Time To Think
Kim du Toit
July 25, 2007
6:23 AM CDT
From George Leef at NRO (writing about this essay), comes this suggestion:
I think that academic research ought to have to pass the test of the marketplace. That is, rather than assuming that all professors have plenty of brilliant ideas in them that they will be able to research and write about when given a sufficiently light teaching load, the assumption should be that professors will devote their time to teaching unless an outside party thinks highly enough of some research proposal to buy their time from the university.
I don’t think so.
Longtime Readers of this website will know that I have little truck with a large majority of what passes for the academic elite these days—and I’m especially scornful of the entire concept of collegiate tenure—but there is sufficient intellectual spark in the ashes of my brain to believe that the expansion of knowledge should not have to be commercially attractive in order for it to be nourished and nurtured.
I am fully aware, as is Mark Bauerlein in the above essay, that a tremendous amount of “research” is in fact no such thing—“academic padding of the CV” is a perfect description thereof—but when I stand back and look at the whole concept from a distance, I think that this is no reason to subject intellectual curiosity to “the marketplace” either.
Sometimes, knowledge gained seems irrelevant, but its relevance becomes incredibly valuable when applied to later research, or even to a parallel field. (Much of economic theory, to give but one example, is made more understandable by physics—I once wrote a paper on the topic, and the results of my research astounded me—and to think of music theory without mathematics is impossible.)
And in any case, I’m not against the concept of knowledge for its own sake, regardless of its utility.
In any field of human endeavor, there is bound to be wastage—or apparent wastage. The story of Alexander Graham Bell is indicative: when asked about his ninety-nine failed experiments leading to his final successful one, he exclaimed that he had discovered ninety-nine ways not to do something—which makes nonsense of the entire concept of “waste” when applied to research.
I recall that 3M’s Post-It Notes, one of the greatest product success stories of all time, came as a result of a failed chemical experiment to find a specific kind of glue, and to deny that this kind of happy outcome could likewise occur in a philosophical or theoretical process would be a grievous mistake in logic, not to say experience.
So yes, some academics will abuse the privilege of unconstrained research to pad their resumes, or avoid teaching classes, or whatever. In every field of human endeavor, there are also many who abuse the process.
But those nuggets of actual achievement are too precious to be denied, even if a majority of the process is worthless. “Babies” and “bathwater” come to mind here, and I for one am sufficiently appreciative of human achievement to want it to continue. I am also sufficiently skeptical of “commercial approval” to say that this should never be the sole, nor even the most important criterion for support. “Commercial value” has also given us far too many “Titanics” and far too few “Elizabethtowns”, far too many “Backstreet Boys” and far too few Eric Johnsons.
Good ideas, and true genius, will always spring forth from the human imagination, but let’s be honest: there’s no reason to pour concrete over the fertile soil of the imagination, either. Without financial patronage, Mozart would have starved to death at an early age, especially as some of his music was counter-cultural at the time. The patronage system of the time no doubt carried its fair share of pedestrian “Salieris” too [gratuitous Amadeus reference]—but that was no reason to dump the entire system.
Imagine if Mozart had been a tenured professor of music at the University in Vienna—would you have insisted on him teaching freshmen students the principles of harmony and composition for three hours a day? And let’s be honest again: brilliant people are often lousy teachers. Why burden them with a task which, in the end, benefits nobody?
I’m generally in favor of finding a decent compromise between two extremes; but in this case, between the extremes of “commercial appeal” and “academic navel-gazing”, I’m tugged far more towards the latter than to the former.
No matter how much the system is abused by the mediocre, the slothful and the incompetent.