We don’t have convincing speculative histories or insightful accountings of the qualitative effects on ideas

A long and rather leaden piece, What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals? by Mark Greif, but with some nice raisins and fruit in it.

Which leaves the question of the university. The economics of higher education in the contemporary moment may be bad for many of us—teachers, students, and temporary passers-through. But, again—this should not be a priori bad for public intellect or public debate. Quite the opposite. A large pool of disgruntled free-thinking people who are not actually starving, gathered in many local physical centers, whose vocation leads them to amass an enormous quantity of knowledge and skill in disputation, and who possess 24-hour access to research libraries, might be the most publicly argumentative the world has known.

And yet the philosophical and moral effect of "universitization" remains, I think, the most poorly explained phenomenon of intellect from the late decades of the 20th century up till now. I don’t mean that we don’t know the demographic shifts or historical causes, ever since the GI Bill. We have enough statistics. I mean that we don’t have convincing speculative histories or insightful accountings of the qualitative effects on ideas.

Confusingly, the "universitization of intellect" names overlapping changes. The most important yet underappreciated was the process by which nearly all future writers of every social class came to pass through college toward the bachelor’s degree. Another was the progress by which more writers, including journalists, reviewers, poets, and novelists, as well as critics and historians and social scientists, drew parts of their livelihood from periodic university teaching, whether they were tenured professors or not. (This had clearly begun already by the "golden age" of public intellect, in the 1940s to 1960s, as I’ve suggested.) The third, a corollary, was the vocational integration in which formerly independent literary arts (fiction, poetry, even cultural criticism) came to be taught as for-credit courses and degree-granting programs—with a credentialing spiral whereby newly minted critics and intellectuals needed to have taken those courses and degrees in order to pay rent by teaching them.

This phenomenon has puzzled me for years now. We have so many more people, in absolute terms as well as percentages, so much more education, and so much more economic security than even fifty years ago, much less a hundred years ago, and yet somehow we don't seem to be making commiserate intellectual leaps and make comparable discoveries. I have long explained this to myself as a product of the ever greater subdivision of knowledge and to the exploratory S-curve. With greater specialization, perhaps the advances are being made, it is just harder for the generalist to see them. With the S-curve, the speculation is that we have already climbed the steep spine and now have entered the area where there are decreasing returns on effort.

Greif seems to be identifying another factor. As we have corralled our intelligentsia out of the diverse life experiences that they had in the past and into the hot houses of universities, perhaps we have lost both variety and rigor in our hypotheses and ideas. It rings true. Academics have long been famed for their obtuseness as captured by George Orwell (a public intellectual of extraordinary shelf-life) in Notes on Nationalism, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool" or by Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development, "This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them."

The meme of academic absurdity is long standing and well founded and well founded with good reason. We want universities to be the places where new ideas are tried out, tested, argued, advocated and rejected. And as with any other innovative endeavor, whether it be new sodas, new clothes, new music, new technology: the yield of useful to the absurd will always be low. The issue is not that universities cultivate absurd and even dangerous ideas. I think Greif is on to something else. Universities now do that as they did of old, but with two dangerous changes. First, the absurd ideas do not get challenged, tested and discarded - instead they are sheltered and protected from debate until they become dangerous. Second, the ideas are boring. Our academics lead too sheltered lives with too little varied experience and therefore their ideas are stunted, shriveled things, flinching from the sunlight.