[K]nowledge is important, in the end, not because it flatters the pretensions of its producers, but because it helps us achieve our purposes.
I had every intention, at one time, of becoming an academic. The happiest I had been was in the academy; I love University libraries more than many places. Yet, my time spent in pursuit of that goal of academic life, the humanities' doctorate, left me disillusioned not just at the process, but at the life toward which I was working. While I am impressed by those who do finish the process, my own view from outside is that, a century after a slew of reforms of the academy - ushered in from Americans impressed with the standards set in German research universities - is that the sprouting of increasingly specialized academic journals and the pursuit of increasingly esoteric studies in a variety of disciplines (moreso in the humanities than the sciences, to be sure) has led not so much to an increase in our ability to understand and organize our collective experience so much as it has led to a kind of leveling down. The demand to "publish or perish" results, in the end, to an overall decrease in the level of academic life. On the one hand, will one more study, say, of the writings of J. D. Salinger or the philosophy of Spinoza really make our society better? Am I the only one who thinks that a careful study of a local poet or local historian or folklorist by a University Press is of decreasingly marginal utility, when considered on a collective basis?
Louis Menand, of Harvard University's literature department, has published The Marketplace of Ideas to address the elephant in the classroom - a kind of malaise that is effecting academic life (in particular the humanities). Reviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Slate (from whence the epigram), Menand's work focuses attention on what has been wrought by the academic reforms of Harvard's storied President, Charles William Eliot. The model of academic freedom Eliot used, based in the academic reforms in the German Empire of the 19th century, were themselves modeled on an understanding of the pursuit of knowledge that was not only historically contingent, but structured on a particularly parochial understanding of "science" as the model for knowledge. That understanding is, largely, passe. Furthermore, while the model does work well in the sciences, they work less well the further one wanders from the laboratory. The mushrooming of academic journals might indicate that our collective pursuit of understanding (as opposed to knowledge) is working quite well; or, it might just be an object lesson, an example of the end of a model of academic professionalization that, for all it has benefited our society over the past century, has become one of decreasing utility.
From my own perspective, there is one telling observation Lewis-Kraus makes on Menand's book:
In the 2004 election, he notes, 95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush. This is sure to be taken up by the few remaining culture warriors as proof of the disloyalty of the American professoriate. But Menand, in the context of a book about the trade-offs of professionalization, reads the situation differently. The fault is not with the politics themselves; academics are usually careful to keep policy out of the classroom. It is with the homogeneity. The system is simply replicating itself too smoothly.
As Lewis-Kraus makes clear, for all it insists that academic freedom as an umbrella exists to protect the pursuit of knowledge as an ideal, he makes clear that Menand makes the observation that the system really creates not scholars so much as professionals schooled in the wiles and ways of certain professional practices. Increasingly marginalized from the larger society, intent on pursuing esoterica that has an ever-decreasing marginal utility - again, understanding as a social phenomenon is, or at least should be, considered among the criteria we apply to the results of academic researches - we are now at the point, or perhaps far past it, where a reconsideration of the entire system might be necessary in order to reset our priorities.
