The Marketplace of Ideas

Via Peter Gratton, I’ve just read Slate’s detailed review of Louis Menand’s new book The Marketplace of Ideas, about the state of the university and the anxiety of the professoriate.

Given that my own feelings about such matters are far less measured and far more informal than Menand’s, I’ll look forward to reading the book, since he clearly covers many of the issues that trouble me, including humanists’ fears of instrumentality and their resulting loss of relevance. From the review:

[Harvard President Charles William Eliot’s] transformation gave the professoriate a new autonomy, but at a price: If professors wanted academic freedom, insulation from the demands of the commercial marketplace, they had to start thinking of what they did in nonvocational termsâ??as the pursuit of specialized knowledge for its own sake. This self-conception helps to explain why the attempt to construct a general-education curriculum has been so fraught. General-education requirements are designed with the idea that there are some nonnegotiable ends to a college educationâ??to provide, for example, the “social glue” that bonds disparate Americans to one another, or to generate productive minds for the purposes of Cold War defenseâ??but professors have been socialized to believe that what they do can’t be reduced to something so vulgar and utilitarian.