The Death of the University
Part Two
This essay continues a reflection I began here a week ago. You may wish to read the original piece first.
1.
I’ll be honest: it had been a couple years since I last updated my CV. There are at least a few good reasons for this. One is that I’m too busy actually doing things to waste any time manicuring the list of things I’m doing. Since 2022 or so, whenever someone has recommended to me that I apply for this or that prestigious fellowship or distinction or chevron, my response has been: “Can’t. No time. Too much to do.” Another is that it all comes to seem a bit undignified, infantilizing, at a certain point in life, still to be working in the mode of the adenoidal high-school overachiever, who, for every task completed, every remedial math student tutored and every plastic bottlecap removed from the beach, cannot help but think: “This is gonna look good on my résumé”.
Recent events did however inspire me to open up the old Lebenslauf and to try out a few modifications, such as:
or, the one I think I’m going to go with:
Whichever I choose, one thing is certain: I am done presenting that credential as a valid document. That part of my CV can now only properly come sous rature. Along with the validity of the university that enabled me to build it, my Lebenslauf’s validity is now, too, thoroughly ausgelaufen.
I’m quite serious about this, though I also have to add that my gesture, impotent and irrelevant like all others currently being made in response to the way the world is going, comes with a complicated jumble of emotions. I feel righteous anger and exhilarating liberation at once, to the extent that I really don’t know which predominates. I don’t know whether my gesture is primarily one of protest against the destruction of the modern university, or of participation in the broad historical motion that is currently killing it off.
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Another way of saying this is that I am suspended between the past and the future, just like everyone else. And at least everyone else with an academic career who is halfway honest with themselves, must, in the present moment, be prepared not just to cling to the august institutional columns that used to give us such a sense of pride and mission, but also to begin to make out the rough form of what an intellectual life might look like in the post-universitarian years ahead. I mean, we might reach Khmer Rouge-levels of anti-intellectualism, where everyone who so much as owned a pair of eyeglasses was simply massacred. But, short of that, there will still be much to be done by the four-eyed class, with or without universities to do it in.
Last week I issued a call to readers to reach out to me if they found themselves moving in the same direction, with a similar jumble of contradictory sentiments. The results were surprising, and revealing. I also made a passing comment about St. John’s College, explaining why I am not entirely on board with their Great Books-focused alternative to what the academic humanities have become almost everywhere else. The responses to that single line, which I almost did not bother to include at all, and the absence of which would have made no difference at all to the essay’s argument, were particularly surprising.
Allow me to summarize some of what I heard back.