Gordon Brittan
Philosophy
MSU-Bozeman
In this book, Adam Podgorecki, a Canadian sociologist raised and educated in Poland, sets out the results of his cross-national study of university cultures. The study is guided by a typology of various kinds of scholars and backed not only by the author's personal observations in the course of a long career but also by interviews conducted in 1994 with well-known scholars at Berkeley and Stanford, seven of them Nobel Prize winners. As soon emerges, the main purposes of the book are to level the charge that university scholarship is everywhere in decline, and to settle a number of old scores.
The typology comprises the following categories: innovators, potential innovators, collective innovators, builders, professional scholars, disenchanted scholars, instrumental scholars, spectacular scholars, gatekeepers, and operators, a continuum from best to worst. Whatever may be said about the merits of the typology, its categories are for the most part familiar. They are clearly as much normative as descriptive, and serve a strategic purpose. The author prizes "innovation" and "creativity," although throughout the book their characterization proves, in the author's word, "elusive" (31).
The unfamiliar categories are those of the "instrumental" and the "spectacular" scholar. "Instrumental scholars are those who are agents of dogma, agents of themselves, or agents of themselves hidden behind an agent of dogma. They do not care about truth--scientific inquiry is only a means to nonscholarly goals" (39). The "spectacular scholar," more interestingly, is someone whose work is valued for the wrong reasons, dissident Polish intellectuals, for example, who were praised in the West for their political position while their scholarship went unknown or ignored.
The charge is that scholars in this country, as well as those in Canada, Great Britain, China, and Poland, have for the most part become increasingly "instrumental" in character, thanks to the influence of American scholars and our cultural hegemony.
The typology is of some interest; it provides a mirror in which to identify ourselves, the opportunity to become if only for a moment self-conscious. The scholars interviewed have little difficulty in seeing their colleagues represented in it, although not, so far as I can make out, themselves (very possibly, they were too embarrassed to acknowledge that they were "innovators"). But of much greater interest is the charge that scholarship just about everywhere is going downhill. I want to make two comments about it.
The first comment is that Podgorecki does very little to support the charge. His book consists for the most part of obitur dicta on a great number of topics, e.g., "British social science scholars, with few exceptions, are shallow and seek mainly to make an unexpected impression" (56). No further support or elaboration of the great majority of them is provided. In those few cases where the author attempts to support his claims on other than anecdotal evidence, the support is either dated or irrelevant or both. Thus the sweeping generalization that "Currently, great scientific minds tend not to surface in the United States or in Europe; instead, they are drowned out by a variety of peculiar sociocultural movements and pseudoscientific mass movements..." is bolstered, at best indirectly, by a chance remark made by Arnold Toynbee (who died in 1975). Many of the arguments are simply non-sequiturs: "Because the new professional scholars bear the basic burden of scientific activity, they appear to be, and in consequence are, the main producers of the existing body of scientific knowledge." Where the arguments are valid, it is often in virtue of the fact that they are circular: "US (but also Canadian) scholars are mainly preoccupied with their careers. This results from the fact that what they select for their research can secure for them professional success and recognition."
There is, moreover, a major settling of scores in this book. In fascinating detail, for example, the names of those who were in Podgorecki's seminar with Jerzy Lande in Crakow between 1947 and 1952 are brought up and summarily evaluated: "Gregorz Leopold Seidler, originally not a party member, wrote two unsuccessful habilitation theses at the start of his career. When both were rejected, he became desperate and dramatically shifted his political convictions to become a party member..." (62). And on and on. It is not just that these names have little resonance for someone interested in learning about contemporary university culture (although the author's various comments about Polish academic life after the war constitute some of the most interesting pages in this book). It is also that score-settling of any kind has little to do with the traditional ideal of scholarship, for it easily gives way to ad hominem arguments.
So the treatment leaves a great deal to be desired. But the issues it raises are important ones. This leads to my second main comment. Although I correspond with scholars in all three countries, I am not in a position to judge with any accuracy what Podgorecki says about the situation in Canada, Great Britain, or Poland (about which, understandably, his comments are most detailed). My impression is that the category "instrumental scholar" (one who bends with the winds, seizing, in a sly sort of way, opportunities for advancement as they arise) is most aptly applied to a country like post-war Poland, where overt and explicit political considerations regularly intersected scholarly careers (Podgorecki gives himself high marks, apparently with some justification, for going his own way). But however far we are from embodying a scholarly ideal, I don't think many of us Americans would recognize ourselves in Podgorecki's portrait:
Because US scholars are professionally oriented [i.e., particularly in the humanities and social sciences resort to abstract formalisms and concentrate on methodological issues, thereby avoiding genuinely substantive and important questions], they arrive (by car) at their office every morning and stay for the entire working day. They keep their doors half open to show not only that they are engaged in scientific work and are (especially if they are male) behaving (eschewing affairs with students of the opposite sex), but also, above all, that their knowledge is at the disposal of their students (because fees usually are quite high, students have a right to expect their professor to be accessible). They leave their office in the late afternoon. Once home, they forget their scholarly work at the university, becoming at once absorbed in their private family life, or they might escape (from scientific work) to the cottage...for the weekend. Their home, official, and private lives are perfectly separated. This separation is generally the achievement (even before the feminist movement) of scholarly wives, who categorically demand that their husbands give time to the family. (69-70)
Typically, this passage contains no documentation but rather a numbing non-sequitur, some off-the-wall sexism, and wonderful (old) worldly disdain for American use of automobiles and American Puritanism. Surprisingly perhaps, there is also disdain for the emphasis on teaching at American colleges and universities (the result of which is that we "lighten our subjects, flatter students, and eagerly exploit any device that makes the time pass quickly" (70), and, more understandably, for the amount of administrative work that we are all expected to do "Administrative assemblies quite often constitute the high point of [the] current academic activities" of younger American scholars (Ibid.).
This alleged lack of involvement does not consort very well with Podgorecki's insistent claim that "careerism" now dominates the academic life, for advancing one's career demands incessant grant-writing and publication. But more important, I do not see myself, or more than one or two colleagues I have known over thirty years, in this description. My own personal experience says that it is simply false that our professional and private lives are sharply separated, or that we shy away from any but the most trivial sorts of questions. If our emphasis is on teaching, this in no way precludes, it in fact requires, that we keep some scholarly interests alive. And it is simply false that there has been anything like a general or local decline in the level of the scholarship practiced. When I came to MSU none of the senior professors in my department had published a book and most of them had no research program; both are now expected.
Yet, although there is little evidence of decline, many of us would have to admit that we do not lead the kinds of scholarly lives traditionally taken as ideal. Why might this be?
First, there is simply too much material being published. I cannot keep up with what is being written in even my very narrow fields of specialization, even as these fields become more and more specialized. When I am not reading, I am refereeing manuscripts for publication. There is not enough time for reflection. Mere quantity of publication is prized. College and university tenure and promotion committees should look at only the two or three pieces of work that their author values most highly, proceedings of conferences should in only very rare circumstances see print, and reviewers (including myself) should set higher standards than we do.
Second, the professoriate has expanded greatly during the last 30 years. The old image of a college professor as a person of independent means, disinterested and scholarly (and slightly maladroit) is not now true (if it ever was), and the genteel American tradition of which it was part perished forever in the Great Depression and the Second World War. This is not the highly selected and narrowly trained 2%--3% of the population who went to universities in Podgorecki's native post-war Poland and emerged from its seminars to pursue scholarly careers. At the same time, a significant element among this new group of teachers has challenged many of the basic axioms of traditional scholarship, among them the notion that the pursuit of "truth" can be in any circumstances "disinterested," and has forced a serious re-thinking of what we are about.
Third, our scholarly lives are being invaded by electronic technologies of all kinds. The first generation of it meant that we spent too much time bending over Xerox machines, copying rather than reading reflectively. The second generation of it means that we churn out too many unedited paragraphs on our word processors, entranced by the ease and speed of it all. The third generation will call into question the traditional ideal of scholarship as much as the present generation of students has. For new systems of information storage, retrieval, even combination, will, I fear, undermine both the need (and the time necessary) to read widely and the ability to remember and bring together scraps of information into some sort of coherent whole. This is not to say that scholarship will perish. But the skills we prize will inevitably be somewhat different.
In my view, the most important service we perform as teachers is to bring our students to be harder on themselves than they formerly knew how to be. We should do as much for ourselves. Few of us are the innovative or creative sorts of scholars who leave new schools of thought in our wake, and whom Podgorecki admires: this is in the nature of things. But the rest of us can try. The main difficulty at present, however, is not a lack of effort or careerism or naïveté. It is that, unsure about the validity of older ideal types, and buffeted by demands with which we were not prepared to deal, a certain number of us lack the confidence necessary to do better work. If there is among some of us an occasional tendency to escape into the routine and ordinary, its sources lie much deeper than Podgorecki might guess (1).