The picture painted by Carpeaux in his essay The Idea of the University and the Ideas of the Middle Classes is impressively current. The situation, moreover, has only worsened. The “regression of an elite to the condition of a mass adorned with academic titles” is a consummate phenomenon in the West. This is largely due to this tendency toward specializations, both necessary and destructive, which has pushed high culture into limbo and curtailed the possibilities for the common individual who, as soon as he gets to know himself, finds himself more often than not crushed by the empire of necessity, which today takes up such a large part of his life that it would have seemed absurd in times past for someone called “free”. Universities, in keeping with today’s trend, teach professions and make careers possible: that is what the market demands. Cultural education is no longer part of the scope of the courses, and so the student leaves secondary school today semi-literate to spend the rest of his life without hearing a single word about history or literature. Universities grow, a huge mass of people graduate, specialize, collect academic titles and gain prestige, money, recognition; “but, in general, these masses of graduates are distinguished from the illiterate only by a professional authority that makes them less useful than dangerous.” It is a disaster.
The Idea of the University and the Ideas of the Middle Classes
