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The Renaissance of Higher Education Is the Renaissance of the Human Ideal

  • May 2
  • 7 min read

Original Vietnamese article by Dr. Vo Tat Thang: "The Renaissance of Higher Education Is the Renaissance of the Human Ideal," published in Tia Sang / VnExpress. Source: https://tiasang.com.vn/phuc-hung-giao-duc-dai-hoc-la-phuc-hung-ly-tuong-ve-con-nguoi-5060627.html. English translation by HAPRI.

The university must become a central institution of the nation, producing knowledge worth trusting, character worth trusting, and citizens worth trusting.
A quiet afternoon in a Vietnamese university courtyard—where learning goes beyond the classroom, and the ideals of truth, responsibility, and intellectual independence take root under the shade of old trees.
A quiet afternoon in a Vietnamese university courtyard—where learning goes beyond the classroom, and the ideals of truth, responsibility, and intellectual independence take root under the shade of old trees.

Where the Great Universities Converge

From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and Japan, the world's leading universities have taken very different historical paths, yet they arrive at the same handful of bedrock principles.

  • First, education exists to shape people, not merely to train them for a job. Harvard still defends General Education against the pressure to specialize. Waseda holds to the cultivation of good citizens as a founding core. Tokyo has always stated its mission plainly: to train intellectual citizens with a global perspective and a sense of the future. Keio speaks of independence and self-respect; Kyoto, of harmonious coexistence within both the human community and the ecological one. Higher education, in these traditions, is always bound to an ideal of the human being, not just to an ideal of skills.

  • Second, the university is a place loyal to truth. Truth is the common thread running through Cambridge, Humboldt, UNESCO, and the whole tradition of the modern university. "Truth" here should not be understood as a sealed metaphysical truth, but first of all as an academic standard: honesty with the evidence, argument taken seriously, the willingness to change one's mind when challenged, and the refusal to let power, self-interest, or the crowd stand in for reason. Academic freedom is what lets teachers, students, and researchers actually pursue that standard — the professional and institutional guarantee that makes the search possible. Freedom of thought and expression, in turn, is the room in which disagreement, debate, and verification can happen out in the open, and responsibly. Only when that link holds does the university avoid becoming either a stage for academic showmanship or an echo chamber for conclusions already reached.

Harvard's motto, Veritas (Truth), expresses the philosophy that a university must be oriented toward authentic knowledge, not reputation or short-term gain.

  • Third, the university is animated by the spirit of research — which is not the same thing as counting publications, grants, and citations. Research is an intellectual climate sustained by questioning, discovery, testing, and humility before what one does not yet know. In such a climate, students do not merely receive ready-made knowledge; they learn how to search for it, how to test it, and how to live responsibly with it. Humboldt treated this as the core of the modern university. Cambridge speaks of nurturing the close tie between teaching, scholarship, and research. Oxford names research and discovery as one of the four pillars of its 2025–2030 strategy. ETH Zurich likewise yokes higher education to pioneering research and to the hardest challenges facing the world today.

  • Fourth, the university need not choose between academic depth and service to society. The great universities have refused both extremes — neither sealing themselves inside an ivory tower nor letting themselves dissolve into the marketplace. From its founding charter, Stanford has bound the university to practical use and the public good, committing itself to serve humanity and civilization. Oxford speaks of sustaining excellence in education and research, extending its impact through innovation, and exercising a leading role through partnership for the social good. ETH Zurich stresses producing knowledge and technology to meet global challenges while keeping up an active exchange with business, politics, and the wider society. All of these examples show that the right path is not to choose between depth and usefulness, but to build usefulness on depth.

  • Fifth, the university helps form citizens. Waseda speaks of cultivating good citizens; Tokyo, of training intellectual citizens. A university does not exist only to serve the success of individuals; it prepares people for a common life and for the responsibilities that come with it. A society does not only need capable experts — it needs experts who know how to think and act as citizens.

Higher education is bound to an ideal of the human being, not just to an ideal of skills. Dr. Vo Tat Thang

Holding the Line Against Short-Term Pressures

These common principles of the modern university help answer the question: what can Vietnamese universities draw on to keep their bearings, hold to their core values, and resist the undertow of short-term demands?

  • First, truth and real learning. The university exists, first and foremost, to hold to truth, not to churn out diplomas. Once the diploma becomes the point, everything else drifts with it: students study for the certificate, institutions teach to produce graduates, and standards bend to whatever the market will absorb.

  • Second, the shaping of autonomous people of character who can think for themselves. By "autonomy" I don't mean only making a living on one's own; I mean intellectual autonomy — knowing how to read, to think, to argue back, to correct oneself, and to stand one's ground against crowds and slogans. "Character," too, is more than generic decency. It is scholarly character: honest, rigorous, humble in the face of knowledge, and ashamed of falsehood.

  • Third, teaching that breathes the spirit of research. Not every institution needs to be a research powerhouse of the same intensity, but every degree program has to be alive to inquiry. Without that, a university is only an extension of secondary school in another form.

  • Fourth, autonomy matched by self-respect. Otherwise, autonomy shrinks into fending for oneself financially and slides, step by step, into commercialization. Genuine autonomy has to help an institution hold its standards more firmly, not weaken them. This is in keeping with UNESCO's call for the free environment that university teaching requires, and with the way the great universities have always yoked autonomy to mission rather than to the market alone.

  • Fifth, a university rooted in real life but not at the mercy of the market's short-term interests. Stanford, Oxford, ETH Zurich, and Waseda all show that knowledge can be very close to life without surrendering its academic dignity. Vietnam's universities can walk that same road: rigorous in their scholarship and useful to society, guarding intellectual depth while taking responsibility for a shared future.

The right path is a third path: academically honest, humanely deep, and of real use to society. Dr. Vo Tat Thang

A Vision for Vietnamese Universities

That framework points toward a longer horizon for Vietnam's universities in the twenty-first century. In such a vision, the university must certainly have a stronger moral backbone: knowing how to hold its standards, daring to speak the truth about quality, daring to defend academic freedom, and knowing how to bring what it knows to bear on the country's largest questions.


A university of this kind must become a central institution of the nation, producing knowledge worth trusting, character worth trusting, and citizens worth trusting. Training engineers, doctors, lawyers, economists, teachers, and researchers remains essential; but at a deeper level, the university has to form them into people loyal to truth, unbowed by falsehood, and unmoved by short-term gain. A country can grow quickly on technology. It can develop sustainably only if its universities still know how to elevate people in knowledge, ethics, and responsibility.


This is not a vague dream. It is the coherent distillation of what the great university traditions have proven over time.


The path of the Vietnamese university, then, cannot be the path of an ivory tower cut off from ordinary life; but neither can it be the path of an academic bazaar in which every value collapses into what sells, what fills classrooms, or what looks good on a poster. The right path is a third path: academically honest, humanely deep, and of real use to society. Stanford, Oxford, and ETH Zurich would call it connecting knowledge to public welfare, social benefit, and the world's hardest challenges without bartering away academic dignity. In plain Vietnamese terms: a university that keeps faith with truth, forms people, and serves the country's development in dignity.

Technology can grow a country quickly. Only universities can grow it sustainably, by elevating its people in knowledge, ethics, and responsibility. Dr. Vo Tat Thang

The Renaissance of the Human Ideal

In the end, the crisis of higher education mirrors a crisis in how we think about what a human being is. When a society begins to accept that form can replace substance, credentials can replace learning, and achievement can replace worth, a crisis in education is only the visible tip of a deeper spiritual crisis.


A renaissance of Vietnamese higher education, therefore, cannot consist merely of tweaking mechanisms, adding criteria, or changing a few procedures. It has to restore a high ideal of the human being: someone elevated by truth, by learning, by intellectual freedom, by character, and by a spirit of service. The world's greatest universities endure precisely because they have never given up that conviction.


The path forward for Vietnamese higher education is one that returns the university to what it is for: truth, intellectual freedom, character, the spirit of research, and the common good — and thereby restores the dignity of the person and of the nation. It is not an easy path. What matters is that once the direction is clear, specific reforms — in governance, curriculum, finance, assessment, or internationalization — finally have a chance to be done right. Without direction, reform is only skin-deep. With direction, even small changes can become part of an enduring work of renewal.

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