Academia.pdf

Academia One of the things I loved most when I was a young doctoral student was my books. I’m not saying they were the only things I loved, but that they held a special place in my life. The couch and the bookshelf were always placed in close proximity. I always felt happy to be surrounded by the books I loved. Over the years I built a small library. I remember that our family’s various moves from one abode to another always required boxing dozens of books. These books have traveled with me across continents. Indeed, there are many on my shelf that have done multiple crossings! I look around me now and I see that they are still there. I feel grateful to them. Some are like guideposts along a path, others are like remote lighthouses, others have fallen into disuse, or silence. If I could think of a phrase that encapsulates my love for these books, I would choose Jean Leclercq’s marvelous expression, “the love of learning and the desire for God.” Today, I am much less sure that academia is a place for love or learning or desire. It seems much more constrained by rankings, commercialization, convention. After the birth of his daughter, Brazilian poet, Rubem Alves, wrote of his own disenchantment with academia: “I broke with the academic style because I decided that life was very short, very mysterious, and I didn’t have time to waste with academics. I would only say things in the most honest manner. If people like it, fine. If not, I can’t help that. Today I couldn’t write academically even if I wanted to.” (42) He bemoaned the fact that within academic circles, the great questions and mysteries of life became little more than clever “trapezes where intellectual virtuosities were performed.” Moreover, academic writing was tightly constrained within the conventions of specific disciplines, such that mastering and dominating one’s chosen segment of knowledge was considered “scholarship.” Alves broke free from a world of academia that he perceived as hollow, pretentious and lacking real relevance. Academia – especially in the humanities – had lost its flesh and become little more than dry bones. I confess that the world of “academic freedom” no longer feels like a world of freedom to me. While I understand that many human endeavours are bound by certain prescriptions, I’ve always been attracted to the idea that places of learning should enjoy some freedom or non-attachment to convention or standards. The virtue of academic freedom exists not for itself, but in order to allow the invention or discovery or expression of new thought. When the “academy” begins to feel like a prison, it is inevitable that the free spirit of inquiry will escape, leaving the bars behind for the open fields of wonder and discovery.