My colleague Bill Turnier just sent along Stephen Carter's defense of "the faculty lounge" (though not this faculty lounge!), which appeared on Bloomberg.com. Here area couple of excerpts:
To believe in the faculty lounge is to believe that ideas matter, that people can and often do respond to appeals not to their self-interest but to their reason. As the economist Deirdre N. McCloskey argues persuasively in her excellent book “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World,” it is better ideas more than anything else that have built the West. You cannot explain the Industrial Revolution, for example, simply by “adding up the material causes.” There are reasons that some countries adopt particular technologies, laws or norms that others could but don’t. One of those reasons, McCloskey contends, is better ideas. ...
Why, then, this urge to attack both university faculties and the lounges where they gather for coffee and argument? One answer was offered half a century ago by Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” The disdain for the highly educated, he points out, stems from the supposition that the dominance of the intellectual is undemocratic.
Read the rest here. At some point I want to return to the topic of anti-intellectualism in American life. I'm not sure the problem is that academics are anti-democratic as that they are so often wrong on issues for which there is no certain answer. Throughout much of our history, the academy worked in conjunction with the powerful and the affluent, not in opposition to it. In fact, this is a key theme of University, Court, and Slave -- which I discuss in early form here.
Al: Great topic. Here is another excerpt from the piece: "Left free: There’s the point. The principles of the faculty lounge at its best include tolerance of disagreement, preference for reason over authority, and avoidance of slogan and emotional appeal. These are the principles that those of us who teach (and, one hopes, all adults) should model for our students, and encourage them to carry with them into the world beyond the groves of academe. The better we do our work, the better our politics will be."
As someone who had no insight into the inside life of academics I was very proud to first become a faculty member teaching economics and then law. I recall walking out of the the very first faculty meeting I attended because the quality of the discussion was so poor. People quibbled about the smallest things and, invariable, the discussion was about them and not the best course to take. Perhaps I have been in the wrong faculty lounges but my experience has been much the same. It is hard to imagine a more anti intellectual setting. Some ideas are taboo. Disagreements are avoiding in order not to upset the social ordering. I could quote a long string of some of the most illogical statements I have heard and many would come from the faculty lounge. I liken the faculty lounge to something closer to theater. People go their to play their part in a giant ongoing social exercise that has very little to do with one's intellect. Carter does describe the ideal but I have not seen it.
Posted by: Jeffrey Harrison | May 28, 2012 at 06:53 PM