1st Edition
Academia versus the World Outside Institutionalized Knowledge and Its Discontents
Academia versus the World Outside explains the givens of the knowledge industry within the ivory tower, colleges and universities. It then moves outside academia to consider this restricted world the way most people see it. The contrast between these two views of academia explains and is at the basis of a major portion of the left-right animosity of our day.
The knowledge industry, a creation of the post-Enlightenment modern age along with other industrial and post-industrial enterprises, is based on creating and adding to a store of knowledge as its own end. This makes academia alien to the more random and personal nature of knowledge acquisition in our everyday lives, as indeed every industry is alien to everyday life in the modern age. Yet most academics are so immersed in the peculiar project they have chosen as their life’s work that they are unaware of and unsympathetic to the fact that people outside live very different lives with very different presuppositions. Most non-academics, for their part, find academia strange for very good reason. Academia versus the World Outside makes this contrast and conflict clear from both directions.
This book is aimed primarily at academics, most of whom so take for granted the givens of what they do that they fail to understand why the vast majority of people outside find academia so strange and alien. This has led to an increasingly hostile and utterly predictable left-right political conflict, academia tending increasingly left and the world outside increasingly right. The goal of this book is to reduce the tension between both sides: if read by non-academics, this book may help them understand the givens of a world as strange to everyday life as any other specialized industry in the modern age.
Acknowledgements
Part I: The Problem
Chapter One: Academia’s Science Envy
Chapter Two: Meaning in Academia
Part II: Inside Academia
Chapter Three: Academia’s Imperative to Expand
Chapter Four: Metaphysical Sociology
Chapter Five: Problems of Art History
Chapter Six: Philosophy Isn’t a Discipline, and It Doesn’t Progress
Chapter Seven: Austen in the Classroom
Part II: Outside Academia
Chapter Eight: The Basis of Knowledge Is Its Opposite
Chapter Nine: Knowledge Requires People
Chapter Ten: The Everyday Normal
Chapter Eleven: What Do We Do Now?
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Bruce Fleming has taught at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, the National University of Rwanda, and, for more than thirty years, at the US Naval Academy. He is the author most recently of Democracy’s Achilles Heel: The Rocky Marriage of Relative and Absolute, The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia, What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now?, The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor, Masculinity from the Inside, and Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers.