Academia's Tottering Republic

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) --Juvenal (after Plato)

Raphael's fresco of Plato's Academy

I am an academic, someone who continues to benefit from and who tries to pass along to students the glories of learning. And I truly think they are glories. I owe infinite debts to teachers and mentors, to books and to countless lectures and discussions. The passport of literacy and the structure of school have brought me privileged citizenship in academia's republic. I am grateful.

And I am certain that the republic of academia as it has been known these many years is more vulnerable than Republican Rome at the time of Julius Caesar.

I don't mean that college campuses are going to be overturned by some sort of plot. These institutions have incredible staying power in the culture. But, ironically, in the very act of trying to be the conservative custodians of knowledge, institutions of higher education will lose their influence, replaced by more flexible media and people. Education is no longer a restricted access institution, but academia is.

Plato established his academy in ancient Greece to foster inquiry and promote the search for truth. There were important parameters to this truth-seeking. First, one had to meet certain qualifications to enter the academy. Second, the setting for instruction was physically delimited; Third, one had to follow the course of study offered. Fourth, one had to submit to the enlightened philosopher who would dispense his wisdom to his acolytes on his own terms. Fifth, the quest for truth was mediated through not just lectures or tutorials, but also through the writings of the wise. Plato had himself learned from Socrates, and he honored his master by recording his dialogues and disseminating his master's ideas to his own students.

Thus we see--from the beginning--the control mechanisms of academia:

1. qualifications required for matriculation;
2. controlled classroom
3. authorized curriculum
4. teacher as authority
5. canonical texts

Academia today still maintains these control parameters, which can be further simplified to issues of access, pedagogy, and publishing.

The new media are challenging each of those control parameters, resulting in both a tightening of those controls and a broad recognition of their inadequacy within the radically new context of the information age and its new tools

Socrates is famous for stating that the unexamined life is not worth living. That reflective, evaluative quality is central to western education. Later, Renee Descartes insisted once again upon re-examining the authority structures of his day, leading to much of the individualism that characterized the Enlightenment. We must be brave enough to see if the unexamined university is worth maintaining. Given the enormous application of resources to these traditional venues for education, it is worth wondering if those venues are indeed the primary places where education is taking place. It could be that academia--like any well established institution--will do more to preserve its own power than it will to seek to bring its primary goals.

I know that whenever someone is fighting to retain old forms, it is likely they have lost sight of their original goals. As will be discussed in later posts, the reasons for exercising the customary controls in higher education have evaporated. Insisting on maintaining those controls will increasingly be unmasked as counter to the goals of education and only an exercise in sustaining a status quo no longer worth defending.

Are we preserving systems out of a sense of tradition? Are institutions of higher education merely credentialing organizations, purportedly devoted to education in the broader sense, but ultimately a service bureau or a career-placement instrument? Speak your mind.

Comments

[Candy Eash]

And I forgot to mention the stories the movies are based on are true.

[Candy Eash]

Brent, I'm not certain that your perspective is completely true. I'm thinking of two movies that help to show what Gideon is talking about - Lorenzo's Oil and Something the Lord Made.

The first is about parents whose son has a genetic disease that the medical profession has basically given up on trying to cure. Both parents delve into research to see if they can find a cure. At the end the father not only finds a solution for future boys with the disease, but has become such an expert that he is given an honorary medical doctorate.

In Something the Lord Made, a surgeon is looking for an assistant to help him develop heart valve replacement proceedures and chooses a carpenter because of his skill with tools. Over time the assistant becomes such an expert that he too is given an honorary medical doctorate and teaches at St. John's Medical School for years.

I think what Gideon is pointing out, is the same idea that came from Dr. Louis Agassiz over a hundred years ago when he invited a scullery maid, who had stated she never had a chance to learn, to write a paper about the brick in the kitchen where she worked. The principle is that to be an expert one only needs knowledge - not necessarily the degree. And now that knowledge is so easily accessible and the world is changing so quickly, that academic institutions aren't the only way to gain that expertise.

[Brent Leavitt]

Generally speaking, the unordered chaos of this modern information highway still requires discipline of its pupils to make any substantial forward progress. Personally, I attribute my current technical skills in web design and development to diligent attention to this alternative school. Arguably though, beyond learning the skills of effective web development, I think it would be near impossible to have such confidence in say a self-professed physician who's primary source of learning was via participation on blogs and forums with other physicians.

To the pupil, the ordered structure of your academia is not necessarily a rite of passage, but more importantly a ladder of enlightenment out of the dreary pit of ignorance.