The Therapeutic University

Abstract

Universities are generally understood as organizations that extend knowledge based on codified bodies of work developed from systematic research and scholarship. This article examines the emergence of an organizational form that increasingly competes in contemporary higher education: the therapeutic university. A recent phenomenon, the therapeutic university is predicated on emotion in which the goal is to make the experience as a student as comfortable as possible. The article discusses organizational morphology of the therapeutic university by identifying practices within it. The practices establish a contest between a rational-universalistic orientation of the university on the one hand and an emotion-particularistic orientation on the other. The article provides an explanation for why this organizational form arose and what it purports to accomplish. Its operations are ensnared by major paradox: as its identity implies, the therapeutic university postures to do good, but its practices, it is argued, debilitate students and higher learning. The mandate that the broader society gives to higher education is thereby susceptible to lost confidence. The article concludes by discussing a way in which universities may be inoculated from the conditions that support their present-day therapeutic proclivities.