Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 51

Why Intellectual Work Matters

over and receded, but a second reaction went deep like an arrow
and stuck. Like the speechless news reporters, I lost confidence
in who I was.
After that I was no longer satisfied with academic work. A curtain had been lifted at the boundaries of my life, and I understood
that my green pastures were surrounded by smoking wasteland.
I felt moved to do something, to respond to the suffering that
soaks the whole world like air or water. It took months to regain
a functional equilibrium as a graduate student, and years before I
understood what it really meant to do something.
Since then I have often seen my fellow academics (and many
others) unsettled by the magnitude of human suffering and
haunted by the same specter of uselessness. Some leave the
profession for more practical tasks; some change their academic
work to be more relevant to contemporary concerns. I call this
practical, results-driven movement "activism." It includes activism's traditional forms of advocacy and protest; but far more than
that, it is any concern that holds political or social results as the
central goal.
Activism in this broad sense rules the day in contemporary
higher education. The core purpose of the University of Texas,
according to its mission statement, is "to transform lives for the
benefit of society." Education is for the sake of "social transformation," says Harvard College-or "the improvement of the world
today," according to Yale University. Activism reaches far beyond
progressivism. Conservatives, too, use academic institutions to
wield social and political influence, and activism is often nonpartisan. Partisan politics on campus generates strong emotions, but
no one is outraged by the assumption that political and social
goods are paramount.
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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