On The Invisible Brink: The Upper Limits of the Pageant to Principle Ratio in Twenty-First Century University Settings – Contemporary Currents, First Principles, and Institutional Constraints

After approximately one thousand years of revered and vital institutional independence, the intellectual mandate designed to guarantee the integrity of university-sponsored learning is presently under siege as never before. Unique at this twenty-first-century juncture is an unanticipated, often insidious adversary: the infiltration of rapid-fire, fashion-conscious trends emanating from mass market initiatives, in conjunction with the latest tech profit models and their affiliated reverberations now coursing daily across the globe. It is of course absurd to dispute the necessity that university life keep in step with the times; nor can either the tower or the fortress successfully ward off energies that defy all visible concrete boundaries and eschew all grand structures composed of brick and mortar. By definition, however, the academic institution is a locus of introversion, reflection, and refuge; a place programmatically shielded from perpetual distractions, and thus, an institutional antidote to the white noise of the world, in the name of personal discipline and academic achievement. If, therefore, in this unprecedented environment, higher education is to continue to live up to its celebrated guarantees, the university as an intellectual ecosystem must tread lightly in the face of mimetic temptation. All institutions are in fact not created equal and do not exist for purposes that should be judged on a par. Inasmuch as non-academic institutional formulas have by now introduced a conspicuous number of popular, albeit, unsustainable trends inimical to intellectual creativity, the problem at hand is that in the absence of analysis and foresight such trends are likely to be identified as unsustainable only after they have damaged or actually overturned fundamental and systemic university mandates. By default, once that happens, sustainability is a prospect, yet only at the expense of the foundation mandates themselves. It is accordingly worth considering whether institutions devoted to higher education should attempt to achieve isomorphic parity with the broad spectrum of corporate institutions at large. The consequences of doing so, in any case, need to be anticipated and boldly laid out with the aim of forestalling policy choices that ultimately put the torch to academic first principles. In such contexts, a proud laissez-faire posture may not long suffice as a robust enough strategy to protect and preserve the onetime monastic European tradition of in depth thoroughgoing Humanistic education. Meanwhile, specialization – the popularly heralded substitute – may yet prove sorely inadequate to prepare individuals for the most challenging aspects of the contemporary unknown. Once institutional systems have departed significantly from their original stated mission, it is au current to support their continued existence at a mere fraction of their declared valuation, all the while pumping up their presumptive authority as a means to conceal widespread internal malfunction and promote a normative ethos ensuring business as usual. Consequently, in such cases, as time goes on, a chasm develops cleaving mandate from actuality, purpose from policy, ceremony from substance, aim from outcome; in summation, integral causes from their intended effects. At issue is what road is to be taken from here for institutions defined as purveyors of knowledge. The point being that knowledge itself is not equipped to play dead in the face of extreme and manifest paradox any more than intellectual creativity can compete on par with the general run of non-academic foundation precepts.