When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted, he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “technical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.” The real power of these technical means lay not in the techniques and technologies themselves but in the disposition of those who used them, …
In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his sense of purpose. The genius of such thinkers …
Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about …
Recently, a broad literature has chronicled, diagnosed, and attempted to solve what many have referred to as a “crisis” in higher education. Some authors tie the purported crisis to an out- of-touch faculty or lackadaisical students, while others blame a conservative or liberal political culture or the public’s general distrust of univer- sities. Amidst all …
LAST YEAR THE ECONOMIST PUBLISHED A special report not on the global financial crisis or the polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Article after article cited one big number after another to bolster the claim that we live in an age of information super- abundance. The data are impressive: …
For critics on the political left and right, the contemporary and increasingly data-driven university has become a bureaucratic behemoth, a rational system that expunges the personal and particular in favor of the quantifiable and universal. Consider here in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework and its accounting of over 191,150 “research outputs” in the past … Continue reading
I am happy to announce that a new collaboration with Andrew Piper’s .txtLab and Mohamed Cheriet’s Synrchomedia Lab has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project is called “The Visibility of Knowledge: The Computational Study of Scientific Illustration in the Nineteenth Century.” Our aim is to study how scientific knowledge became visible to readers … Continue reading
What today’s critics of the university get right…and wrong. Since at least the nineteenth century, research universities from Berlin to Baltimore have been indispensable institutions. They have conserved, created, and circulated knowledge not just for the specialized scholars within their ivied and bricked walls but also for the communities outside them. Research universities authorized and … Continue reading
Of the power of art, history, and philosophy to change us there are few instances more straightforward than Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which a confrontation with classical sculpture ends with the injunction, “You must change your life.” It might seem, at first, a short step from that stern command to branding Rilke’s … Continue reading
To search is to google––to use Google’s search engine to find something on the Web. The search for meaning, love, purpose, or God––search as an existential feature of being human––has, in little more than a decade, been reduced to a secondary meaning. [I delivered various versions of this talk this past fall and spring at … Continue reading
One of America’s unsung rites of spring is National Humanities Advocacy Day. In mid-March, humanities professors from around the country travel to Washington, DC, not to gaze at masterpieces in the National Gallery, but to make the case for their field on the Hill. These learned lobbyists spend a day in the (outer) offices of … Continue reading
On Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, announced that President Teresa Sullivan and the board had “mutually agreed” that Sullivan would resign. Citing a “rapidly changing” higher education environment, Dragas insisted that the university had to change, and fast. In the ensuing weeks, Dragas alluded to … Continue reading
