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It is a popular belief in modern democratic societies that modern, Western universities are unique as sites of teaching, inquiry, research, and writing which, above all, are marked by their independence from the various forces which influence so much of the life outside of the academy. The academy, in these terms, approximates to an ideal which, though it never existed, continues to be honoured. Never the less, to the extent that the University-as-Institution approached it, universities in general "reduced the entropy of time and fought against it;" fought against it, furthermore, as a stable institution, able, because of its historical consciousness, "to preserve at least a pocket of memory, " and maintain, as Regis Debray recalls it, "a tribal reservation for the ethics of truth." Relatedly, the University, was a dominant site of secular critique practised by people "capable of living what [they] taught until it killed [them].

It is the argument of the first part (I) this paper that, over the period marked by World War II and the Cold War, "research universities" emerged which came to not only derive their status from the extent to which they were consultants to government or industry, but also radically undermined the residual commitments to, and practices of the traditional / idealised academy. In plain terms, the result was that independent inquiry in the "relevant" areas of such universities, became almost hopelessly compromised. The argument, albeit briefly made, in the second part of this paper (II) is that the University is now in need of renewing itself along the lines of an ethical code modeled upon, the principle primum non nocere (first, do no harm) — in other words to develop a way of thinking which places the welfare of students and society above other concerns.

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Michael McKinley

...."and if Voltaire lent the licence":

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Who were the greatest deceivers? The teachers?
And the greatest fools? The students?

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