On Intellectuals

494 PAUL ROAZEN PAUL ROAZEN On Intellectuals I cannot imagine most of the greatest figures in modern social philosophy functioning at all well in any university setting. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Marx all did nicely without university affiliations. And Sigmund Freud, the thinker whose career I know best, never got beyond a marginal position at the University of Vienna, and devised other means for exerting the influence of his teachings. So I see no sound reason why we should expect that really important and original work should necessarily arise within an academic context. If one confines attention to the most recent period and discusses what has happened over the last generation to alter the gulf between the educated public and university intellectuals, it seems far too early to make any secure judgments. The appearance of Allan Bloom's best-selling The Closing of the American Mind cannot be taken to mean that the so-called decline of the public intellectual has been reversed. Yet it would surely be wrong to think that only left-wing writers are entitled to have their popular successes applauded. John K. Galbraith was widely known within academic life before he published The Affluent Society, but only immediately thereafter did he succeed on a genuinelybroad public stage. It is notoriously hard to generalize about something as unexpected and mysterious as the flowering of talent. For myself, I see no reason why anyone should expect that social prophecy, for example, will emanate from a university context. James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was read as avidly among my friends in graduate school as I like to imagine Tom Paine's Common Sense was in the late eighteenth century. Yet Baldwin and Paine would both have been out of place within an academic setting. I believe that there should be a gap between what goes on in universities and in the general society as a whole. I see no reason why our higher learning should be watered down to the lowest common denominator . We do our students a great disservice when we transform our universities into training centres for life. Secondary education in the high schools has fallen down on its educational job precisely because of too great an eagerness to satisfy the immediate and practical demands of so-called relevance. The upshot has been that we have cheated people out of a unique opportunity to detach themselves from their parochial cultural backgrounds. A university should ideally give a precious breathing space, a time when, for a few shortyears, itbecomes possible to come in contact with the best that has been said and thought in at least Western culture. So I am in favour of the old ideal of the ivory tower. Under today's circumstances, such a project is not easily viable, but still I think that we have to do the best we can. Our Canadian university UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 495 admissions policies, whatever the changing (but essentially meaningless) grade-averages required, amount to open enrolment. So we are not so much attaching students to the great traditions of Western thought as we are socializing them into contemporary North American society. New immigrant groups are eager to send their children to us; and although we may have been trained in tackling the greatest issues of human thought, we end up, in practice, teaching the elementary rules of reading and writing. The functions of universities have been transformed in the course of this century, and the results are by no means automatically for the better. My hunch would be that sixty or seventy years ago the students who graduated from a few of the best high schools were better educated than most of today's university graduates. As institutions, universities nowadays provide democratic services that they never were expected to fulfil; but the often intellectually demoralizing university milieu is not especially conducive to preparing us as writers to reach out to the largest problems of society as a whole. Universities do, still, offer their faculties both salaries and abundant free time, and for that we should be immensely grateful. It is also a...