The Degradation of the Academic Dogma

Egon Friedell, Robert Nisbet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351304948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This is one of the most important books ever published about the American university. Robert Nisbet accuses universities of having betrayed themselves. Over the centuries they earned the respect of society by attempting to remain faithful to what he terms "the academic dogma, " the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The measure of a university's greatness and of the stature of an individual scholar was determined not by the immediate usefulness of the work done, but by how much it contributed to scholarship, learning, and teaching.

American universities abandoned this ideal, Nisbet charges, after World War II, welcoming onto their campuses academic entrepreneurs engaged in the "higher capitalism, " the highly profitable sale of knowledge. This "reformation, " says Nisbet, has resulted in the greatest change in the structure and values of the university that has occurred since their founding as guilds in the Middle Ages. And it may be responsible, for reasons he spells out in convincing detail, for their eventual demise as centers of learning.

In her introduction, Gertrude Himmelfarb pays tribute to Robert Nisbet for his prescience in analyzing the reformation of the university in the postwar period. A second reformation, she says, has further undermined the academic dogma, first by applying the principles of affirmative action and multiculturalism to the curriculum as well as to student admissions and faculty hiring, and then by "deconstructing" the disciplines, thus subverting the ideas of truth, reason, and objectivity. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma is even more pertinent today than when it was first published a quarter of a century ago. For those concerned with the integrity of the university and of intellectual life, Robert Nisbet has once again proved himself a prophet and a mentor.

PART I

         The Nature of the Academic Dogma

1

THE LAST REFORMATION

ANY EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND the contemporary academic scene, its convulsive changes of the past quarter-century, its mounting conflicts of function, purpose, and allegiance, must begin with recognition of two facts of outstanding importance. Both are historical. The first is the aristocratic, even feudal structure of the university and also of its historic relation to the social order. The second fact, no less important, no less historical, is the deepening intensity and widening scope of the revolutionary change in modern Western society that, for want of a better term, we call modernism.

The university is, in a manner of speaking, the last of the great institutions formed during the Middle Ages: the last, that is, to suffer in full sweep the kind of changes and buffets that earlier were the lot of monastery, fief, guild, and parish. For many but not all medieval institutions these changes and buffets reached the height of their intensity in the sixteenth century during the Reformation. And it is indeed a Reformation that engulfs the university in America today.

It is surely evident that the university has become a battle ground of interests, ideas, and allegiances in the same way the Church was in sixteenth-century Europe. Then, as we know, it was the assertedly corrupt character of the Church and its relation to society that aroused Zwingli, Luther, and Melanchthon.

Today, as events of the last decade have made only too clear, very similar doctrines are to be noted: doctrines of private economic interest among faculty members, doctrines of private political judgment among faculty and students alike within the corporate university, and doctrines of individual determination of truth among even undergraduate students. But today these doctrines have as their prime target, not the church—though I would not wish to suggest that the church, especially Christian, is without its own currents of revolt—but the university.

The belief that purity of faith and conscience, rather than works, including published works, is the proper road to salvation is as evident today as it was four hundred years ago. Then the Church was held to be the seat of corruption. Today, on all sides, the university is charged with the kind of society-sprung corruption and dishonesty that Luther and his allies saw in Rome. Now as then, the relation of man to institution, of institution to society, is a pressing one, with, however, the context academic rather than ecclesiastical.

I am not implying that only in the mid-twentieth century has the university known the impact of modernism. Changes of thought, curriculum, and theme have taken place throughout its eight centuries of history in the West: the impact of the Renaissance, with its joyous rejuvenations of classical, especially Greek, writers; the later impact of natural law doctrines; the critical rationalism of the eighteenth century; the vital influence—but only slowly, reluctantly, accepted by the universities—of the natural sciences; the burgeoning professions in the nineteenth century and their largely successful efforts, especially in the United States, to become elements of the university; the whole movement, of which the Land Grant universities were leaders, through which new and ever more vocationalized subjects were added to the university curriculum and through which the intellectual resources of the university were taken directly to the economy, especially to agriculture. All of these are changes indeed in that rather primitive curriculum that was the rock on which a Bologna or Paris was founded in the early Middle Ages. I do not deny them. Nor do I deny the conflicts within universities that not infrequently attended reception of new elements in the curriculum.

But if we confine attention to the structure of the university and to its principal components, changes are few and far between during centuries in which destruction or substantial modification of such other medieval structures as aristocracy, guild, village community, manor, and church was commonplace. From the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, the essential structural elements of the university have remained largely the same, and almost as much the subject of social honor today as they were then. The organization of the university into the two great divisions of faculty and students and into schools, colleges, and faculties; the pervading hierarchy, not only from student to faculty member but, more crucially, within faculty; the firm insistence upon faculty authority in matters of admissions, establishment of courses, and, above all, in the granting of degrees, licenses, and certificates; the profound conception of the university as an enclave of privilege and authority within the social order—that is, a liberty, in the medieval sense—with its correlative conceptions of academic freedom and tenure; the consecration of the university to teaching and scholarship within the learned disciplines; the primary of the role of the professor; even the academic gown, whether used for practical or ceremonial purposes—these are a few of what I mean by the structural and normative elements of the university. Very obviously, changes have been minimal and few in these respects. That is, until very recently.

For many centuries it was almost as though the waters of revolution were held back by powerful, if invisible, dikes when they threatened to reach the university. Not only did the proud and jealous citizens of academia fight against outside influences (sometimes to their own stultification), but so did almost all of the inhabitants of the world outside academic walls. No matter how willing the new men of wealth and of power were to see the historic positions of guild, parish, estate, and fief destroyed or weakened, it was, for a very long time, as though an invisible hand reached out from the twelfth century to repulse the forces of intellectual, economic, and political modernism when they threatened to touch the university. However quaint and anachronistic the lives of teachers and students within the walls might look to outsiders—a quaintness and anachronism almost perfectly reflected in the robes that became increasingly ceremonial ornaments—these lives, these roles, and the structure that contained them and the dogma that underlay them were largely left alone for some eight centuries.

Left alone until the present day. They are no longer being left alone, and it requires little gift of prophecy to be able to see a future of almost limitless dislocation of academic structure, roles, functions, authority, and dogma. Such a statement is made in no spirit of doomsaying or alarmism. The evidences of dislocation already securely begun are too many and too important to leave much room, it seems to me, for any other kind of future. And, as I noted clearly in my prefatory remarks, to say this is in no way to prophesy the decline of knowledge, of culture, even of the contexts of effective teaching. After all, the university as we have known it for many centuries is only one of a number of possible ways of meeting the problem faced by all societies: that of keeping alive the springs and the contexts of the knowledge necessary to survival; and also that of transmitting, through whatever channels, this knowledge from generation to generation.

The evidence of comparative history leaves no doubt whatever that the university, much as we may cherish it, is anything but universal. Countless peoples, including some of the most creative and intellectually advanced in history, have met the problem of knowledge in ways other than that institutionalized in the university. Neither the greatness that was Greece nor the grandeur that was Rome was based in any way upon structures comparable to universities.

As one of the most distinguished historical interpreters of the university, Charles H. Haskins, has written: “The Greeks and the Romans, strange as it may seem, had no universities in the sense in which the word has been used for the past seven or eight centuries. They had higher education, but the terms are not synonymous. Much of their instruction in law, rhetoric, and philosophy it would be hard to surpass, but it was not organized into the form of permanent institutions of learning. . . . Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do there emerge in the world those features of organized education with which we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic degrees. In all these matters we are the heirs and successors, not of Athens and Alexandria, but of Paris and Bologna.”¹

So too does that greatest of all historical interpreters of the university, Hastings Rashdall, emphasize the medieval source of the university in the West. “The institutions which the Middle Age has bequeathed to us are of greater and more imperishable value even than its cathedrals. And the university is distinctly a medieval institution—as much so as constitutional kingship, or parliaments, or trial by jury. The universities and the immediate products of their activity may be said to constitute the great achievement of the Middle Ages in the intellectual sphere.”²

Note well this medieval source and character of the university. Without awareness of the continuing medievalism of university structure into the twentieth century we should not be able to understand the full significance of what is today happening to the university and, in all probability, will continue to happen in ever mounting intensity. For the moment, however, I want only to emphasize the fact that we err seriously if we make knowledge, its discovery and its dissemination even at the highest levels, synonymous with the university.

Nor has the university been the exclusive home of learning, research, scholarship, and creative intellectual discovery in the modern West. A great many classics in all fields of knowledge are testimony to this. Often, indeed, the university could seem the home of ignorance, prejudice, mere ritualism, to some of the light and leading of the West. The brilliant burst of ideas we know as the French Enlightenment did not take place within academic walls. More than a few fields of learning, today integral parts of the university curriculum, had to come into being not merely outside university walls but under the lash of university scorn and contempt. If one were to make a list of the hundred greatest works, including scientific discoveries, in the realm of knowledge (which I will of course distinguish here from works of artistic or religious imagination), it is by no means certain that, even limiting ourselves to the past three centuries, a majority of them would be products of the universities. I should rather guess the opposite; that a majority would not be such products.

I make these points about the university and its limited relation to the discourse of knowledge not to derogate but, rather, to set it in proper context for both past and present. There are many attacks today on the university. There will be many more in the future. Many of these attacks are and will be based upon ignorance, bigotry, hatred of knowledge in all its higher forms. But not all of them are or will be. In the same way that a Gibbon or a Voltaire or a Bentham could take a hostile view of the universities of their day for the universities’ ritualized resistance to fresh knowledge and fresh ways of communicating it, so will more and more voices of the near future echo this hostility.

They will echo it in the same spirit in which Gibbon, Voltaire, and Bentham themselves echoed, albeit in secularized way, the still earlier hostility of the Protestant reformers to the corporate Roman Church. Precisely as these reformers found the corporate and hierarchical structure of the Church a huge barrier to the individual’s attainment of grace and salvation, so have, and do today, other reformers and revolutionaries found the university with respect to cultivation of mind and the attainment of true knowledge.

It is a mistake to think of the Reformation as something that took place in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In a very real sense modern history, right down to and including the present, has been one long series of intermittent Reformations. The zeal of assault that Luther and Calvin applied to Church was applied by other reformers and revolutionaries to other institutionalized products of the Middle Ages. The university is such a product, and I can think of no better way, as I have already indicated, to assess the significance of what is today happening in the university than by likening it to that earlier phase of the Reformation in which Luther and Calvin were protagonists.

The same fundamental combination of new wealth, new power, and assertion of individuality we see in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, we see also in the successive attacks mounted upon still other medieval institutions: guild, village community, landed aristocracy, and so on. Today we see this attack mounted upon the last of the great medieval institutions, the university.

Rashdall notes the striking likeness in the Middle Ages of the guilds of scholars which were the universities, in our sense, and the guilds of knights. “The original conception of knighthood was the solemn reception of the novice into the brotherhood of arms. The blessing of the priest was required by the knight bachelor as the scholastic bachelor required the licence of the chancellor. . . . Both of these great institutions arose from the transference to the military and scholastic life respectively of one of the most characteristic social and political ideas of the age—the idea of a guild or sworn brotherhood of persons following a common occupation.”³

Modern history, Lord Acton once declared, is essentially the story of what has happened to medieval institutions and values. Nowhere is this observation more telling than with respect to the university, medieval to the core in its dogma and structure. Modernity has been anything but kind to the knighthoods—in all their guises and manifestations—that sprang into existence all over the European continent in the Middle Ages. What F. W. Maitland once wrote of the English sheriff could be applied as well to the medieval knight: that in his rise and fall can be epitomized all the major forces of modern European history.

As is only too plain, contemporary history is proving to be anything but kind to the role of professor, who is, after all, in academic dress no more, no less than a knight: a knight of the classroom, laboratory, and study, but not less a knight. He too is or has been the beneficiary of certain immunities and indulgences that the social order long since ceased to grant other knights, other craftsmen, other guilds- men. But I know of no better way of describing the contemporary Reformation in its impact upon the university than by saying that it is exceedingly unlikely that these immunities and indulgences will continue for much longer. As was the knight of combat several centuries ago, the knight of scholarship is today the victim of an erosion of role that threatens to make him obsolete.

---

1 Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of the Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 1-2.

2 Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 1:3.

3 Ibid., 1:287.

2

THE ACADEMIC DOGMA

ALL MAJOR INSTITUTIONS are built around dogmas. So, for that matter, is social life generally. We could not live without dogma, which is no more than a system of principles or ideals widely believed to be not merely true or right but also beyond the necessity of the more or less constant verification we feel obliged to give so many other aspects of our lives.

“At different periods dogmatic belief is more or less common. It arises in different ways, and it may change its object and its form; but under no circumstances will dogmatic belief cease to exist, or, in other words, men will never cease to entertain some opinions on trust and without discussion.”¹ So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. Cardinal Newman was but echoing, and giving point to these words when he observed that men will die for a dogma who will not even stir for a conclusion. The word “dogma” comes from the Greek dok (ein) which may be translated as “seem good.” Equality, justice, freedom, democracy, all of these are dogmas for us today, just as the Godhead, the Resurrection, and spiritual grace were (and still are) dogmas for the Christian community.

To describe a belief as dogmatic does not necessarily imply that it cannot be “proved” through logic, reason, or evidence. No doubt each of modern man’s dogmas—democracy, equality, justice, and others—could be so proved if we wished to submit it to critical or scientific scrutiny. A very considerable literature in the social sciences and moral philosophy seeks to do precisely this: “prove” on rational or empirical grounds that each of these is functional in light of man’s real nature. A large literature in theology seeks to do the same with: Christian dogmas.

None of this gets to the heart of the matter, however, or offsets the dogmatic character of the beliefs I refer to. The essential point is that irrespective of the possibility of their rational or empirical verification the beliefs are widely regarded as good or right without necessity of constant scrutiny. And, as Tocqueville wrote, adding to the words quoted above, no society can even exist, much less prosper, without such common belief. Nor can any individual. For if each individual was compelled to demonstrate and redemonstrate to his own satisfaction each of the propositions he lives by, his obligation would never end. As Tocqueville notes, man would exhaust his strength in preparatory de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition by Gertrude Himmelfarb
• Introduction
• Part I The Nature of the Academic Dogma
• 1 The Last Reformation
• 2 The Academic Dogma
• 3 The Academic Community
• 4 The Yield of Academic Feudalism
• Part II The Degradation of the Academic Dogma
• 5 The Higher Capitalism
• 6 The New Men of Power
• 7 The Academic Bourgeoisie
• 8 The Cult of Individuality
• 9 The Deluge of Humanitarianism
• 10 The Politicization of the University
• 11 The Student Revolution
• Part III The Future of the Academic Dogma
• 12 The Search for Academic Community
• 13 The Future of the Academic Community
• Epilogue
• Index