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Academia and academics - form, function

11:48 / 06.08.02

Prompted by the news that dear old Simon Schama has pulled in £3m from a cross-media deal - following on from David Starkey's £2m for his Channel 4 series - which is considerably more than your average academic could hope to earn in a lifetime (certainly in Britain, where remuneration is notoriously poor).

Now, these two are obviously able to command that kind of money because they are not only reputable historians but charismatic enough to present well to a non-academic audience - rather like AJP Taylor, only with a bit more padding to fill in the longueurs. And, as academics who are able to cross those turbulent waters, they are no doubt well worth it - to their publishers as much as to the wider public.

But, if the rest of academia - and there is a very great deal of academic history out there, and a very great many specialist historians - does not do this, what is its function? Does it exist purely to teach, and if so why is this felt to be necessary? Is the necessity perhaps based on social divisions, or on economic factors? Is there a purpose to academia other than the education of a proportion of the population, and if so what?

My personal feeling is that it is rooted in the 19th century idea of the liberal education (hello, Matthew Arnold) and that perhaps this is why the function of the university and of academia seems rather ill-determined - we are still not sure whether higher education is a good in itself, or whether it exists to provide people with a specific advantage for the life thereafter.

Thoughts?

12:18 / 06.08.02

Practical: Production of Penguin paperbacks.

Theoretical: Universities as meme-farms (or meme-zoos) for specialized memes that would not survive in a non-academic environment.

12:30 / 06.08.02

Universities are extremely important as storehouses of knowledge. Allied to this need to maintain a knowledge of the past, is the need for further study into this knowledge, both in discovering new things, and re-interpreting previous discoveries.

Even if higher education were to diminish in popularity, I would still see the need for academics to be maintaining and processing these stores of information, as a necessary task. Like garbage collecting, it is a job that needs to be done for the benefit of society, and I find criticism of academia for being separate from "the world" to be one big yawn, quite frankly. It is part and parcel of the job being done there, that it be separate from political agendas or (what an over-used term is this) "practical" concerns.

The Ivory Tower syndrome may lead to a bit of up-one's-own-arsedness, but I think that's a small and inevitable price to pay if we are to have these storehouses.

12:40 / 06.08.02

Yes, I agree that universities are not simply storehouses of knowledge, but also have a clearing house function, in that hypotheses, arguments, claims are tested and settled, and the resulting information distributed.

13:28 / 06.08.02

Please excuse epigrammatic quality of previous post, I was in a rush (and now am sneaking in a post at work.) I meant more in the line of what Loomis and Cavatina said. I.e., zoos are not just storehouses of animals, but also devoted to the study and preservation of the same.

Goodness Gracious Meme

13:37 / 06.08.02

I think another point worth mentioning here is that academia, as i've experienced it, certainly isn't all about the teaching, or indeed, much about the teaching.

Was talking to someone about this the other day; academics in the UK system at least, get little or no teacher training, and are not hired on basis of teaching ability. They're hired on the basis of this notion of academia as storehouse of knowledge, as the people most likely to extend, critique and generally progress this storehouse.

Teaching is often a neccessary evil to academics, it's what they do in order to be allowed to do their proper work... this isn't to say that there aren't some damn good teachers out there, just that a love of and talent in an area is not at all concurrent with a desire to teach it.

Tryphena Absent

22:08 / 06.08.02

I'd support the idea that universities are storehouses of knowledge but would also like to throw in the concept of research. Certainly British and North American universities spend a lot of time examining things and trying to further thought within certain areas. They reevaluate the data that we already have to hand and view it in ways that are different and original. Reading the Daily Mail you find political ideas that stem directly from C19th liberalism and I'm sure that in 100 years you'll get much the same kind of information passed around in similar ways, that info will be a result of what some popular academic is saying now.

14:04 / 11.08.02

I read something about this recently. The idea was that as universities become more vocationally "skills" orientated they are just performing training that should be carried out by business itself.
To cut costs business lobbies for increased voational training in universities while at the same time paying as little tax as possible to fund them. So one role of a university might be a cheap, publicly funded means to provide trained workers for private firms and private profit.