Assumptions
In reading a review of Louis Menand's The Marketplace in Slate today, I came across this interesting piece of history:
...Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals, initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.... They have been taught to think of their own work, which is accountable only to the internal standards of their profession, as something pure, something unrelated to the messy business of the world. But this belief itself was only ever dreamed up as a solution to different problems, and once we understand it as a matter of historical contingency, we shall presumably be better able to deal with its consequences.
The dissociation of scholarship from the rest of the world was largely engineered to in order to (1) insulate the faculty from religious interference and (2) to stave off competition from professional schools by inserting a liberal arts undergraduate training as a prerequisite to degrees in law/business/medicine.
So the idea that universities should focus on knowledge for its own sake rather than "applied" things is not an absolute Truth, but rather part of a 19th century liberal arts faculty jobs-preservation bargain.
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on Mon, Jan 18, 04:01PM
"Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals, initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation."
It sounds like your bottom line, then, is that the review on Slate is wrong here. I.e., you are saying that there was no "becoming" that was spread out over all of last century, but rather that the change happened all at once and was engineered in to the system from the beginning?
BTW, it's awesome to see you posting again. I love the blog.
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on Mon, Jan 18, 06:01PM
Thanks, Curt - I'm glad you like the blog!
I don't know the history very well, but given that not much of anything happens quickly in academia, I imagine that the review's characterization of a gradual becoming is correct. My read is that the foundations for the current system were laid back in the 19th century, but the current state of affairs probably took awhile to evolve in response.
