the intellectual
Teppo
Mark Oppenheimer has a nice essay in the Chronicle Review on the lack of broader intellectual curiosity by graduate students (and professors for that matter), specifically for intellectual and public matters outside their narrow domains. I in part concur with his proposed solution:
I have long believed that admissions committees at graduate schools should work very differently. Instead of asking for letters of recommendation from undergraduate thesis advisers, admissions committees should try to figure out if an applicant is an intellectual. They should ask: “What do you read outside your proposed field of study? What are your favorite books? Where would you most like to travel, and why? What periodicals do you read?” If a student has no aspirations to travel, doesn’t seem to read much except within her undergraduate major, and shows no interest in academic debates — well, that’s a bad candidate for academe. A bright, kind, loyal person, perhaps, who could be a success in many ways. But a bad candidate for the academy that America needs.
Now, that might be a bit over-the-top, lots of very narrow folks have obviously come up with brilliant theories and innovations, though, in principle his point resonates.
This appears to be another example of a humanist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The irony of the question “where have all of the intellectuals gone?” is exarcerbated by the fact that it is asked in the context of a virtual explosion in cultural production by non-specialists (of course not being published in The Partisan Review or The New Left Review for that matter). By all accounts, there is more intellectual production for and by non-specialists today than there ever was during the heyday of either The New Criterion or Dissent. Yet, Spenglerian declinists (invariably from the humanities) tell us that intellectual debate is dead, that narrow specialism has killed “the life of the mind” etc. Total rubbish. How many blogs are active right now? How many new ones are created every day? If the print journals are struggling (it is unlikely that anything like the New York Review of Books will survive long into the near future), then welcome to the club of print media decline. But I doubt that that’s because graduate students today are somehow “damaged goods” in comparison to the ones that existed circa 1963, or that we need more “intellectual” wannabes. If you aks me, we have too many of those. Beyond that, it’s only so much old-man-in-the-porch, “In my day…” nostalgia.
Omar
September 24, 2006 at 1:30 pm
regardless of whether there is some painful absence of the “true” intellectual in the academy, the curiosity that drives my personal wish to become knowledgable in many things places me in agreement with this post. so, without trying to answer the question of “is intellectual debate in decline?” by counting the number of non-specialist blogs or deploying jargon, i want to underline what it is i believe. i am an undergraduate. my interests are wide-ranging. i read a lot outside my field (international relations) because i believe that all areas of inquiry have value to me in the work i hope to do one day. so, i spend a lot of time outside of class reading philosophy, history, maths, and more. i try to keep up with the latest developments in science…particularly evolutionary biology, fascinating stuff that really explains a lot, i think. i ask my professors who place themselves “firmly in the rational choice camp” just what it means to be a reasonable person to see if there are any insights…i’m usually disappointed.
by taking an interest in other fields, by examining closely the ancient greeks, for example, i see that our “progress” is really very modest, despite what our technological advancement would have us believe. that’s “big picture” and useful for a humbling perspective, which i think is necessary to be a good person. i feel i am better for understanding maths, not for its practical benefits, which are great (i do love being able to do it), but for the benefits gathered by the foundations of my thinking…some word association is in order as a way to describe it since i’m writing this on a lazy sunday: abstraction, logic, grammar, simplicity, improves my chess game….the point being, it helps me in other areas, sometimes tangible, as in chess, or intangibly, as a benefit to the way i’m able to solve other problems.
the downside i see is that when it comes time for me to go to graduate school, i won’t have the 5 club officerships, the student-athlete label, the internship, the job, the 5 volunteerships, etc. etc. i’ve only gathered the modest number of scholarships and grants that have presented themselves as sometimes annoying requirements in order to satisfy the bursar office’s demand for money. it won’t be easy for any admissions committee to see that in addition to A’s in my undergrad major, i’ve struggled to teach myself calculus, or read plato, kant, locke, hobbes, hume, and more. or that learning arabic is much harder than french. or that i learned hebrew from my wife. or that the history of world war 1 is really interesting. or that i think evolution is awe-inspiring and scary. that who i am is shaped by the painful experience of being forced to live in several different countries as a child, and i believe i’m better for it.
sunship
September 24, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Omar asks:
“How many blogs are active right now? How many new ones are created every day?”
Umm, I think the “Spenglerian declinists” are talking about something else altogether. What in the world do blogs have to do with anything? A simple experiment: Show me ONE blog that holds a candle to any of the “old media” outlets you mention. Just one. (Methinks you got a bad case of new media millenarianitis, but I will readily concede defeat and shut up if you can point me to ONE SINGLE BLOG that is of as of high a quality as, say, the New York Review.) Yea, there has been an “explosion of cultural production,” but “cultural production” happens every time I open my mouth. What that has to do with creeping anti-intellectualism is beyond me.
sk
September 24, 2006 at 5:09 pm
[...] Link via orgtheory.net. [...]
Intellectual commons « nanopolitan 2.0
September 24, 2006 at 5:18 pm
sk asks: “A simple experiment: Show me ONE blog that holds a candle to any of the “old media” outlets you mention. Just one.”
Dailykos
Instapundit
Each of these blogs reaches *millions* of people everyday. Only the top 10 newspapers and a few magazines are in the ball partk. Also:
drudge report
More of a new sorting page, but I consider it “quasi-bloggy.”
Fabio Rojas
September 24, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Wow, how far have we sunk if we consider Drudge to be even quasi-intellectual? ;)
I actually find myself somewhere in between Oppenheimer and Omar in this debate. I think that those bemoaning the decline of intellectualism tend to be pessimistic and fail to notice all of the interesting new media sources (including but not excluded to blogs), but I also think that students (even many grad students) tend to be less literary and exploratory in their intellectual horizons than would be ideal (sunship is the exception not the rule, I think). I doubt this has much to do with specialization though as it does with all of the competing cultural products that students and other burgeoning intellectuals have. Perhaps the new intellectualism is just a little more “pop” than was true in the past.
brayden
September 24, 2006 at 5:51 pm
I only said Drudge was “quasi-bloggy” – he does write occasional blog like news snippets!
Definitely not an intellectual!
Brayden said: “I also think that students (even many grad students) tend to be less literary and exploratory in their intellectual horizons than would be ideal.”
I detect a need for the division of labor. Some fields would demand broad knowledge, while others require deep, technical knowledge. In my own life, I think it would have impossible to write my book (yes, another plug!) without a lot of knowledge of black history, sociology, management theory, and a liberal dose of statistics. I would expect historical or comparative fields to draw “old school intellectuals,” while technical fields, like demography, probably draw very focused people.
Personally, I don’t find the situation all that bad. We have intellectuals of all kinds and our society is wealthy enough to support the well read academic (e.g., Tyler Cowen or the Crooked Timber crowd) as well as the narrow technician (e.g., the Mystery Pollster).
Fabio Rojas
September 24, 2006 at 8:15 pm
[...] Of course, in today’s climate of increasing hyper-specialization, such students are probably at a competitive disadvantage for completing the PhD, finding a job, getting tenure, etc. (Thanks to Teppo for the pointer to Oppenheimer.) [...]
Demise of the Public Intellectual « Organizations and Markets
September 24, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Nice article, thanks for the link!! Peter Klein’s argument sounds very plausible, and the overall climate of hyperspecialization exists in various contexts within and across the academic disciplines and universities.
Yet, building huge walls around the little garden that a scientist works in and (maybe) even wants to own exclusively, is a consequence of both the individual strategies for success within the existing academic landscape and of incentives that decision makers within academia have set up for him and her. Structure does not fall from the sky, we make structure and we reproduce it day in day out. How about: Professors get the students they deserve and universities get the researchers they deserve?
Tina
September 24, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Fabio sez:
“sk asks: “A simple experiment: Show me ONE blog that holds a candle to any of the “old media” outlets you mention. Just one.”
Dailykos
Instapundit”
I think you are misinterpreting what “candle” I have in mind. Yes, hundreds of millions of Americans watched TV last night too, but it is hard to see what that has to do with the “life of the mind.” What prompted my comment was Omar’s suggestion that blogs were some sort of stand-in or replacement for the high-level, considered work (i.e., “intellectual”) work that appears in the publications that he mentions. I don’t see it. So…challenge still stands. Point me to ONE blog that holds a candle to the New York Review. I’m fair-minded and can be converted to blogophilia. I obviously read the stuff!
sk
September 25, 2006 at 5:42 pm
Things always get interesting when it becomes a matter of taste, and of course de gustibus non est disputandum. The “challenge” is vacuous, since tastes are defined tautologically for the most part. There is no blog out there that “holds a candle” to the NRB, because you have rigged the candle holding criteria from the start; thus your tastes are magically confirmed when you look around and notice the “inferiority” of much intellectual production in blogs.
But that is entirely the point. Those who see decline are entirely right, but for the wrong reasons; since what they see is the decline of modes of cultural production and standards of quality that they are used to deeming superior, being replaced by others. However, if it is a matter of quantity, then the argument does not hold water, since quantity, rather that the candle-holding je ne se quois, is an empirical question. There is more intellectual production today than ever before, in fact the means of intellectual production (both embodied and external) are more widely available than ever before. Thus, there is no “death” of the intellectual, only the death of the type of intellectual that writes essays for outlets such as the NRB.
Omar
September 25, 2006 at 8:13 pm
Omar sez:
“There is no blog out there that “holds a candle” to the NRB, because you have rigged the candle holding criteria from the start; thus your tastes are magically confirmed when you look around and notice the “inferiority” of much intellectual production in blogs.”
My goodness! And here I thought we were having a reasonable conversation…
sk
September 25, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Reasonable? Nah ah…
Omar
September 25, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Reminds me of a conversation I had with my mom once, where she lamented at how inferior new filmmakers were compared to those greats of the past (e.g. specifically Hitchcock). When I asked her to define what qualities she identified as distinguishing a great filmmaker, she basically described the elements common to Hitchcock films. I couldn’t argue with that logic.
brayden
September 25, 2006 at 9:12 pm