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The True Scholar, by R. N. Bellah, ACADEME, Bulletin of
AAUP, January-February 2000, pp. 18-23.
Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 6/27/00
"When we say that an action or a person is 'truly human' we are
using phronesis, judgment. We mean simultaneously that this
action or this person is such as humans can be and such as they
ought to be. … We use judgment in this sense all the time and
not only in the humanities and social sciences; we could not conduct
the scholarly enterprise without it. … But changes in the university,
and therefore in scholarship, over the last hundred years have not
come about only because of altered intellectual understandings.
Changes in the relationship between the university and society have
also played a part. The university has never been a place devoted
solely to the formation of character or to pure inquiry. The university
has always been an avenue of social mobility. One's life chances
are enhanced by attaining a university degree - about that plenty
of empirical evidence exists as far back as one can go."
"… Universities, and so scholarship, have been seen as serving
external purposes, above all those of the state and the economy.
By far the most influential outside purpose deriving from the state
has been the pressure to contribute to war efforts. …"
"In the May-June 1998 issue of Harvard Magazine, James Engell
and Anthony Dangerfield published a survey of trends in the humanities
titled 'The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money.'
Here are some of the most important findings:
- The humanities represent a sharply declining proportion of all
undergraduate degrees.
- Between 1970 and 1994, the number of B.A.'s conferred in the
United States rose 39 percent.
- Among all bachelor's degrees in higher education, three majors
increased five- to tenfold; computer and information science,
protective services, and transportation and materials moving.
- Two majors, already large, tripled: the health professions and
public administration.
- Business administration, already popular, doubled.
- English, foreign languages, philosophy, religion, and history
all suffered absolute declines.
Also, the authors point out that
Measured by faculty salaries - a clear sign of prestige and clout
- the humanities fare dismally. On average, humanities receive the
lowest faculty salaries by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars;
the gap affects the whole teaching population, regardless of rank.
Humanities' teaching loads are highest, with the least amount of
release and research time, yet they're now expected, far more than
three decades ago, to publish in order to secure professorial posts.
… They argue that there are 'three criteria for the power money
in academia, whose rule is remarkably potent, uniform, and veritable.
Academic fields lacking all three languishes.' In the Age of Money,
they continue, the royal road to success is to offer at least one
of the following:
- A Promise of Money. …
- A Knowledge of Money. …
- A Source of Money. …"
"… (Rational choice theory assumes that social life can be
explained principally as the outcome of the rational choices of
individual actors, who typically base their actions on what they
perceive to the most effective means to their goals.) Rational choice
theory is now taken as a given in economics and has spread out into
many neighboring disciplines: political science, sociology, law,
even religious studies. If the theory is true, we need to submit
not only that acquisitiveness is the fundamental human motive, but
also that, as it was put in the 1980's, 'greed is good.' And we
must also concede that we were mistaken all these years, in all
the religions and philosophies of mankind, in thinking cupidity
a vice instead of chief virtue. …"
"… Probably the single most important theoretical source
of rational choice theory was Von Neumann and Morganstein's Theory
of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944. …"
"Whatever one thinks of game theory, rational choice theory as
developed at Rand was prescriptive, and it did indeed determine
actions. … Today, rational choice theory, born in the intense
engagement of the Cold War as a tool for the prosecution of that
war, is now ensconced in the university and taught to students as
scientific truth. … Scholars live in the world, and world we
live in right now is dominated by money. If we believe that the
struggle for strategic advantage is the truth about human beings,
then we should realize that we not just teaching a scientific truth;
we are preaching a gospel. … So if we don't think that the
struggle for strategic advantage is the whole truth about human
beings, then in our scholarship and our teaching we should begin
consciously to accept that our work is governed by the virtue of
judgment, at least in aspiration. …"
[Readers who are interested in this paper are encouraged
to read the original version in its entirety. Other summary notes
on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu
under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]
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