THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: The Idea of a University
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE o g c r S c r tl t: 0 il The Idea of a Un.,i rsit U NIVERSITY EDUCATION IS BIG BUSINESS i n America, with the largest turnover of all economic sectors in the state of...
...In its own way, the purposeless is functional...
...It would need the sardonic genius of a Veblen to give the full story of the symbiosis that exists between the pursuit of knowledge and the "knowledge economy...
...Humboldt, Newman, and Arnold, who were the first to define the role of higher education in a world of declining faith, believed that the university is the home of culture, and they saw culture as the depository of all that the human heart had achieved by way of self-knowledge and self-expression...
...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...Does anybody think that we would stand idly by if that were to happen to us...
...Their time in the cloisters is a rite of passage into the life of the mind, and they are to leave for the wider world with an intellectual and emotional framework that would inoculate them against stupidity, and fit them to take charge of the world...
...Who needs it, and why...
...The answer is zero, violence' would have never arisen...
...Any Palestinian civilian killed by Israel is an unintended victim...
...They exist to provide new fields of scholarship, new journals, new books, new footnotes...
...An even more serious incident occurred on Israel's northern border...
...Some of the scholars are also celebrities, but this is not the purpose...
...The over 1,000 civilian Israeli dead so far as a result of the current Palestinian "intifada," correspond to about 65,000 American victims...
...Likewise the claim that we exist in a "knowledge economy" is entirely unfounded...
...There is no "cycle of violence...
...The universityis now an immovable part of the American economy and to complain that business could function just as well without it is to misunderstand the nature of modern economies...
...Hence when it comes to the great decisions, noise drowns out the still small voice of understanding...
...The "information" that is processed is not information about anything, nor does it have its equivalent in knowledge...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...
...It was knowledge painfully acquired from books and acquired in silence...
...In order to promote peace, Israel abandoned the southern Lebanon security strip, which it had maintained as a buffer against Hizbollah (the "party of God...
...SO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 You deserve a factual look a t . . . 102 Myths About the Israeli-Arab Conflict (11) Is there such a thing as the "cycle o f violence...
...The Arab-Israel conflict has raged for almost 100 years...
...Nevertheless, the American university, even if it is dominated, in its vociferous part, by liberal activists, is not an ideological institution...
...Of course not...
...They are expendable fantasies, which create the appetites that they satisfy, and which result from the exhaustive enterprise of consultants, managers, researchers, and designers, thousands of whom dance invisibly upon every productive pinhead...
...Bowing to bad advice and the installationsCiVilian populatiOnand infrastructure.and their "Had [the Palestinians] accepted t h e hand of pressure of public opinion, Israel Ask yourself how many friendship and peace that Israel has extended evacuated Gaza - not a single Israeli soldier or civilian remains Palestinian civilians have so many times., the concept of the 'cycle of there...
...Gender studies, queer studies, and all the other "studies" that pollute the curriculum do not exist for ideological reasons-though the ideology facilitates their introduction...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...By remaining distracted throughout those years in which energy, ambition, and creativity might otherwise search for a real target, they are preparing themselves for their forthcoming life among fictions...
...The most important products of a modern economy are not solid objects answering real human needs...
...Alumni shower gifts on these places that nurtured their growing pains, businesses retain them as researchers and consultants, and every politician hopes for an honorary doctorate or a university trusteeship so as to take up his position among the Great and the Good...
...A modern university could be compared to an ant-heap, in which the library is queen, her swollen body constantly enlarged by the fertile scholars that cling to her, and surrounded and protected by the sterile bands of student soldiers...
...They believe that if that "cycle" could somehow be broken, peace and good will would prevail...
...In a most serious incident, the Gazans dug a tunnel into Israel, attacked an Israeli patrol, killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped one...
...Such students take full advantage of the surrounding opportunities for pretense and seduction, and study to acquire shallow affections that rise and die in the realm of dreams...
...The answer is: all of them...
...However, as Veblen saw, that is to take too narrow a view of human life...
...What are the facts...
...It was knowledge that enabled those 1,000 British civil servants to govern the vast subcontinent of India, or a comparable number of Roman citizens to bring law and order to the entire civilized world...
...Israel was and continues to be subject to almost daily rocket attacks...
...The Israelis, always exercising much restraint, are often forced to respond to such violence in order to protect their cannot bring our military might to bear on them...
...America today has several million civil servants, engaged in multiplying and perpetuating each other's mistakes, and the cause of this is information...
...In that installment, we addressed the myth of "occupation" and its being the alleged cause of the conflict between Arabs and Israelis...
...Although the university contains departments and programs dedicated to the "useful arts" and others devoted to entirely useless arts like women's studies, its central curriculum in the humanities (which are its dominant courses of study) remains fixed on that strange thing called scholarship, the utility of which has been neither definitively proven nor finally disproved...
...Our country, justifiably, went into full attack mode...
...The concept of the "cycle of violence" would have never arisen...
...There is only the very measured response of the Israeli military to defend its civilian population and its vital installations against unending attacks by the Arabs...
...most of it is unread...
...Knowledge and scholarship are important, but largely because they are the handmaidens of culture...
...The postmodern economy is a vast and elaborate fiction, maintained by the public appetite for unrealities...
...But the claim is false...
...And then ask yourself, how many Israeli civilians have been intentionally targeted and killed by the Arabs during that same period...
...Box 590359 I San Francisco, CA 94159 Gerardo Joffe, President FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization...
...The Palestinians, on the other hand, target only Israeli civilians- shoppers in stores, teenagers in discotheques, celebrants at a bar mitzvah, a wedding, or a Passover Seder, or innocents riding in buses or other public transportation...
...The sense of ethics that inspires the Israeli government and the Jewish people and, to be sure, also the pressure of public opinion, prevents Israel from unleashing its military potential and obliterating its tormentors once and for all...
...Israel has had to defend itself against attacks since the very day of its birth - and before...
...What degree of forbearance does the world expect of Israel...
...The restraint of the Israelis in the face of neverending provocation is almost unbelievable...
...The Palestinians live in abject misery, their economy is in shambles, and their youths, having not learned much more than the Koran, violence, and "martyrdom," face a hopeless future...
...Information technology" simply means the use of digital algorithms in the transference of messages...
...Activities insulated from the surrounding world, with no purpose other than themselves, may seem to have no economic function...
...But the process goes on, since it is well funded by those aweinspired students, some of whom will detach themselves in due course from the milling crowd of Activities insulated from the surrounding world, with no purpose other than themselves, may seem to have no economic function...
...There is 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 ROGER SCRUTON more scholarship produced in America than in the whole world besides, and in my own subject of philosophyit is unquestionable that the best place to teach it, if not to learn it, is America...
...What other country in the world would continue to suffer such sustained damage, such loss of life, without making every effort to eliminate its source...
...But one thing is certain: the word "knowledge" does not mean the same in those two occurrences...
...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world...
...and the glory of the university is contained in its role as the guardian of a literary and artistic heritage...
...Learning how to enter this economy, and to extract some of its profits, is an art that is well worth the expense of acquiring it, and if that is what the American university teaches then those astonishing fees, which have no equivalent in the academies of Europe, would be an insignificant payment for an incalculable reward...
...And the students look on their professors with awe and amazement, as spectacles that it is worth every cent of that tuition fee to gaze at...
...Professors hardly have time to surrender to their mission as teachers, now that they must produce books and articles in a "field" of their own...
...Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum...
...However, they are a minority, and the university offers them no official support...
...Let me, then, offer a tentative suggestion...
...Today, we look at another myth - repeated over and over again - that of the "cycle of violence...
...It is true that you can teach just about anything on an American campus, provided your innovations are not diagnosed as part of some conservative conspiracy...
...But they do not explain why so many conservatives feel that the universities are betraying their mission...
...The young must therefore be provided at this most dangerous age with a spectacle, one in which they cannot join, but which awes them with its arcane and seemingly functionless perfection...
...It is sometimes said that "information technology" has vastly increased the extent and accessibility of human knowledge...
...However, as Veblen saw, that is to take too narrow a view of human life...
...But it is in conflict with the aim of postmodern scholarship...
...We certainly would do so and do so mercilessly if we could...
...Middle-class parents, whose children provide the running costs of scholarship, are compelled by the high tuition fees to work harder, just at the moment when they might have retired...
...Nothing would be more damaging to the economy than the entry of young people with ideals and a desire to be useful...
...This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...
...The effect of information technology is to give images precedence over thought and to multiply a thousandfold the noise that fills the space in which ideas are conceived and brokered...
...Regrettably, our enemies are elusive, and we almost immediately...
...Its most important product is the celebrity, shaped through print, image, and digital code, and projected into minds eager for amazement and addicted to the spectacle of people who exist solely in the province of dreams...
...Indeed, as the Internet reveals, information technology is far more effective in propagating ignorance than in advancing science...
...But instead of the intentionally been killed by the Israelis...
...During their time on campus many students are indeed busy trying out their potential in the celebrity market, and learning skills like Internet surfing, vita inventing, and knowledge simulating that will be genuinely useful in the world outside...
...They will stop at nothing to inflict damage or, if possible, obliterate and "wipe Israel off the map...
...The curriculum was built upon works of lasting value, and the role of the teacher was to provide the knowledge and skills required to understand those works, which exemplified, in Arnold's words, "the best that had been thought and said" That vision still resonates with many university professors...
...you are surrounded by colleagues with the knowledge that you envy and with an eagerness for discussion that has disappeared from academies elsewhere...
...To the visiting professor, indeed, nothing is more astonishing than the encouragement offered by the American university to study and research...
...Scholarship is its own purpose, and it consists in continually adding to the libraries from which it feeds...
...But there is no such "cycle...
...The hatred of the Arabs against the Jews is bottomless...
...How is that knowledge used...
...and it was acquired because the competing noise had been carefully filtered out by educational institutions that created a common frame of reference among those who attended them...
...After three or four years of this, they lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, and go with a subdued but resigned awareness into the labyrinth where images trade for images, and dreams for dreams...
...Hollywood makes celebrities, Washington makes politicians, the uniNOVE~,~BER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 4.9 THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE versities make knowledge...
...Our government, the media and many people refer to and deplore the acts of violence raging between Israelis and Arabs...
...It has sustained casualties that, in proportion to its population, are far higher than that of any country in modern times, even those engaged in open warfare...
...expected peace, violence erupted nobody...
...Yet there is no doubt that universities are still in the business of pursuing and perpetuating knowledge...
...In a daring raid, Hizbollah invaded Israel, killed eight soldiers and kidnapped two...
...Much of the result is unreadable...
...They are prepared to sacrifice their lives and that of their children and are willing to go to any lengths to achieve their goal of destroying Israel...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...
...Meanwhile their children, sustained in the amniotic fluid of academic life, are learning to delay the moment of engagement...
...Had they accepted the offered partition of the country in 1948, or had they accepted the hand of friendship and peace that Israel has extended so many times since, they could now have had their own state, perhaps for as long as the Israelis - since 1948...
...It brought about enormous destruction and hundreds of dead in both Lebanon and Israel...
...In the worst enemy attack on our country, the outrage of September 11, 2001, 3,000 Americans died...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE o g c r S c r tl t: 0 il The Idea of a Un.,i rsit U NIVERSITY EDUCATION IS BIG BUSINESS i n America, with the largest turnover of all economic sectors in the state of Massachusetts, and a substantial presence in every other state in the union...
...The libraries are bursting with the journals and the books that you should have read...
...spectators and join the ranks of the scholarly elect...
...For, in the conquest of cyberspace, ignorance has a flying start, being adapted to the habits of idle minds...
...They could have an advanced, peaceful and prosperous society, just as that of Israel, in partnership with and next to it...
...A violent war erupted as a result, during which Hizbollah launched thousands of sophisticated Iran-supplied rockets against Israel...
...Young people attend university, they thought, not so as to become scholars, but so as to become cultivated...
...It even has its own settlements: towns like Princeton, Syracuse, and Cambridge where the entire economy is centered on higher education...
...S O WHAT IS THE EXACT PLACE o f t h i s scholarship i n the new economy...
...It treats truth and falsehood, reality and fantasy as equivalent, and has no means to assess the difference...
...The myth of the "cycle of violence...
...S UCH THOUGHTS MIGHT EXPLAIN the persistence of this expensive and seemingly purposeless institution, in an age when scholarship lacks the theological anchor that tied it to the faith and hope of ordinary people...
...Evacuation of Gaza in vain...
...And while this serves the postmodern economy as well as anything recommended by MatthewArnold, it detaches the university yet further from the culture that, for Arnold at least, was its justifying goal...
...The answer is simple: it is used to make knowledge...
...In this way scholarship ensures that the managers, consultants, advertisers, and media specialists, who are the primary source of the fictions on which the modern economy feeds, go on producing at full throttle...
...In a recent one of our hasbarah (educating and clarifying) messages, we described how untruths and misinformation advanced by the Arabs have made many people, even well-intentioned ones, believe this propaganda...
...It remains centered on scholarship, and retains some of that aloof unconcern for the real world that Plato first institutionalized over two millennia ago...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
