From the Ivory Tower to the Strategic Retreat
Annals of Higher Education
A Slightly Rueful Response to Michael Huether
Note: This is a draft expression of a long-term project. In an effort to reach a wider audience, and because Medium is not built for citation, I’ve cut the notes. Those wishing for the scholarly apparatus please see SSRN.
In “Tired of Science ?! Notes on the Relationship Between the University and Society,” Michael Huether insightfully updates a preoccupation of German intellectuals running back at least to Kant’s “Conflict of the Faculties.” The conceptualization is familiar, in general terms at least. Society affords, the State even pays for, a special institution, the University. In part, the State does so in order to license the professions (traditionally, theology, law, and medicine), as Kant notes. Such inquiries are carried on under the aegis of authoritative texts. But for Kant, Huether, and incidentally me, the essence of the University, its telos one might say, is the pursuit of truth (research) and its dissemination (teaching).
What kind of truth is at issue? Huether says “Wissenschaft,” here inevitably translated as “science,” but in the broad German sense of all sorts of knowledge. That is a fine start. The truth at issue here, at least at the first cut, is something worth pursuing for its own sake, unlike the truths of the professions, where knowledge is in the service of some practice. The soul, the truth at the heart of the University, in contrast, is literally impractical, not in the service of something else. More positively stated, the pursuit of this sort of truth is free, unhindered, independent, by definition. And not just the pursuit: the object of the pursuit, truth itself, is understood to be free. This sort of talk about “academic freedom” tends to shade into an epistemological preoccupation (how are we to know, really), that rests upon an ontological assertion (the Truth simply is, out there).
All this is familiar in certain circles. But, thinking about Wissenschaft, it may be helpful to shift the focus from “wissen” to know (a fact or other thing that can be known “objectively”) to the suffix “ — schaft,” which acts to abstract, to change the meaning from the doing of something to the practice of doing that thing, much like adding the suffix “– ing” can create a gerund, for example, “to swim” becomes “swimming,” the sport. With the addition of the suffix, herren (to command or lord) becomes Herrschaft, lordship. Examples abound: Wirtschaft (economy); Betriebswirtschaft (business administration); Landwirtscaft (agriculture); Gesellschaft (society) or Aktiengesellschaft (corporation), or even Gemeinschaft (community, the group that owns/holds in common) are all words that name a practice of individuals coming together to do something. Thus, Wissenschaft is not science merely as a body of knowledge, but also implies a sociology, even an ethos: a group of people who gather to know, who presumably believe it is virtuous to pursue that which can be known. Consider, most famously, Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf, a calling, with its deep Christian resonance.
[From the department of false etymology: it would have been really cool if “ — shaft” was from “schaffen,” to achieve or manage. Schaffen is to take chaotic parts and make a whole, as in Ordnungschaffen, or Merkel’s response to the chaotic influx of refugees, “Wir schaffen das,” loosely, we will manage. The “wir” is important: schaffen implies a collective.]
The “free” pursuit of the truth is often threatened by the State or by other societal forces with ends of their own, and so in tension with, ultimately inimical to, the unrestricted freedom of inquiry. Huether diagnoses rather specific forces threatening academic freedom at the present juncture in Germany, which he discusses under the rubrics of “moralization” and “economization.” More generally, one may say that the University is the institution wherein the truth is to be pursued free of political constraint, using “politics” in a broad sense. From this, one might think that the relationship between the “University” (where “Science” is done) and “Society” (often represented by the State) is in principle one of subtle opposition, even antagonism. Huether is quick to point out that the pursuit of truth cannot be conducted in such a way as to violate the constitution. Insisting on the constitutional character of basic research sounds strange, at least to an American law professor, but the rather abstract scheme of the argument, with “the doing of Science” and “the demands of Society” at sword point, raises the issue.
Matters get stranger still, since in Germany, as in most of the world, the University is largely supported by society, with student fees but especially by the government, using tax money. Why should the State do such a thing? The answer, for Kant (Huether is less explicit) lies in the other half of the University’s mission, the dissemination of truth, education, Bildung. If elites are taught that the truth is free, to be known by the methods of science, broadly, reason, then society itself will ultimately become rational, reasonable. Enlightened. That is, while individual pursuits of truth are not in the service of specific political ends, a society of people who appreciate the truth, who recognize and use rules of reason, will constitute themselves differently from a society with a less enlightened populace.
The political project of the University, then, is to provide the cultural ground in which the (educated, even Enlightened) citizen can be cultivated. To do so, however, the University has to answer the question, “what is it to be educated,” a question that cannot have a straightforward answer. Instead, the answer is embodied by the figure of the professor, who does research (freely and autonomously), and who also teaches, fosters order. We hear echoes of the contestation of this question down the ages, for example, in endless discussions of whether calculus is necessary, and for whom? Or any number of debates over the specifics of this or that “core curriculum.” But what sort of question is this meta, curricular question, “what is it to be educated”? The question sounds in the humanities, with a bit of science and latterly social science understood as proper to the education of a gentle(man). Answers are sought in “the faculty of arts and sciences,” or “philosophy,” or “the liberal arts,” or even “national culture,” most purely represented in the study of literature.
I hope to be fair here; I am deeply sympathetic. In some important ways I still believe that something like this is what the University, in some essential sense (and this sort of argument is very much from essentials, principles, abstractions) is. Moreover, “Tired of Science” is also preoccupied with the position of the professor, and more generally, the preconditions for intellectual life. I too am concerned with how to make the world safe for people like me, and Huether’s diagnosis points up real dangers for the life of the mind. See Safe For Philosophy? Hardly the only dangers: this tradition of argument risks seeming tragically naive — the putatively enlightened society, or elite, is not bound to comport itself reasonably, as history in Germany and elsewhere has demonstrated. But what else is a professor to believe?
As already suggested, “Tired of Science” is philosophical, in that German sense of treating abstractions, often idealistic, in very concrete fashion. Where Huether is German and philosophical, my response is decidedly American, and more sociological. By way of example that I hope will be edifying, I contrast the ideal of the professor’s academic freedom with the contemporary university administrator’s desire to control professors, seen not as seekers of truth who themselves constitute the university, but as highly paid, intelligent, often secure employees, difficult to discipline. In particular, I want to look at the administrative practice of “strategic planning.”
I conclude by ruefully suggesting that that the political project of the contemporary university is quite different from its idealization by Kant and others since. The contemporary university should not be understood as a compromised version of its old self, a bad owl. The university has become something else, perhaps a dog, sometimes a very good one. Maybe a comfort animal. Contemporary institutions of higher learning are somewhat incidentally interested in the pursuit of truth for its own sake, research. Conversely, we are not holding up such pursuit as a model of intellectual life to which youth en route to citizenship should aspire in their lives as productive members of society. The politics of contemporary institutions of higher education is simpler: such institutions strive to legitimate the contemporary social order, and in particular, to ameliorate the tendency to tribalism.
In thinking about “the University,” and despite experience elsewhere, I somewhat inescapably end up thinking about “universities as they exist in the United States,” which admittedly exhibit some local peculiarities. Here is one: in almost every US State, the highest paid public official is a university football coach. For 2021, Alabama head coach Nick Saban’s annual salary is $8.7 million. Under his 8 year contract, he gets a raise of $400,000 per year, all this exclusive of bonus and,most importantly, advertising and other fees. This is what Huether calls “economization,” but on a grand scale. As Francisco Ramirez emphasizes, the contemporary university tends to be more of an organizational entity, embedded in society, than its “ivory tower” forebears, somewhat buffered by Church, State, and endowment. Inclusion — actually, the desire to be seen as inclusive — has replaced the frank elitism of an earlier era. Higher education, or at least the opportunity for such education, is seen as a human right, even as such education works to create and legitimate hierarchies, especially those of employment.
All of which is to say — and it pains me to admit — that it just does not make sense to think of the ideal University, at least as idealized in the United States, in terms of a place apart, an ivory tower. The University and Society do not stand vis- a-vis one another, but are mutually imbricated, entwined. Of course, “higher education” is not synonymous with “society,” any more than “society” is synonymous with other large social abstractions, such as “the state” or “governance” or “the economy” or even “law.” But such words simply cannot be thought, or not thought for very long, in isolation from understandings entailed in “society.” The ivory tower is now a vast condominium. The fruitful separation between the “University” and “Society” that frames Huether’s Kantian argument is no longer a plausible way to understand what we in the United States mean by “higher education.”
Sticking with football, a personal anecdote makes the point: when my very senior colleague Bill Greiner, then president of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, urged Buffalo to acquire a Division I football team, I objected. Football in the United States is expensive, a very big business, and why did we think we could, or more to the point should, be competitive? Why did a University need to buy a semi-pro sports club? To which the response was — Bill never said this, as he was far too graceful and solicitous of my junior ego — that I did not understand “the University.”
Although employment is the most commonly cited “use” or “purpose” of contemporary higher education, it is hardly the only one. There is “science,” still, although its position is unclear. Even most natural science, however, isn’t “pure research” but is instead funded by institutions who want something done. Through such research, the university is associated with material progress, and even “making a difference,” a sort of secular redemption. The University has every business running a football team, just as it has to cosset alumni, placate faculty, please students, employ people (a lot of people), offer healthcare, ensure inclusive diversity excellence while being carbon neutral, manage funds, and so forth. (As I wrote this, I received a missive from Harvard’s President Bacow, who likes to use “letters” to address multitudes, somewhat like Paul. I was pleased to learn that Harvard is working to invest its massive endowment exclusively in environmentally righteous companies. “Moralization” indeed.) See The Church of Harvard
The University at Buffalo began playing Division I football quite some years ago, and the enterprise has become central to the university’s stated goal of building a beloved “brand,” community as product. More recently, following Lyotard, Readings, and others since, my work remarks a shift in the idea of the university, from the university of culture, centered on Bildung and the figure of the professor, adorning and fostering the nation’s elite, to the administrative university, centered on excellence and the bureaucratic manager, building brand in a global competition for prestige across a bewildering variety of endeavors.
A few things can already be said about this dog (and I love dogs), still called the University. Most of the undertakings of the contemporary university share an orientation to, and seek to justify themselves by claims on, the future. This might be seen as a subtle kind of what Huether calls economization. By definition, investment entails claims (at least hopes) about future states of affairs, at least to the moral certainty of “putting your money where your mouth is,” to use an old idiom. That is, businesses construct themselves, and seek investment, on the basis of being able to meet the demands and exploit the opportunities that the future will present.(Anticipatory knowledge is inherent in finance.) Similarly, in the contemporary university, anticipation of future demands by various stakeholders, including students who wish to be employed, government agencies, entities that wish to use university personnel or facilities for research and are willing to pay for it, vague invocations of society itself (leadership and innovation will be required), and occasionally even faculty, are said to require intense engagement with the future, bureaucratically expressed as statements of mission and elaborate strategic plans. Administrators, for their part, wish their institutions to be widely seen as excellent at whatever is widely valued in medium term, signified (“validated”) by prizes, grant money, rankings, high rates of application, and the like.
The emergence of the contemporary university — the shift from professor to administrator — thus entails a rather profound shift in the intellectual temporality of academic life. While the university of culture may have participated in a society’s history, building citizens and doing research, and in that sense participated in a narrative stretching into the future, scholarship and teaching were traditionally thought to be about something existent, and with a past. Classics, for starters. To attend to a text is to affirm the substantive importance of what was written, existing, not anticipated. The owl of Minerva flies at night. In the same vein, the grand journal of the physical sciences is aptly named Nature, i.e., there is a world, now, and with its own “natural history,” and the job of the scientist is to understand it. And so forth.
In contrast, from the perspective of the administration of a contemporary university, like that of the management of an operating company, the critical question is future demand. The external task is to amass the capital (not just money, evidenced by investment, but social capital of various sorts, for which “brand” is a fine shorthand) necessary to make the university a plausible supplier, so that the institution flourishes. This is “leadership.” So, for homely example, law schools may see themselves as needing to anticipate what “lawyer” will come to mean in the next decades, and needing to establish a reputation for training people so that they get such jobs. (Contrast what might have been said in another era: study law because it is important, august, maybe even holy.) That is, anticipatory knowledge characterizes the contemporary administrative university in ways that it did not characterize the university of culture, centered on the professor who understood rather than anticipated.
But if the external task for the administrative university is acquiring the status (various forms of capital) required to meet societal demands, then the internal task is maintaining the organizational capacity (labor, in one old view) to deliver. In doing so, universities, like other institutions with large numbers of relatively autonomous, intelligent, professional or at least highly trained members, face a structural problem: the same qualities of autonomy, intelligence, and specialized training that make members valuable to the institution also make their disagreement and even disobedience or simple inaction likely. Consequently, the organization may find it difficult to act collectively, i.e., as an institution. In the United States and probably elsewhere, this is colloquially known as the problem of “herding cats.”
A key way to herd cats is the ritualized collective production of what is touted as anticipatory knowledge, often called a “strategic planning process.” I am here presuming that any US academic reader, and perhaps people employed in other sorts of organizations in other countries, have participated in such exercises. If not, a brief introduction, and if so, a little recapitulation may be useful. As noted above, anticipation of future demands by various stakeholders are said to require statements of mission and elaborate strategic plans. Organizational scenarios are presented as efforts to model or otherwise represent the world that is to come, that is, to anticipate facts, things about which one may have knowledge, even if the facts have not yet fully emerged. The point of such scenarios is allegedly practical: to inform rational decision and collective action, to shape the world, or at least the school. This is the self-presentation of the modern public servant, of rational bureaucracy, of administration, not of the professor or scientist. (Resolutely in the passive voice.) Imagining the future in this or that way — more grandiosely, deciding that one knows the future, hence anticipatory “knowledge” — informs and legitimates today’s administrative choices.
Such bureaucratic efforts at anticipatory knowledge are, one must presume, made in good faith. And it may be so. I don’t want to seem unduly cynical, just duly cynical. Some of my best friends are bureaucrats. In teaching law, I attempt to educate bureaucrats. And surely organizations, like people, must anticipate the future if they are to make their way in the world. By the same token, most of the time, we must take language at more or less face value. Those things said, can we really simply understand strategic planning as a product of good faith institutional effort? Or — to give my argument away for this audience — don’t we hear Weber crying out for Foucault? The institutional production of anticipatory knowledge is often, perhaps always, a technique of management, of control, and a way to constitute the institution itself. In this view, the future is often not just the field of anticipatory knowledge, but more importantly the source of authority and the occasion for its exercise.
Strategic planning processes usually require, and are said to begin with, the establishment of a number (often a large number) of committees, which tend to have rather vague and overlapping assignments. Obviously, who gets appointed where is important. At least from the perspective of the administration, key positions should be filled by allies or at least dutiful souls. There is real planning to be done before official “planning” is allowed to begin.
Even more important to the success of the strategic planning process than careful appointment, however, is widespread participation. In the formulation of such statements and plans, democracy and especially diversity are said to require broad based participation. Of course. And here again we see administrative self- presentation, which may be just as virtuous as claimed. But there are tactics at play here, too. “It is important that every (your) voice be heard.” Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, participants are encouraged to believe, at least comport themselves, as if they have the idea that saves the institution. Conversely, not wishing to participate, or not taking participation seriously, would seem to indicate bad manners, a lack of collegiality, a certain antidemocratic spirit, perhaps even antipathy to the ideas of others. Being against the ideas of others, against diversity, is a very bad thing indeed, tantamount to racism. Participation in “planning” is thus presented as flattering and as an institutional, even moral, obligation of membership in the organization.
Given the importance of participation, strategic planning processes often incorporate opportunities for self-nomination to committees, and a sufficient number of committees to require widespread, sometimes universal, involvement. More generally, precisely because it is important that every voice be heard, the process must be designed to provide opportunities for all concerned to express themselves. If a member does not avail herself of the opportunity to make herself heard, and others change their position (well, a report is adopted) in reliance on her silence, then she subsequently has no right to complain about the decisions eventually taken. (In the English tradition of legal pleading, this is a form of “estoppel.”)
Suitably constituted, the committees typically engage in a period of fact finding about the strengths, weaknesses, and direction of the institution. Fact finding is often done via surveys or interviews, and sometimes outside reading or other research into the situations of comparable institutions. Perhaps there are spreadsheets. All of this “data” forms a record on the basis of which proposals can be made. It is important to note that the record is both factual (these are in fact the responses that people made when asked; these are said to be “best practices”) and collective (everyone participated, or had the opportunity to do so). The record is thus difficult to dispute (this is what everyone thinks). On the basis of such a record, proposals are articulated, and often floated back to the membership of the institution for further discussion, before being reported “up” to a central committee or directly to the institution’s leadership.
In a related but more dramatic and expensive process, institutions sometimes formulate strategy, or suggest outlines of a strategy to serve as the basis for further work in committee, at a “strategic retreat.” The idea of withdrawal from the world in order to discern what really matters is familiar; most religions have an ascetic aspect. But “the retreat” as understood in the context of strategic planning is a churchly rather than a monastic enterprise: after the retreat, the members of the firm return to the world, their bonds to one another renewed through “team building.” That is, the purpose of the retreat, in some contrast to strategic planning more generally, is often explicitly the construction of the institution itself, perhaps in need of “healing.”
In US business culture, the idea of the retreat has been traced to the “Hawthorne Experiments.” In the 1920s, at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company (a subsidiary of AT&T), Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo and his colleagues attempted to assess relationships among worker productivity, job satisfaction, and workplace organization. Beginning in the 1930s, Mayo began conducting “retreats” to bring managers together with workers in order to discuss better ways of doing things, with the aim of increasing job satisfaction and, ultimately, productivity. Mayo’s retreats were tremendously influential, and were attended by representatives of the leading American corporations of the day. The practice of retreating has since spread to encompass institutions of all sorts, including universities.
Retreats are often “facilitated,” i.e., tightly scripted by a paid outside consultant. A longer version of this paper would describe, in some detail, the techniques used by facilitators to generate acceptable consensus among the members of an organization. For present purposes it suffices to say that the techniques of universal participation (“we want every voice to be heard”), staged responses (“what are three positive aspects and three problems with the proposal?”), and selective summation and editing ensure that the retreat issues in a closing document that reflects the premeditated circumstances of its composition. Like a lawyer’s question, the well-run retreat generates the answer for which it was designed.
More generally, strategic planning results in texts that ostensibly memorialize the collective consensus reached through the process, and that thereby seem to justify the process itself. Such texts are, symbolically if not actually, the products of the process. Not incidentally, such texts are also the generally well printed and brightly colored work product of any outside consultants or facilitators, for which fees are paid, even by cash-strapped institutions (which clearly need a better strategy, no?). Ubiquitous examples of such texts are “mission statements” (generally short and broad and unobjectionable, often written to receive favorable vote by a board), detailed in “strategic plans” (much longer) and concretized by “implementation strategies” (randomly detailed and often impossible). Mission statements tend to be so vague and hortatory as to be virtually meaningless. Strategic plans and implementation strategies are often said to be “dynamic,” that is, subject to interpretation and modification as circumstances dictate, in the discretion of management, that is, also not to be relied upon in any concrete sense.
Nonetheless, the crafting of such texts typically receives considerable care. Although it is important that every voice be heard in the establishment of consensus, the actual formulation of texts is done by senior management, often with the assistance of outside consultants. The text is invariably presented, however, as the sense of the body, which just so happens to coincide with the hopes and expectations of management. At this juncture in the process, it is time to congratulate all concerned for their collegiality and hard work.
Apart from providing a deliverable for the justification of fees, such texts, once completed, serve little or no purpose. As suggested, mission statements are often so vague as to be meaningless. Therefore, mission statements may safely be transmitted, or even publicly published, e.g., on the institution’s website, for whatever the words may be worth. Although there is often a public (anodyne) version of a strategic plan, the preparatory work, details of strategic plans, and especially plans for implementation are likely to be viewed as proprietary, presented as if they conferred a competitive advantage over rival institutions, which often are engaged in substantively indistinguishable strategic planning processes.
It is a bit heartless to note that way back in 2019, countless institutions produced a strategic plan entitled 20/20 — the convergence of the calendar with the standard measure of eyesight evidently was irresistible to consultants. Even then, 20/20 literally meant average eyesight, but as with advertising, the literal sense of words does not matter much for planning. It’s about tone and other subtle things, I think. Be that as it may, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic rendered all such plans substantively worthless. This was hardly the failure one might naively assume. Again, actually planning, in the sense of anticipating the future, is hardly the only reason for a “planning” process.
Within the institution, strategic plans may be referred to in cursory fashion by management as it announces a new decision (“in furtherance of our strategic plan and in line with what we decided at last year’s retreat, _________”). In brief, planning documents do not communicate much to the members of the organization, or other stakeholders, much less represent anticipations of the world as it will soon be, not least because the documents tend to be vague, disjointed, often unrealistic, and generally unreadable, to say nothing of non-binding. As the pandemic mordantly demonstrated, nothing is so out of date as last year’s strategic plan. Since nobody believed the plans anyway, however, nothing much is lost. Meanwhile, unread texts “die a death,” as the Scots say. Such mortality has its uses. If the planning documents are moribund, then the institution needs . . . more plans.
To sum up: it is naive to the point of wrongheadedness to understand most strategic planning documents to be actual plans, that is, good faith representations of anticipatory knowledge and decisions based upon such knowledge, even if the documents are presented in that fashion. Instead, the process of document creation [through countless committees, surveys and interviews, endless meetings, money spent on consultants who have new ideas for “ideation” (savor that word, and all will be clear) and the like], and the resulting unbearably long and anodyne reports, create (often cynical) commitment by the participants, who cannot say they have had no opportunity to express their views. Or just numb acquiescence. Such participation is presented in terms of representation, but perforce must also be understood in terms of time, responsibility, and complicity. The cats (faculty) may not march together in lockstep, but they have little grounds on which to disagree, and importantly, nowhere to go.
Conversely, the administration has a ready-made legitimation for the policy du jour (“As we agreed in the strategic planning process . . . “). Prognostication thus shades into planning, a ritualized process of anticipatory knowledge generation, which does much to constitute the organization itself. Institutional prudence to say nothing of changing circumstances mandate that strategic planning never conclude. The corporate retreat lasts forever; anticipation of the future is the future. To be catty.
Where does all of this leave the “University” and the “Society” of Huether’s subtitle? As I hope to have suggested, the US university has become central to the construction and maintenance of US society in ways that “economization” and “moralization” only begin to capture. It was not always thus. At least until WWII, elite colleges were largely for the privileged, and a smattering of the truly talented/hungry. Thinking of land grant institutions rather than what came to be known as the Ivies, universities fulfilled their traditional roles of licensing professionals, including the occasional professor. Working and even middleclass success did not presume much if any higher education. In much of America for much of its history, this was thought to be a bad thing, and reforms centered on access to education — for the working and middling classes, women, religious and ethnic minorities, and so forth. Such efforts were eventually successful, in many regards, especially in the years since World War Two. As a result, however, higher education has come to be the crucial way in which the middling/professional classes are defined. Even the skilled working class needs some sort of degree, a certification. Higher education has become constitutive, and hence deeply political.
By way of conclusion, two aspects of the imbrication of the university and society in the U.S. seem worth brief articulation. First, the relative status of the professor has declined. In the modern university, concerned with so many things, the doing of research, “science,” is definitely not nothing — but not some sort of core mission, either. It is tempting to bemoan this coming down in the world, both objectively and as experienced by people like me, perhaps most readers of this essay: the impositions of required syllabi, the pious ukases of HR, the dictatorial ways of IT, and so forth. It is worth remembering, however, that these are mandarin complaints, the frustrations of the talented yet hardly independent, indeed quite constrained. Complaints much like this are banal in the modestly privileged ranks of the church, the military, or indeed many businesses.16 In the University, however, the loss of autonomy still rankles. Many of us remember when the deal was sweeter, which is why we signed up, and wonder if we would do it all over again, if we had to start now. Rephrased, for a long time, the University seemed to be a solution for the age-old question of how to afford the life of the mind in relatively commodious fashion, even in dangerous times. The University no longer seems to be an obvious solution.
As suggested, it must be remembered that the loss of status, autonomy, freedom, is relative. A friend speaks of proletarianization, and he is not wrong, but “professor” in the world of proles is still an honored position. Science, however understood, and thinking more broadly, still get done. The duties of the professor may be more irksome than they once were, but the lifting is light. There remains much time to think, to do real work. “Sinecure” springs to mind, unbidden. And if work done in this fashion builds a personal brand, and even redounds to the credit of one’s institution, so much the better.
The second aspect of the contemporary imbrication of “university” and “society” is more cheerful, which is why I close with it. At present, US universities are concerned with the performance of identity politics, generally under the heading of “diversity” policies that tend to require and reinscribe racial and other categories the policies are purportedly enacted to oppose. Bracketing their morality, such passion plays constrain intellectual life, as Huether and others suggest. The easy examples of such constraints have to do with the excesses of PC speech, the occasional witch hunts, ruined careers, and so forth, which one might coldly dismiss as collateral damage in the effort to build a just society. Drama aside, difficult problems involve category mistakes, tired narratives, moral aggrandizement, bureaucratic power grabs. From the perspective of thinking, and to continue being morally obtuse, such problems are distractions, and incidentally, very Soviet. Essentially symbolic politics, however, can often be managed without too much difficulty, as we also should have learned from the Soviet Union.
If we truly see the world in terms of representation, however, then we must fear fragmentation, a sort of neotribalism, polarization. Evidence abounds, stories of social breakdown, no doubt somewhat overheated in the convection oven of digitized media operating around the clock. We are back to Rousseau’s worries about large polities. In the Poland, Rousseau counselled festivals and games. I think he would have approved of football, and the elaborate picnics that fans of “Ole Miss” (the University of Mississippi, around the corner from Faulkner’s house) hold in “the Grove.” Partisan political, racial, class, religious, gender who knows what other tensions are put aside for the weekend. From this perspective, the political function of the University is not to enlighten the republic’s elites through the teaching of reason, but instead to unite its principal tribes. The University is not, essentially, where “Science” is done, but is instead where a semblance of community is forged. Not light but glue. Enjoy the game.
From the Ivory Tower to the Strategic Retreat was originally published in Age of Awareness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.