Quotes about Academia

Academia was created by business, religion and government as an enclosure for intelligent, altruistic people to keep them occupied and feeling important, and distracted from exposing corruption and working for change.  Fortunately, this strategy hasn't always succeeded.

It's quite easy to imagine one grasps the essential outlines of an issue once one has cleared away all the emotional and moral turbulence that interfere with thinking about it--but in those greenhouse-conditions one is not truly thinking about reality as it actually is. Modern "academic" or "scholarly" philosophy is the victim of the delusionality of "scientism" or "objectivity," of thinking supposing that the controversiality or polemicality of our lives can be effectively purged out of things. We can cosmeticize it, depress its strife and tension with a facade of pseudo-neutralized terms; but even the most meager forms of insight suffice to reveal that this objectivity is mere facade. Modern culture is becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of sophisticated relativism, a mentality that hasn't got a clue what to do about perspectival variations and rationalizations from one mind to another. If there isn't a consensual community about what is right or good, then bourgeois society can only seek forms of mediation or compromise or count the votes of its countless subrational idiots. To wrestle with fundamental norms and principles is not something intellectually respectable among bourgeois minds, any more than it is to make public and direct value-judgments about someone else's thinking. By default we sink into a morass of incommensurable and pathetic views.

It is in college that the clamps really start to come down, heavy-duty or professional-caliber ideologizing against radical ideas.  Even in very large departments of sociology or political science I couldn't find virtually any people who had read thinkers off the Approved list.  I was to discover over the decades that there is certainly a blacklist of sorts in philosophy as well--and the grave difficulty the 19th-century thinkers pose for the academic establishment is that all of those primary thinkers are contrarian and radical.  It isn't possible to overlook or refute them; all that can be done is deform and misrepresent their thinking, blunt it, confuse its purposes and accomplishments.  How geniuses get academicized.

Academia is alas full of special interests and specialists who presumed it was possible to "leapfrog" over this or that entire line of development. These minds hoped to distance themselves from the pernicious vices of a whole way of thinking, but of course at the same time excluded all of its virtues too.  Modern abstractivism in its simplex form (which does not preclude a high degree of articulate facility within the ambit of what is preconceived and accepted).

The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.

One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence."  This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.

Paul Ehrlich's bet with Julian Simon concerning his belief that natural resources were becoming scarce -- which he famously lost -- has not completely undermined Ehrlich's reputation. But what if, instead of one controversial academic betting against another, there were thousands of ordinary people working to make a buck off of the foolishness of academics? Insofar as ordinary people often have much greater insight into social and economic systems than do many academics, the most egregious foolishnesses of academia would rapidly be exposed.