Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 06:16:20 -0400
From: Stirling Newberry <allegro-AT-thecia.net>
Subject: Re: PLC: Thanks (and no thanks)



>>> _The Idea of a University_ for those conversant with the Cardinal, from one
...
>>> division teaching.
>>>

I cannot find a time period where there was not doom and gloom about the
state of education. Old institutions become cluttered with dead wood, as
people try and set up checkpoints on the frontiers of knowledge intent on
verifying the papers of anyone who wants to engage in inquiry. Eventually
enough talent is turned away, and a talent glut becomes a talent drought
when easy prosperity turns to crisis. New institutions are formed. Old ones
reform, sometimes freely and willingingly, sometimes under duress.

It is knowledge that is important, its creation, its aquisition. The
particular social arrangements which work for one time seldom work for very
long, and it becomes necessary to make adjustments. The current pressure
over money is caused by something very simple. The outside does not see the
value of what is being done inside.

The way to correct this is not with melodramatic handwringing but by
addressing the deficiencies and focefully making the case for University.
This is not best doen by proclamations of how nothing can change, because
everything in the end must change, nor by snarling "we are an elite - go
away you unwashed masses and don't bother us as we contemplate the
whichness of wherefore, having long since lost our interest in 'Wherefore
art thou Romeo' ."

I do not know the situation in many other countries, but in the country
which both Mr. Trail and I reside, there is a large influx of immigrants.
Many of those immigrants as individuals value academics, in the noblest
sense of the world, and belong to cultures which do value academics in that
same sense. I cannot believe that a person from China who is proud of
coming from a centuries old academic tradition will allow the idea to
wither simply because they have moved here.

The Mongol's great Golden Hoarde swept over the plains and overthrew China
once, they formed a dynasty which was noted for its harshness; then its
devotion to luxury - and always its hostility toward native scholars. Many
of them "retired" or became "amateurs" who wandered the roads or stayed at
home, keeping old books, old ideas, old arts alive. Eventually the Mongols
became Chinese like everyone else, and found they could not get along with
out wisdom any better than anyone else could.

- - -

Let me point out the obvious. If everybody needs two years of college to
get along, it means that the current means of formulating knowledge are too
cumbersome and take too long to teach; it means our methods of teaching are
outdated , our textbooks need revision. All of this sounds like the work of
University to me, and will to others if only you start trying to convince
them of it, rather than standing on a pile of musty books and declaring
that University is about sinecures for whoever has managed to worm their
way into "the club".

Pop culture and brute economics are under the delusion that they can go on
indefinitely without high art and high learning. And yet the world of mass
culture has only been free of its connection to high art for a generation,
and already it is repeating itself. The world of brute economics will find
that if people have nothing to live for, they will have nothing to work for
either. You get a generation or so of people who work like slaves to rise
up out of economic poverty, but they do so to have something better for
their children. That better often means a University education. If the
position of the University is in danger - it is because it has spent too
much energy on infighting and not enough on doing real work, and conveying
teh value of that real work to the outside.

The university makes a claim, not merely that there are good people in it,
but that it has a better ability to recognise abilities of certain kinds
and husband them. When it becomes perceived as unable to weed its own
gardens - or worse when it starts weeding the roses to give more room to
the crab grass - then it will loose the only thing it really trades upon:
credibility. One can oppress as one likes behind closed doors. The only
price is that talent votes with its feet to go elsewhere, and comes away
with a poor opinion of the academy.

Why is the bad writing contest so popular? Because it plays on the
perception - supported by a great deal of fact - that too much of what is
said and done in Academia is academic, in the worst sense of the world.
Either shape up, or there will be people who will happily profit by
presenting a theme park vision of University, user friendly and santised.

It is almost never the idea which is in danger, nor the institution which
is decayed - but more often the people who have forgotten that improving
the first is the only way to defend the later.

Stirling Newberry
business: openmarket.com
personal: allegro-AT-thecia.net
War and Romance: http://www.thecia.net/users/allegro/public_html




     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---