Don't end the university as we know it

Two weekends ago, in that short period of blazing heat that followed days of cold April showers, I was in New Haven at a conference titled “Greek, Latin and Indo-European Poetry.” Since thinking about ancient literature is how I choose to occupy much of my time, being indoors for hours on end was not for me the hardship you might think. But it evidently was not a hardship for a lot of others either since more than sixty people, many of them students, attended the meeting, asked questions and participated late into the night in the general intellectual excitement and social merriment that characterizes all good academic events.

Among the dozen scholars who delivered papers were some of the most distinguished historical linguists and classical philologists of our time, including two who taught me when I was an undergraduate at Yale. These are people who have repeatedly made major contributions to the two things the university is most about: knowledge and analysis. It is a special, if at some level frightening, pleasure to return to one’s alma mater as a professor, especially in such heady company. But even better than this — aside from the intimations of middle age — is participating actively in the march of generations: watching the transformation of one’s own students into colleagues. Indeed, a whole number of participants in this bulldoggish event are at heart tigers, Princetonians who not long ago took classes with me in East Pyne: Jay Fisher GS ’06 and Pauline Le Ven GS ’08 are now on the Yale faculty, and Christopher Simon ’04, a graduate student at Yale, gave a talk whose roots lie in the very fine senior thesis he wrote under my direction. In addition, three current Princeton students came along — as did a senior at the University of Chicago who is entering our graduate program in Classics in the fall.

All of this is to say that when I got back to New Jersey, I was feeling rather good about the state of the profession. The next morning, however, what should appear in the New York Times but an op-ed piece with the following imperative as its headline: “End the University as we Know it.” Written by the chairman of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, Mark Taylor, this infuriating piece, largely about the graduate experience (the subject of Tony Grafton’s column that same day in a different newspaper) and largely about the humanities, quickly received 437 online comments before the thread was closed and has been a regular topic of conversation this week among colleagues and students alike. There is no way in a few hundred words to take apart Taylor’s argument, whose essence is that the whole idea of the university needs to be rethought, from curricular structure to tenure via the encouragement of video games at the expense of “traditional papers.” But there is space for a couple of points.

First of all — this may be a minor matter in the larger scheme of things, but it sticks in my craw — if you are a tenured professor, you should under no circumstances be making fun of some poor, and no doubt identifiable, graduate student in America’s newspaper of record: “A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations,” an example of work that, Taylor implies, is “irrelevant for genuinely important problems.” Furthermore (and this is not a minor point), “relevance” is notoriously hard to assess except in hindsight, and it is not difficult to argue that small advances in knowledge and analysis that stand the test of time are worth a whole lot more than grand claims that make a splash and then sink without trace. It is worth keeping in mind that Duns Scotus, who died 701 years ago, remains a significant model of philosophical argumentation; whether Jacques Derrida will still be a name in the year 2710 is anyone’s guess, and I would not expect anybody to predict a long shelf life for such works as “Altarity,” in which, according to the back cover, Taylor “develops a genealogy of otherness and difference that is based on the principle of creative juxtaposition.” And this is to say nothing about the likelihood that someone without specialist archival equipment will even be able to view Taylor’s 1997 interactive CD-ROM “The Réal — Las Vegas, Nevada” just a generation or two from now.

I don’t pretend that anyone will remember me either outside some stray citations, but at least I don’t go around gratuitously insulting other people’s doctoral advisees. Let’s wish the student of Duns Scotus well.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, the Director of the Program in Linguistics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.