The noted public intellectual Louis Menand recently authored a book entitled "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Reaction in the American University." Menand argues that the 19th Century creation of the research university caused professors to seal themselves off from the world, retreating into their own abstruse interests. Former Harvard President Charles Eliot, who pioneered the creation of the research university, was trying to liberate academics from religious obligations and other restrictions holding sway at the time. He wanted to prevent new and original scholarship from being stifled, to create a community of free scholars his goal was to encourage useful ideas without restrictions from ideology.
Yet, in Menand's estimation, the unforeseen side-effect of Eliot's praiseworthy designs was that, rather than generating new ideas with practical value, many academic departments particularly the humanities and social sciences simply pursued specialized knowledge for its own sake, and thus creating the "Ivory Tower," a hermetic community with little relevance to the way life is actually lived. This is why academia is littered with papers with titles like, "Gendered Narratives in Elizabethan Pedagogies and the Subjectivization of the Other." Clearly, Menand's observations have relevance to our own attempts to create an intellectual community at Dartmouth.
We live surrounded the theories of French literary critics and analytic philosophers, for example but have any of these ideas provoked you to bring something authentic and useful out of yourself? It is easy enough to regurgitate ideas once one has digested them, but the point of education is, ostensibly, to sharpen one's mental toolbox not to provide, pre-fabricated, the ideas those tools should fashion. This is the long lost goal of academia, per Menand's argument. We expect to be challenged in class, but the ideas we are presented with are frequently stale and useless. As Zachary Gottlieb '10 recently observed ("Fouad for Thought," Jan. 15), it is refreshing to have your ideas challenged, and to have the adults around you engaged in helping to fire your creative spark. It is easy to be meek in the classroom, to uncritically imitate the current intellectual fashions and don their mental jewelry, but can such intellectual stagnation occur forever without something fresh arising from the muck? Who would rather dangle at the end of crumbling ideas than create sturdier bridges, stretching out to reach the distant edge?
We embrace the dogmas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (on the one hand) and Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker (on the other) as passively as earlier generations suckled on Carl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, The Frankfurt School and Sigmund Freud. But I would much rather be Freud than a mere sycophant of Freud just as I would rather set the world on fire like Marx, than be a minion obedient to Marxist doctrine. To borrow the ideas of others wholesale is to commit intellectual suicide especially when those ideas are so wrapped up in their own pretensions that they cease to be of use to the outside world.
In order to understand scholarship in America, it is necessary to look back at the vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our national sages. In his youth, Emerson was obsessed with creating a uniquely American tradition of thought. He traveled to Europe in search of inspiration, meeting many of the great intellectuals of the day, but he concluded that American scholars would better be served paving their own path. As chronicled in Louis Menand's earlier book, "The Metaphysical Club," we can see the progress of the dynamic intellectual tradition Emerson practically created, inspiring and challenging pioneers like William James, John Dewey and Henry Ford. The Emersonian spirit one of pragmatism, which honors power in "the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting of an aim" is needed to revitalize our comatose academic institutions.
The intellectuals we admire are people who added something of practical value to the culture and science of their time scientists like Thomas Edison and Charles Darwin, and political thinkers like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. They were of use to mankind, whereas the people who horrify us are those who fanatically humble themselves at the feet of the two-bit ideology in vogue. Menand's challenge, and the challenge of the wider world which scoffs at the Ivy League's intellectual insularity is to enlist our education in our own attempts to attain a similar level of utility, power and influence.
