the purpose of social stability in another way—by being squandered on trivia. Thus, the university becomes a playpen in which the society invites its favored children to play—and gives them toys and prizes, to keep them out of trouble. For instance, we might note an article in the leading journal in political science not long ago, dealing with the effects of Hurricane Betsy on the mayoralty election in New Orleans. Or, a team of social psychologists (armed with a fat government grant) may move right into the ghetto (surely the scholar is getting relevant here) and discover two important facts from its extensive, sophisticated research: that black people in the ghetto are poor; and that they have family difficulties.
I am touching a sensitive nerve in the academy now: Am I trying to obliterate all scholarship except the immediately relevant? No—it is a matter of proportion. The erection of new skyscraper office buildings is not offensive in itself, but it becomes lamentable alongside the continued existence of ghetto slums. It was not wrong for the Association of Asian Studies at its 1969 meeting to discuss some problems of the Ming dynasty and a battery of similar remote topics, but no session of the dozens at the meeting dealt with Vietnam.
Aside from trivial or esoteric inquiry, knowledge is also dissipated on pretentious conceptualizing in the social sciences. A catch-phrase can become a stimulus for endless academic discussion, and for the proliferation of debates which go nowhere into the real world, only round and round in ever smaller circles of scholarly discourse. Schemes and models and systems are invented which have the air of profundity and which advance careers, but hardly anything else.
We should not be surprised then at the volatile demonstrations for black studies programs which began around 1967–68, or for the creation of new student-run courses based on radical critiques of American society. Students demanding relevance in scholarship began to be joined in 1968–69 by professors dissenting at the annual ceremonials called Scholarly Meetings: at the American Philosophical Association a resolution denouncing U. S. policy in Vietnam; at the American Political Science Association a new caucus making radical changes in the program; at the American Historical Association, a successful campaign removing the 1968 meeting from Chicago to protest Mayor Daley’s hooliganism; at the Modern Language Association the election of a young radical English teacher to the presidential succession.
Still we remain troubled, because the new urgency to use our heads for good purposes gets tangled in a cluster of beliefs which are so stuck, fungus-like, to the scholar, that even the most activist of us cannot cleanly extricate ourselves. These beliefs are roughly expressed by the phrases “disinterested scholarship … dispassionate learning … objective study … scientific method”—all adding up to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper. And so we mostly remain subservient to the beliefs of the profession although they violate our deepest feelings as human beings, although we suspect that the traditional neutrality of the scholar is a disservice to the very ideals we teach about as history, and a betrayal of the victims of an unneutral world.
It may, therefore, be worthwhile to examine the arguments for “disinterested, neutral, scientific, objective” scholarship. If there is to be a revolution in the uses of knowledge to correspond to the revolution in society, it will have to begin by challenging the rules which sustain the wasting of knowledge. Let me cite a number of them, and argue briefly for new approaches.
Rule 1. Carry on “disinterested scholarship.” (In one hour’s reading I came across three such exhortations, using just that phrase: in a New Republic essay by Walter Lippmann; in the 1968 Columbia University commencement address of Richard Hofstadter; in an article by Daniel Bell, appearing, ironically, in a magazine called The Public Interest.) The call is naive, because there are powerful interests already at work in the academy, with varying degrees of self-consciousness.
There is the Establishment of political power and corporate wealth, whose interest is that the universities produce people who will fit into existing niches in the social structure rather than try to change the structure. We always knew our educational system “socialized” people, but we never worried about this because we assumed our social norms were worth perpetuating. Now, and rightly, we are beginning to doubt this. There is the interest of the educational bureaucracy in maintaining itself: its endowment, its buildings, its positions (both honorific and material), its steady growth along orthodox lines. These larger interests are internalized in the motivations of the scholar: promotion, tenure, higher salaries, prestige—all of which are best secured by innovating in prescribed directions.
All of these interests operate, not through any conspiratorial decision but through the mechanism of a well-oiled system, just as the irrationality of the economic system operates not through any devilish plot but through the mechanism of the profit motive and the market, and as the same kinds of political decisions reproduce themselves in Congress year after year.
No one intends exactly what happens. They just follow the normal rules of the game. Similarly with education; hence the need to challenge these rules which quietly lead the scholar toward trivia, pretentiousness, orotundity, and the production of objects: books, degrees, buildings, research projects, dead knowledge. (Emerson is still right: “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”)
There is no question, then, of a “disinterested” community of scholars, only a question about what kinds of interests the scholars will serve. There are fundamental humanistic interests—above any particular class, party, nation, ideology—which I believe we should consciously serve. I assume this is what we mean when we speak (however we act) of fostering certain “values” in education.
The university and its scholars (teachers, students, researchers) should unashamedly declare that their interest is in eliminating war, poverty, race and national hatred, governmental restrictions on individual freedom, and in fostering a spirit of cooperation and concern in the generation growing up. They should not serve the interests of particular nations or parties or religions or political dogmas. Ironically, scholars have often served narrow governmental, military, or business interests, and yet withheld support from larger, transcendental values, on the ground that they needed to maintain neutrality.
Rule 2. Be objective. The myth of “objectivity” in teaching and scholarship is based on a common confusion. If to be objective is to be scrupulously careful about reporting accurately what one sees, then of course this is laudable. But accuracy is only a prerequisite. That a metalsmith uses reliable measuring instruments is a condition for doing good work, but does not answer the crucial question: will he now forge a sword or a plowshare with his instruments? That the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a plowshare does not require him to distort his measurements. That the scholar has decided he prefers peace to war does not require him to distort his facts.
Too many scholars abjure a starting set of values because they fail to make the proper distinction between an ultimate set of values and the instruments needed to obtain them. The values may well be subjective (derived from human needs); but the instruments must be objective (accurate). Our values should determine the questions we ask in scholarly inquiry, but not the answers.
To be “objective” in writing history, for example, is as pointless as trying to draw a map which shows everything—or even samples of everything—on a piece of terrain. No map can show all the elements in that terrain, nor should it, if it is to serve efficiently a present purpose, to take us toward some goal. Therefore, different maps are constructed, depending on the aim of the mapmaker. Each map, including what is essential to its purpose, excluding the irrelevant, can be accused of “partiality.” But it is exactly in being partial that it is most true to its particular present job.
A map fails us, not when it is untrue to the abstract universal of total inclusiveness, but when it is untrue to the only realm in which truth has meaning—some present human need, and what we must do to attain it. And so with a historical account. As Kierkegaard put it: “Truth exists only as the individual
