• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

At bottom universities are not about academic freedom, they’re not about open inquiry, they’re not about public service, they’re not about educating the masses—they embody or accomplish none of these except as an accident to their primary function. And that function, when all is said and done, is to draw upon a chunk of society’s surplus and funnel it into various colleges and departments, who then use it to pay scholars so they can research and teach full- time within the parameters of method and quality set by those distributing the cash. Universities medieval and modern, whether under the control of religious clerics or communist parties or capitalist trustees, are united across time and space by this fundamental pattern of organization. From this perspective, it follows rather obviously that the point of establishing such institutions in the first place was to generate particular kinds of people producing certain sorts of approved knowledge, sustaining them so they could do it as a permanent living. To the extent universities remain useful to modern democracies (and it seems to me Lee, for all his ruthless critique, remains rather fond of them), it’s because we too need permanent and reliable funding streams by which to nurture and sustain knowledge- producing communities, for the good of society and perhaps even as a good in itself.