The Scholar vs. the Professional
A conflict that plays out at UATX and elsewhere
In a recent personal conversation, economic historian Jerry Muller (who is not with UATX) raised the issue of the apparent tension at UATX between wanting students to be both scholars and doers. It occurred to me that this tension is very real, but also that it has existed for a long time in American higher education.
The Ideal of the Scholar
Traditionally, the life of the scholar was a life apart. Scholars were monks or aristocrats. Many important philosophers believed that philosophy itself—the life of the mind—was the highest form of human existence.
In this version of the ideal, the scholarly life is one of leisure, and activity is driven by curiosity. In that sense, the emergence of science in the era of the Republic of Letters was an extension of the model of the detached, leisured, curious scholar.
The Reality of the Professional
We have arrived at a world that values professionals. Stereotypically doctors and lawyers, but now including managers and technocrats.
Where scholars live in their heads, professionals function in the world. Where scholars function at leisure, professionals are always busy. Where scholars go where their curiosity takes them, professionals pursue goals that are measured, typically by the market.
The Collision on Campus
We have come to expect universities, which were formed to house scholars, to serve as training grounds for professionals. As long as I can remember, this has been a source of tension.
Humanities professors are in their comfort zone teaching people like themselves, with the aspiration to become scholars. Their actual students, who predominantly aim to be professionals, come across as transactional, anti-intellectual philistines.
The Professional Scholar: An Unfortunate Synthesis
Comedian Jim Gaffigan expresses his disappointment with fruitcake:
Fruit? Good. Cake? Good. Fruitcake? Nasty Crap.
I think that we have arrived at a similar combination in academia: the professional scholar. To me, it is nasty crap.
The professional scholar does not leisurely pursue knowledge, driven by curiosity. The professional scholar pursues career advancement, grubbing for grants and conforming to metrics of publication, promotion, and status.
As I see it, this process has lost sight of the purpose of advancing knowledge. Instead, the academic publication enterprise has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone. The professional scholar busily churns out papers in order to put on a false front of “productivity.”
The professional scholar’s relationship to the world outside of campus has become even more fraught. He has become an “activist,” demanding “justice” in a society that he deeply misunderstands. UATX was launched in reaction against that.
My Path
I can tell my own story as one of alternating between being a leisurely scholar and being an engaged professional.
As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I had plenty of time to roam the library pulling books off the shelf such as The Philosophical Implications of Contemporary Physics, even though I never took a course in physics or in the philosophy of science. But I remember being somewhat frustrated by the remote airiness of the place, and I found relief in returning to my home in suburban St. Louis to work in a factory and go to baseball games.
After a year of professional life using computers as a research assistant at agencies in Washington, I went to economics graduate school expecting to feel like a scholar. Instead, MIT subjected its students to mathematical hazing. We were in training to be professionals. I hated it, but I stuck it through.
Out of graduate school, I went back to Washington to the Fed. There I bounced between sections, some of which were scholarly and others of which were very engaged in current analysis (reading the tea leaves of economic data as releases were published) and forecasting.
When I moved to Freddie Mac in 1986, I joined a scholarly section, but I became deeply interested and engaged in enterprise issues (and in corporate soap opera). After a couple of years I left that section—I was fired, actually. I landed elsewhere in the company, becoming fully engaged as a middle-management professional, at the intersection of computer systems and the business area.
I spent the latter half of the 1990s with an Internet start-up. I did not have time for scholarly contemplation, but I encountered all sorts of stimulating ideas and issues that I pursued after the business was sold.
This century I have been occasionally tempted to get back into the professional world, but the temptation quickly goes away. And mainstream academia holds no appeal for me. By and large I have stuck to scholarship, on my own terms.
The Tension at UATX
Should students aim to be scholars, or should they aim to be professionals? UATX answers with a resounding “Both!” There is a commitment to the Great Books. There is an equal commitment to having students who are “builders,” trying to start their own businesses or exploiting the school’s connections with Austin’s tech community.
This now strikes me as a challenging synthesis to pull off. I know that there are famous business executives who read extensively. In that, they behave like scholars. But that is when they are older and well established. You are less likely to see young founders doing leisurely reading. They are too absorbed in their enterprises, too busy solving problems.
Based on my experience, perhaps UATX might think in terms of offering students paths to pursue scholarship and professional activities in series rather than in parallel. I fear that the model of “Both! At the same time!” risks short-changing each and/or resulting in burnout.
If it were me as a student, I would have been better off with more leisure time to pursue knowledge driven by curiosity. But set aside periods (summers? inter-sessions?) in which students can immerse themselves in internships or projects.
The "both" answer is actually "neither", I think. Institutions need to make choices about what to do well - it isn't possible to do everything and be everything to everyone. This is one reason accreditation has been so damaging to US higher education - it forces homogeneity when we should be encouraging heterogeneity. It would be better for UATX to skip accreditation and try something new and different (picking a lane) rather than trying to avoid making choices (which might annoy donors, faculty, etc.)
I too underwent the "mathematical hazing" at MIT (later than you) although I'd quibble that MIT was "training" us to do anything. With a few exceptions, the faculty at MIT didn't seem much interested in whether the students learned anything. By getting in, we'd presumably proven we were smart enough to figure stuff out and they were very busy people. Maybe hazing isn't the right word - it suggests intentional behavior and I felt more like the victim of a hit and run driver who hadn't seen me than someone actually out to haze!
What a delightful post. As a former academic, I fully sympathize with the dilemma. In a way, business schools attempt to do "both" by including executive-in-residence and encouraging faculty to engage in consulting in the hope they bring real world professional experience to the classroom. That doesn't negate your description of academia as a grant-chasing, mass-research producing machines where the ranking of the publication journal counts way more than ability to increase the knowledge of the students (whether they aspire to be scholars or professionals).
However, at times, the choice of subject to teach (if allowed) can bridge the gap somewhat. I created a course in competitive intelligence, which required "feet on the ground" so to speak, mashing scholarly work with practical corporate perspective. Then, when I left academia, I started an Academy for corporate managers in the art and science of competing (a subject not typically taught in a university, as it is not a classic scholarly subject). Naturally, my attempts to persuade several academic institutions to collaborate in that endeavor failed miserably. Perhaps "both" is an ambitious goal because of internal contradictions, but I keep my fingers crossed for you to succeed in UATX.