What is a university?

A university is the most complex institution ever devised, it aims to nurture the highest human faculty: intellect.

Pakistan now has a large number of universities yet, a precious few qualify for that title. However, a number of centres of learning in both the private and public sectors are currently establishing institutional procedures and processes through which they could achieve international standards at some point in the future. It may, therefore, be helpful to discuss the idea of a university.

A university is, perhaps, the most complex institution ever devised, since it aims to nurture the highest human faculty: the intellect. It can be argued that two of the defining features of a university are: a) the production of knowledge by the various faculties through reflection and research and b) intellectual training of the students so that they, too, can produce knowledge at some stage. Thus, research and research-based teaching are essential to the enterprise of a university.

The aim of intellectual training is the pursuit of truth, while the means is the discipline of the mind: the ability to concentrate and bring to bear one’s diverse mental faculties. John Henry Newman, in his discourses on the idea of a university at Dublin in February 2008, echoed the view of thinkers through the ages, when he said that “truth is the proper object of the intellect”. Such an intellectual quest involves developing both the capacity to analyse and synthesise.

Sharpening one’s analytical ability requires training the mind for critical thinking. This was the method used by Socrates in his dialogues in 4^th century BC, so that students learned to understand the grounds on which a particular proposition was predicated. Only then can one think for oneself and make an original contribution to knowledge.

The ability to synthesise involves comprehending wholeness within diversity. Therefore, the university environment should provide students exposure, not only to specialties within subjects, but also to other subjects to give them the opportunity to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on human knowledge. The rules and procedures that shape the intellectual interactions within a university ought to enable the nurturing of both reason and the creative imagination: they must allow those moments of reflection and insight when the diligence of intensive reading of tutorials, lectures and seminars are filtered within the synthesised university experience of a student into what Newman calls “the faculty … of clear-sightedness, of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind”. Thus, a university is not a place for vocational training, which is important, but best left to vocational training institutes. A university is a place for acquiring the power of thinking clearly and developing a humane sensibility.

The intellectual traditions of both West and East combine the use of reason with the nurturing of virtue in the human intellect. Socrates in his dialogues, through his questioning method, trained his students to use reason, as well as the creative imagination to understand the concepts of justice and the importance of ethical values.

Ibn Al’ Arabi, the great Arab Sufi and philosopher writing in the early 13^th century, discusses the God-given human capacity of combining reason with the experience of transcendent truths. “Know that the universals, even though they have no tangible individual existence, yet are conceived of and known in the mind ...” Shah Hussain, the 16^th-century Punjabi Sufi poet spoke of the relationship between knowledge, virtue and social action: “What (the teacher) said has entered my consciousness and so I must seek to actualise the truth.” Martin Lings, a great Sufi master and scholar of the contemporary period, suggests that the ancient world of both the East and West considers the ‘heart’ as a synonym of the ‘intellect’, not in terms of the contemporary misuse of this word, but its actual meaning in the Latin intellectus which is “the faculty which perceives the transcendent”.

Pakistan, today, is ravaged by bigotry and violence. Reason has been banished from political argument and religious discourse divorced from its root in the loving heart. The university, in fulfilling its core function of nurturing reason and humanity, of teaching students to think for themselves and being creative, can make a vital contribution towards reconstructing Pakistan’s society.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2012.