Monday, May 10, 2004
(9:50 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Universitization of Knowledge
(A two-layered coinage: universitize -- to make like unto the university; universitization -- the noun form thereof.)
Liliputian Lilith has written a post, to which Rana of Frogs and Ravens has responded. Both are part of the broader blogospheric conversation on academia and its discontents, in which I have frequently participated. I "weigh in" today in order to make a more theoretical contribution to this conversation.
I have often noted, with dismay, the increasing number of fields in which there are degrees available, often advanced degrees. To some extent, that's fine -- the more education, the better. What happens, though, when all art, all "serious/classical" music, all "creative writing" -- ultimately, all knowledge or truth of any kind -- has to be routed through the university? There is a reason we young aspiring academics are so desperate to get into the university even as it continues its slide into decadence: that is where truth happens in our society. If Americans are divided as a people ideologically, we are even more divided intellectually. As Lilith points out, intelligent people need to talk to other intelligent people, but our very civilization seems to be slowly descending to the level of the jingoistic soundbite -- it worked for the right, and now the left feels like it needs to follow.
The university is by its very nature an insular institution, and there's nothing wrong with that in principle. People can be short-sighted and narcissistic and still do good work -- and we can all be mature enough to recognize the value of that work and ignore the academic snobs when we "dumb down" their sacred research to make it digestible by someone who doesn't have eight years to burn reading every single thing ever written about the responsiveness of Milton's poetry to psychoanalytic interpretation. The problem comes when all knowledge and all intellectual inquiry is corralled into the university or universitized -- turned into a navel-gazing niche market.
Just search for a Derrida book on Amazon and click on one of the Listmania or So you'd like to... guides, and you'll see how advanced this process is at this late date. You could spend the rest of the evening just clicking through list after list of everyone's favorite poststructuralist masterpieces, without ever touching the ground -- and if you make the mistake of clicking on a guide that offers an "introduction" to a certain topic, often you will find that the "introduction" consists in reading a series of heavy academic books that themselves require substantial introduction. Even worse: the actually "dumbed-down" introductions that assume everything is much too hard for the average person to understand and make little asides about how hard it is to understand -- such books are an introduction to convincing oneself not to care about "that intellectual stuff."
Why can't we get an introductory text by someone who simultaneously cares about the topic at hand and believes that educated human beings are in principle capable of deciphering written texts?[1] Some academic ideas are hard to understand -- but so are some insurance ideas or some stock-market ideas or even a couple decorating ideas, and people regularly manage to wrap their minds around them, at least enough to have an intelligent conversation about it. The point of education should not be to divide humanity into those who have a "passion for learning" and those who don't, but rather to provide shortcuts to get people up to speed on what everyone's talking about. Isn't that what a history lecture is, for example -- a way of telling the story in a compressed manner, for those who don't yet want to trudge through the primary documents themselves, so that if they do want to take the plunge, they'll kind of know where they are?
The universitization of knowledge has made such introductions, and such engaging lecture courses, exceedingly rare. Learning is for the academics, and the rest of us, for some unknown reason, have to go through the university and complete the appropriate paperwork in order to get a job or something. Absurd degrees of academic specialization have gone hand-in-hand with turning the university into a glorified vocational school. A liberally educated person should be more than capable of working in a business job, and so the existence of the bachelor's degree in business (not economics, not rhetoric, not psychology, but business) is a testament to the decline of the liberal arts ideal. (Incidentally, this decline comes precisely when the economy supposedly demands as flexible a work force as possible.)
Universitization may well be a symptom of corporatization. In any case, both are bad. Both indicate a dehumanization of our society -- sucking the joy out of learning. The universitization of knowledge may also be complicit with the mass appeal of Fox News.
Here ends my theoretical contribution to this ongoing debate.
Notes
[1] The Oxford University Press "Very Short Introduction" series is a noble attempt to turn the tide. I've read between five and ten of those books, and I've never been disappointed -- I've also felt (and sometimes confirmed) that if I decided to dig deeper into the topic by following up on the recommended reading lists in those books, I would have enough context to feel confident doing so. If I decide not to follow up, then the book would at least allow me to participate and ask intelligent questions in a conversation with people who had followed up. In short, there are some glimmers of hope, here and there.
