OxBlog

# Posted 5:05 AM by Patrick Belton

WHERE HAVE ALL THE INTELLECTUALS GONE? Frank Furedi poses the question with a book by that name (Continuum, 176pp), and Terry Eagleton's review is an admirable read. Some snippets:

• In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word "intellectual" is a job description, not a commendation.

• One mark of the classical intellectual (more recently dubbed a "theorist") was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole. In this sense, Polly Toynbee is an intellectual but most Oxbridge dons are not. In fact, a snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic".

• A society obsessed with the knowledge economy, Furedi argues, is oddly wary of knowledge. This is because truth is no longer precious for its own sake. Indeed, the idea of doing something just for the hell of it has always put the wind up philistine utilitarians... At an earlier stage of capitalism, knowledge was not so vital for economic production; once it becomes so, it turns into a commodity.... Now, knowledge is valuable only when it can be used as an instrument for something else: social cohesion, political control, economic production.

• "Student-centred learning" assumes that the student's "personal experience" is to be revered rather than challenged. People are to be comforted rather than confronted.

• In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service... Meanwhile, libraries try frantically not to look like libraries, or to let slip intimidatingly elitist words such as "book".

Furedi makes the courageous case, against the cultural move away from challenging standards and toward warm fuzzies, that excellence and popular participation are not bound to be opposites, and that paternalism and condescension weigh instead on the side of the ledger sheet of those who claim they are. Both Furedi and Eagleton are well worth reading.

(0) opinions -- Add your opinion