In the past post-secondary institutions were called bastions of academic enlightenment and progress. However, there are many, including myself, who are expressing doubts over those claims.
When, as high school adolescents, we are told of university and its benefits, we are regaled with the opportunities for those curious enough to accept the challenge. We are told these institutions are places where critical thinking skills are enhanced and developed, our intellectual misconceptions skillfully challenged and modified and our intellectual, social and economic horizons expanded in all directions.
As we leave university, though, many of us express disappointment with our experience. While we realize an individual’s expectations may exceed the reality, there is a deep sense of being misled or conned. Many say that instead of having their critical thinking skills enhanced and developed, they were intellectually burnt out and their critical thinking skills bastardized.
Instead of intellectual misconceptions and notions being challenged and modified, many find their intellectual misconceptions and notions either reinforced or rejected out of hand—as being developed by a “prepubescent child with little intellectual background.” Instead of intellectual, social and economic horizons being expanded, many find their horizons being confined and narrowed until they are merely insignificant specks in the cosmic scheme of things.
What has happened to our hallowed halls of knowledge? In large part it is due to the fact that the hallowed halls of post-secondary academia have integrated too well with society.
I am not merely talking about the increasing importance of corporate and private sponsors or the heavy-handed directives of provincial bureaucrats and politicians, but the fundamental lack of independence of academic institutions from society. What happened to students who had the time and academic encouragement to express opinions that contravened social norms? What happened to the maintenance of academic freedom of expression even in the face of public criticism? What happened to academic professionals acting on their academic intuition while ignoring the social, political and economic consequences of such actions? The answer is simple. These ideals and concepts have all disappeared.
No longer are free thinkers and non-conformists finding sanctuary in post-secondary institutions. These post-secondary institutions have shunned them in favour of cash bonanzas given to those institutions willing to participate in society. They have integrated themselves into society as mass producers of human automatons for the soulless economic system, as starving research guinea pigs willing to do anything for funding and as vain individuals and organizations bent on protecting reputation for the pursuit of funding. It is a sad state of post-secondary academia at present and a worrisome one for the future.
The survival of knowledge in the past has been guarded by institutions that separated themselves from the chaos of society.
Whether it is through the dedication of industrious monks in preserving knowledge via manuscripts or the quiet contemplation of great scholars in the sanctity of academia, human knowledge has always been protected by academia while the rest of society was in upheaval.
Will that continue, though, now that academia is increasingly integrated into society? What is to be done? Obviously we cannot isolate academia from the rest of society entirely.
To do that would be to deny society and academia a shared benefit stemming from accumulated knowledge.
No, what must be done is a careful consideration of the true nature of academia.
Is its main purpose to produce human automatons for the economic system or is it to encourage intellectual enlightenment with little regard to current social convention?
Whatever we choose we must choose carefully. If we choose the wrong path, we not only risk losing thousands of young, creative intellectuals but centuries of accumulated human knowledge as well.
