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What they won't teach you at university

The danger of group-think academics

Issue 95, 9th March 2021
| Research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.
1,302 words
Read time: approx. 7 mins

The university system has a vice-hold grip on what we consider ‘true’. However, academia has for a long time only served a materialistic picture of the universe, and so ‘truth’ really just means ‘scientific materialism’. This state of play is kept going in universities by a culture of group-think, dogma and disenchantment – where student well-being is left by the waste side, writes Jules Evans.

 

‘Esalen existed in the liminal space between academia and the counterculture.’

So reads a line in Jeffrey Kripal’s history of Esalen, where he’s the director of the Centre for Research. It made me think of my own relationship to academia.

Esalen is a place in Big Sur, California, set up in 1962, which offers week and weekend-long courses, mainly in personal growth. It is like an alternative college, exploring topics that academia was scared to touch (ecstatic experiences, psychedelics, alternative medicine etc), but also exploring new ways of knowing, beyond the lecture format, like the encounter session, the trip. Why did it require a non-academic college to explore these ideas?

Academia has a kind of vice-hold on western culture, and on what is designated ‘truth’. It has one dominant mind-set — rational-intellectual and resolutely secular; one main method of learning — the lecture; and one main method of evaluation — the exam. Its culture was defined by the sociologist Max Weber, in his very influential lecture of 1917, ‘Science as a Vocation’.

Weber insisted that academia must be committed to the search for objective rational truth. It must have no other values than that. It must resist the temptation to serve other gods, such as happiness or wisdom. The lecture room must not become a church pulpit, he insisted.

This defence of the objectivity of academia sounds heroic but was in fact profoundly disingenuous. Academic culture is not a ‘view from nowhere’. Weber was deeply committed to one view, one ideology — secular naturalism — and he envisaged academics as foot-soldiers for the advance of this ideology. Academia is, for him, a machine for disenchantment. That dogma academics are very much encouraged and expected to preach. In fact, it is so all-encompassing it is simply taken for granted.

Academia has a kind of vice-hold on western culture, and on what is designated ‘truth'.

Jules Evans
Issue 95, 9th March 2021

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