliament.

‘Upwingers’ are about what Transhumanists call ‘morphological freedom’, which means that humanity is closer to a spiritual than a bodily entity, implying that the bodies of our birth are simply the platforms from which we might metamorphose into, say, enhanced bodies or even virtual avatars. In contrast, ‘Downwingers’ are about retrenching humanity in Homo sapiens and having us reconnect to our roots in nature, on which we are ultimately dependent. Given these stark alternatives for defining the future of humanity, universities basically cede to AI those aspects of education that it can render more efficiently. However, the challenge remains for universities to recruit staff members who can supersede what the machines can do. This will involve a revival of the Humboldtian model of the academic personality as someone capable of venturing into the unknown, inspiring others to join him or her in the journey.

CS: Across your work, one finds a willingness to analyse vast historical periods and deal with many characters. For example, Humanity 2.0 engages with Duns Scotus, Teilhard Chardin, Joseph Priestley, Darwin and Newton. What do you make of the postmodern critique of metanarrative and is this an active effort on your part to redefine academic work?

SF: Postmodernism pretty much started when I began my academic career in the late 1970s, so I feel that it’s been a fellow traveller throughout my life—and largely a welcomed companion to my thinking. However, I’ve always seen it as a corrective to the more monolithic forms of Modernism represented by, say, Kuhn’s account of science, in which the dominant paradigm promulgates a metanarrative about the origins and destination of scientific inquiry. In short, the problem is not the existence of metanarratives but the impression that there is only one (true) metanarrative.

An early influence on my thinking about these matters was Hayden White’s Metahistory, which was dissected in a postgraduate seminar at Columbia University that I was allowed to attend as an undergraduate. White identified four ‘emplotments’ of history, roughly corresponding to literary genres, that have prevailed in the West since the nineteenth century. He showed that there are systematically alternative ways of recounting the past with an eye to the future. My own idiosyncratic pick of figures to stress in my own historiography—you mentioned Scotus, Teilhard and Priestley—should be understood in this spirit: You can’t plausibly argue for a different future without presenting a different past. It sounds obvious, but it’s remarkably powerful when done well.

CS: Why do you regard Twitter as a medium for aphoristic expression? Is not the nature in which Tweets are read (quickly, unabsorbed, chuckled at, moved on from) detrimental to the idea of its aphoristic potential?

SF: Another interesting question. The first thing to say is that the sort of pithy sayings we call ‘aphorisms’ have been typically repeated across the centuries, often edited and reframed—so much so that it is often difficult to identify the originator. Twitter differs only in terms of its shortened timescale, which makes it somewhat easier to identify the original tweeter. Nevertheless, many tweets become ‘memes’, as they are repurposed for interventions in different social media threads. All this sounds very much like the fate of aphorisms.

I think the more profound issue lurking here is whether aphoristic expression should set the standard for human communication. Twitter and other social media platforms seem to be heading us in that direction. To be sure, academic institutions are trying to resist this tendency. However, it’s interesting to observe that, certainly when compared with the East, the West—at least since Aristotle—has been generally suspicious of aphorisms, unless they are unpacked into a discursive argument, whose validity can then be properly judged. Indeed, such unpacking became the hallmark of ‘serious’ and ‘rational’ language use, especially in the modern era, which has also witnessed the revival and popularization of aphoristic expression in political slogans and advertising taglines, all of which are routinely seen as ‘emotive’ and perhaps even ‘irrational’.

In our ‘post-truth condition’, which I see as ‘Postmodernism 2.0’, the respective values assigned to discursive and aphoristic expression have become unclear. Those who poorly—if at all—communicate on social media platforms are increasingly marginalized, notwithstanding their academic credentials. For that reason, my assignment in the Media course I teach requires students to translate a paragraph or two of a media theory text into a tweet—and then explicate the logic behind the translation. You might say that’s a way to hedge one’s bets on the future of communication.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: academic personality, Charlie Standen, expertsie, future of the university, modern university, research universities, Robbins Report, SERRC 6/6/2025, Steve Fuller, transhumanism, UK universities, Wilhelm von Humboldt