Mad Tract

Mammon, Saviour of Athens

“It’s something like the priesthood now,” my then tutor said a while ago, adjusting her cassock. She had heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and consequently wanted to enact a chat, and, I assume, a sanity check. For myself, I’ve always heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and rarely paid them overmuch attention.

“I mean,” she continued, “do you know what you want to do, what it is? It requires a sort of cold, full-on dedication now, of course. The gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist anymore.”

The chick had, naturally, got to the node of the matter. I’m aware that the gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist, that we’ve gone from Sliggers (see prior article) to sloggers, but I am young and foolish and, in my moments of reconciling myself to the Worship of Athena, I do like to think I could help to reverse that process.

In this article I will try and articulate how, by musing on what the academy was, what it is, and what it might become, in two more or less frightening versions of the future: in one of which I am a distinguished professor and probably the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, while in the other I have settled for becoming a strolling player, or something, and have not implemented my Plan to Save the Eggheads.

So we begin with what Athens was: et in Arcadia Minoo: the past world my tutor, correctly, intuited I am liable to sentimentalise. William Empson is lounging in bed with a couple of lady-boys and a Sheffield lecturer. CS Lewis is recovering from a hard evensong with the help of hot toddy. It is a golden morning, and a few golden minds are writing about the Golden Age of English Literature: “an age synonymous with the glory of two words, Aristocracy, and England” (thanks, CS). What distinguishes such a milieu? There are very few people there; some are extremely clever, and some are just the Earl of Colfax’s favourite nephew (see Trinity, ITV, out now on DVD). Very few of them are girls, partly because debutantes still exist (so that’s my ex-tutor catered for, I suppose). What is going for this age, other than the dress sense? It is this: the operation of a very powerful internal shame ethic. When one writes, one must write well what can be read well. Criticism is a kind of literature, not a sort of riot police force maintained by the taxpayer to curb literature’s excesses.

Only by our own era, of course, criticism – like every other arena of academic study – has become exactly that – a poor creature, bloated then straitjacketed by taxes, funded, and restricted, at every level. It is a historical period that is about to suffer, with the desolation of the higher education budget, intense withdrawal systems, but it has already done its damage. Scholars, no less than their gaily debt-gathering pupils, float about on mysterious money about which they know little and care nothing – on the academic level, unlike the undergraduate one, this ethereal benevolence does not come back to claim them in the form of debt. The fact is that very generous cumulative public funding makes the question of demand irrelevant to the publication of academic works. When academics could be trusted to enforce the laws of taste instead, the gap in necessary discriminatory control was filled.

When literary merit – which I would define, in the sphere of criticism, as a style obedient to the diktats of beauty and of clarity – became unfashionable, a curious situation was produced. The taxpayer was now supporting at the country’s universities a class of teachers to produce and publish work which could not conceivably interest him or her; jargonical, marginal, aggressively priced and pompously expressed.

It will be objected perhaps that I speak of the “literary” and the “critical” and yet apply my apparent disillusionment to all disciplines, including the sciences. I believe that the point self-evidently stands; it’s just that the cancer of elitist inexplicability, only in progress in the arts, subsumed the sciences rather longer ago. Science is fascinating and powerful, but there is a reason it is not the queen of dinner party discourse – the scientific community, well within recorded memory, decided, patchily then eventually conventionally, that an attractive writing style was, in their portfolio, a dispensable skill; so, to give energy to higher priorities, they dispensed with it. Rebels exist – Richard Dawkins’s maddest diatribes should and will still be read by a general public, because he is an excellent writer – but theirs is not the usual way.

In the context of the sciences this development is regrettable, as their skills become underappreciated and ever less competently taught at school level, laymen becoming, and staying, repelled by science very early on. But in the context of the arts, the abandonment of communication and elegance is more than this, it is – in a variety of thought where utilitarian value should not be of paramount importance – completely debilitating. Arts academics in the absence of taste become distinguished on the grounds of industry and originality. Industry means they put a lot of stuff on paper or maybe the internet, originality means they invert fashions and privilege the obscure over the good. A computer programme could fulfil all these functions; at times the last Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was, I recall, on the point of suggesting that it should do.

Here is my planned healing process; it comes in a simple step and later a more drastic one. First, it is not very hard to write interestingly and clearly, although when one is angry one tends to get a bit more interesting and a lot less clear; I apologise for the operation of that process within this article. Anyway, the scientists jettisoned, the humanities are jettisoning, the belles lettres because they developed a perception that style distracted energy from more important things. It doesn’t. Lucidity actually makes work easier to write as well as to read. Freud, Jung, Einstein and Rutherford were lucid. In the quasi-artistic worlds of political science and philosophy, Macchiavelli or Bertrand Russell have many lessons to teach to the aesthete. The tribe of academics at work on non-books for non-audiences, or as they would put it “monographs for supervisors”, are thereby leading harder and unhappier lives as a result of their doctrinaire idleness about style.

However, the regrafting of taste on a voluntary basis is unfortunately likely to be quite a slow process. I suggest that we, as a nation, encourage its secure advancement by, in the meantime, privatising all universities presses, thereby requiring every academic to seek some sort of commercial publisher. The internet would still exist as an output for the most doggedly vital, and yet commercially unattractive, research; the most recalcitrant biologists could cure malaria quietly on a nice blog somewhere; but they could abusing bookshelves while they were about it: unless of course they felt like expressing themselves in a way that would truly edify the public, incidentally repaying the debt they owed that public for their own education and careers.

The effects of this course of action would be alarming, especially in such an unruffled milieu as our beloved Oxford, but I believe ultimately beneficial. Supervisors and senior tutors would have to recommence rating and promoting their colleagues on quality in a general rather than a specialised sense. The university and the strange lands outwith it would begin to reflect each other a little more.

For the strange thing is that the legendary breed of jovial ivory tower dwellers, Lewises, Empsons, Trevor-Ropers, Bayleys, were actually more realistic, fleshly beings than the anaemic spectres who occupy their posts today. In the names of modernity, contemporaneity, originality and research rigour, academics today have firmly turned the ivory key; and if they do not have recourse to the Dinshaw Doctrine (they won’t, by the way), they may be turning it for the last time. In the post-Credit Crunch Crumpet landscape, the pillowing public money proved evanescent, the student debt powerfully unattractive to the young, and the intellectually enthusiastic sane enough to go anywhere but academia, I don’t see how the academy can retain any kind of primacy in education and interpretation. I don’t know whether the new priesthood will be teachers or TV personalities, but they won’t be hons, dons and smoking MA Oxons.

At a recent meeting of the Stubbs Society Sir Keith Thomas recently lamented the likely future downfall of academic history before popular biography. Well, Keithy, I say they get as they deserves.