What might Alasdair Macintyre have made of the state of our universities?

Scottish universities have, in recent decades, been buffeted by a range of new demands, most immediately financial, but also demographic, cultural and technological. Understandably, perhaps, faced with this multiplicity of quotidian pressures, universities have lost sight of any wider sense of purpose. This article seeks to place a conceptual frame around the condition of higher education, prompting engagement with the question of what the purpose of universities in Scotland ought to be or could be. To do so, we turn to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish-born philosopher of world renown. A primary concern for MacIntyre is the fragmentation of moral purpose in societies organised around (neo)liberal principles. He argues that this has led to an inability to reason together around important moral questions. The consequence of this is that moral judgments are viewed as no more than expressions of personal preference, attitude or feeling. MacIntyre addressed the role of university education in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh in 1988 and in related writing. This article will revisit the salience of his work in light of the current issues facing higher education.