The Glass Bead Game

The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, "What Is Academic Freedom For?"

With all due respect, I can only say I’m glad I wasn’t in the audience. I would have expected more from a University of Chicago president on the subject of academic freedom. I would have expected him to actually say something, to embody the very academic freedom that he claims to hold so dearly instead of reciting the tired and abstract argument that academic freedom is a good thing that must be preserved. Why must university presidents wish to preserve a freedom that they’re afraid to exercise?

Apparently, academic freedom is what presidents of great universities put in a box and keep it on a shelf in the college’s dimly lit wood-paneled library with all the other ancient manuscripts gathering dust.

Apart from Chicago’s fifth president, the outspoken Robert Maynard Hutchins, whom Zimmer describes as “a powerful defender of academic freedom,” Zimmer suggests that, as a modern university president, he must refrain from speaking out on controversial subjects. Exercising academic freedom, he argues in all earnestness, would actually harm the cause of academic freedom.

We should be clear about what academic freedom really means at great modern universities. Academic freedom has been transformed from an idea about individual freedom to speak one’s mind into a business strategy of endowment-maximizing universities. And presidents of great universities exercise this sort of “academic freedom” with abandon.

Universities hide behind academic freedom as a constitutionally protected entitlement -- to which the U.S. Supreme Court has invariably deferred -- which has allowed universities to pick and chose the kinds of students whom the university claims best represents the cultural values of the institution.

Thus we get constitutionally protected admissions systems at elite universities that are namely all about merit, but have virtually nothing to do with genuine merit. Rather, our great modern universities use admission criteria that sort for certain kinds of individuals, typically affluent students from nice neighborhoods and well-educated families who’ve been endowed with the right tribal lineage.

That’s what academic freedom really means at the modern university, and university presidents, who depend on alumni parents to help build their endowments, will fight to the death to keep it.

But that’s not the kind of academic freedom that presidents of great universities like talk about. For his part, Zimmer describes the University of Chicago as a model of academic freedom for all great universities, an institution “where education and research are embedded in this culture of inquiry, where intellectual freedom is viewed as essential to open inquiry, and where we are open to all people and all perspectives that can stand the scrutiny of argument.”

These highfalutin words made me feel like I was re-reading Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi and its grandiose descriptions of the timeless and perfect Glass Bead Game. All young scholars of a certain class aspired to become the Master of the Game, ascending to Castalian society’s pinnacle of knowledge, power and prestige.

As Zimmer’s own grandiose descriptions of academic freedom go on and on, I must say, “Congratulations, Dr. Zimmer. You’ve arrived. You are Master of the Game!”

But we know the path that Hesse’s Joseph Knecht, ultimately chose. For Knecht, being the Magister Ludi wasn’t what all that it was cracked up to be. So he quit his prestigious position, despite his lifelong pursuit, and decided to go out into the messy and imperfect world where he genuinely confronted the notion of freedom -- a freedom that was not merely academic.