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: …
In the winter of 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche, then a classics professor still in his mid-twenties, delivered a series of lectures on the future of education in Germany . They were held in Basel, where Nietzsche was working then. When he arrived in 1869 from Leipzig to this Swiss enclave on the Rhine, he encountered … Continue reading
Shortly before his death in in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled driving across the United States as a young man. Having come of age in the austerity of postwar Britain, Judt saw much to marvel over in 1970s America. As he traveled by Buick from Boston to a job at the University of California, … Continue reading
This fall, the former ur-blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in New York Magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” There, Sullivan referenced Alan Jacobs’ article “Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction,” from our summer 2016 issue, and wrote about his addiction to information and his attempt to rediscover his humanity. The article … Continue reading
Today, to search is to google. Specifically, it is to use Google’s search engine to nd something on the Web. As for those other searches that once helped de ne the human condition—for meaning, love, purpose, or God—those have, in little more than a decade, assumed almost secondary importance. From its now almost apocryphal beginnings … Continue reading
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
