Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitari... — David Lodge

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Author: David Lodge

Insight: There's something deeply true about this: universities have become the places where we go to wrestle with big questions, to step outside the immediate pressure of making money, to think in ways that don't have an obvious payoff next quarter. Like medieval cathedrals, they're built on the faith that some human activities matter precisely because they don't reduce to practical use. But here's where it gets complicated. Cathedrals were actually useful—they held communities together, provided social services, created art and architecture. The comparison isn't quite saying universities should be useless; it's saying they serve purposes beyond job training. Philosophy, pure mathematics, literature, history—these create something hard to measure but real: a shared culture, a way of thinking, a space for questioning assumptions that shape how we live. You can't always point to what you got, but you feel its absence when it's gone. The sting is that we've started demanding universities prove their worth in exactly the utilitarian terms they shouldn't need to defend against. The real loss isn't that universities are less useful now. It's that we've stopped believing anything could be worth doing just because it deepens what we know about being human. That shift might tell us more about ourselves than about universities.