Fragments
Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys), The View from the Bridge (1996):
In principle, I do not mind the idea of a reform in Higher Education, however drastic it might be; what I do mind is the intellectual muddle and confusion. We obstinately insist on calling 'universities' institutions that correspond less and less to what is normally meant by this name.
The University increasingly resembles the cardboard theatrical props that were used on Elizabethan stage, or in Peking Opera, and on which was written in big characters: 'THIS IS A CASTLE' or 'THIS IS A FOREST'—it amounts to little more than a symbolic signboard: 'THIS IS A UNIVERSITY'.
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Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943):
Experience soon showed that a few generations of lax and unscrupulous intellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict serious harm on practical life. Competence and responsibility had grown increasingly rare in all the higher professions, including even those concerned with technology…
People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization—technology, industry, commerce, and so on—also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.
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Max Weber, ‘The Bernhard Case’ (1908):
The price to be paid for any concessions by the faculties to inappropriate proposals, and in particular for any deviation from the principle of gaining as many highly qualified academic staff as humanly possible, will ultimately be the weakening of the moral authority of the faculties themselves. And of course the consequences of this will not be limited to cases like the present one.
Instead, for the foreseeable future their fate is likely to be in the hands of “operators,” who may be friendly enough on a personal level, but are frighteningly ingratiating and petty. These are people through whose influence a “climate” is constantly created for the rise of academic “operators” that meet their requirements, in accordance with the law that one mediocrity in a faculty never fails to attract others. … in “cases” such as this the only choice they have will be the form in which they make the best of a bad situation. As a result of the weakening of their moral authority, for which they have only themselves to blame, they cannot offer any real resistance that would carry weight either with the public or the government. Another relevant factor is that more and more members of the universities are perfectly happy with this state of affairs.
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Friedrich Schiller, ‘What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History?’ (1789):
The course of studies which the scholar who feeds on bread alone sets himself, is very different from that of the philosophical mind. The former, who, for all his diligence, is interested merely in fulfilling the conditions under which he can perform a vocation and enjoy its advantages, who activates the powers of his mind only thereby to improve his material conditions and to satisfy a narrow-minded thirst for fame, such a person has no concern upon entering his academic career, more important than distinguishing most carefully those sciences which he calls 'studies for bread,' from all the rest, which delight the mind for their own sake.
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Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (1931-21):
And it is always the adherent of the smaller value-system who slays the adherent of the larger system that is breaking up; it is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the role of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.