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  • Scholarly Truth and the Hunger for Progress
  • David Bromwich (bio)

there is a certain presumption in addressing an audience of scholars on the future of scholarship; and since my area of competence is far narrower than the range of the topic may suggest, a personal confession seems in order. I teach mainly British and American literature. Also, occasionally I teach courses in a nondepartmental humanities curriculum dealing with political thought and moral philosophy from the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. I am a critic and interpreter more than a scholar in the textual or archival sense. The probity and accuracy of my work depend on the prior work of such scholars, and for selfish as well as public-minded reasons, I want their research to go on and their support to be strengthened. But I have in mind today a broader sense of scholarship: a word that goes back to the Middle English scolere, and is associated with the compound activity of learning and teaching.

Recent books by foundation heads, education administrators, and professors have instructed us on the dominance of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines in university budgets and their disproportionate attraction for ambitious students; on the diminishment of the place of the physical library as a haunt of the learned; and on the eclipse of the liberal arts ideal by vocational training and the transmission of "skill sets" in institutions that once would have scorned such a demand.1 All these circumstances go to shape our predicament, but I am concerned rather with a question about human personality. What are the protocols of scholarship doing to the people who learn whatever skills we have to teach [End Page 531] and who become teachers in their turn? A distinct character and temper have always been required for scholarly work, and many conditions of the modern university seem to militate against the perpetuation of that character and temper. The remarks that follow, therefore, will focus on the academic environment, though I recognize a danger in conflating "scholarly knowledge" with the knowledge conveyed by universities and the people who inhabit them. Scholarship is bigger than that, of course, and harder to delimit, but universities are the institutions that matter most. In the United States, we could hardly imagine the vocation of scholarship without them.

A preliminary statement of aims for this conference alluded to "the tension between autonomy and accountability." What does this mean? The scholar possesses an individual mind, and yet the work of the scholar needs checking: what John Locke called the process of "rectification" by other minds. This is naturally done by persons well acquainted with the scholar's work—they are his or her relevant colleagues at a distance, and they may have been consulted in the course of the work itself. Such exertions of accountability are also performed, in ever more minutely calibrated ways, by a machinery of oversight that may take the form of separate advisory committees, in the divisions of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Those committees then look for guidance and rectification to external referees, who are asked to rank a given scholar's work against the background of other work to which it can be properly compared. At any of the major research universities, referees are asked to employ the measure of the hypothetical or actual world-class scholar, alongside whose typical achievements every other contribution to knowledge must be rated. For teachers in smaller liberal arts colleges, a broadly similar index is likely to be invoked, perhaps with a heavier emphasis on student evaluations.

"Every idiom has its idiot," as the novelist Peter De Vries wrote (2014, 108), and one advantage of the present system is that idiocy is decreased. Few persons who bear the name of scholar now command a distinctly uncommunicative idiom that baffles students and [End Page 532] colleagues alike. As this was a common trait of the old, embarrassing, cartoonish image of the scholar, its loss is undoubtedly our gain. A desirable sort of conformity is thereby fostered, and the regulated currency of a discipline offers assurance that an agreed-on body of knowledge is being referred to...

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