Foster Leaders To Share Their Knowledge
Did you see the news item about Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. selling his Web site, Africana.com, to Time Warner? It set me to thinking about relations between academe and the rest of us.
It seems that “people familiar with the deal,” according to The Wall Street Journal, say that Gates - a Harvard professor - will garner a cool million from this transaction. But not every colleague is happy for him. As the Journal put it, “The sale may raise some eyebrows at Harvard and elsewhere in academia, which is struggling to balance scholarly pursuits with the entrepreneurialism of Internet-inspired faculty.”
No doubt some of the unsettlement is over academe’s increasing intertwining with profit-making. We want our universities pursuing knowledge for its own sake, not just knowledge that pays. But I sense another kind of purity here, too, a purity that holds that academics shouldn’t dirty their hands too much outside the ivied walls, or care how many people read or see their work.
Skip Gates operates differently. He gets out his word - on TV, the Web, magazines, newspapers and books. Gates started out as a journalist, for Time magazine in London. So there’s a certain coming-around to this deal. But it’s not a coming-around academe admires. I remember, during a mid-career year at Harvard in 1985, that some of my professors had published an arms-control book that was selling well. Yet, internally, the reception was cool: If so many people wanted to read this book, could it really be worth anything?
Just after the Gates story, a piece ran in The New York Times on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, retiring after four terms as senator from New York. Moynihan passes very well for an intellectual here in Washington. The Almanac of American Politics calls him “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.”
But the Times has now set us straight. Praise has been piling upon praise for Moynihan. Which means, for the Times, if for few others, that “as the tributes to a long and successful political career pour in, the question arises: How does Mr. Moynihan stack up as a scholar? What is his reputation among his academic peers?” The verdict could hardly be worse: When he arrived at Harvard in 1966, “He was viewed by many people as little more than a journalist.”
I’ll admit there’s a lot to be said for scholarship, for pure research, for probing the deepest veins of learning. Having recently joined a journalism school faculty myself, I’m all the more aware of that.
But getting some of the fruits out to people is worth something. So along comes a smart fellow like Gates, founding a Web site full of interesting comment and news, aiming to become the dominant portal for blacks worldwide, and likely now to bring lots of black readers to AOL after it merges with Time Warner. Or, take a remarkable character like Moynihan, diverting his eloquence toward the parched earth of public discourse, which has been a blessing indeed. Compared to, say, a more fastidious exercise of statistical methods, I’d say they’ve done all right.
The academic delicacy about being too much in the world seems particularly unfortunate when it extends to university presidents. These “captains of erudition,” as the 19th-century economist Thorsten Veblen called them, seem ever more inward-looking.
I recently reread a report on the nation’s media, published in 1947, familiarly known as the Hutchins Commission report after the man who led it: Robert Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago. The report was controversial and (to me) flawed because the commission included no members of the media. Yet it was a remarkable undertaking - and particularly remarkable in that a university president led it. When, on issues of similar consequence, do we nationally hear university leaders’ voices today?
To be fair, the inward-looking quality is characteristic not just of academe, but of health care, the law, even our religious institutions - and certainly of the journalism world. We’re all so driven by marketing and financial concerns that taking stances on big issues is a luxury we have little time for. Besides, it might be costly. Then, too, as Princeton’s President Harold Shapiro notes, the more vocal and better-known presidents of yore headed far smaller and simpler institutions. “Today’s American university president in our public imagination does not choose or cannot afford to be the philosopher king of his or her institution, let alone the society at large.”
However sound that explanation, we’re sorely missing strong leaders’ voices. Here’s wishing the academy might find ways to value those who make theirs heard more broadly.