The Country Should Serve Academia, Too

In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy ’40 famously roused Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” In our Harvard forebear’s spirit, I wrote two weeks ago that academia should serve the country. But I also believe that the relationship between the ivory tower and the world beyond its gates is symbiotic, and that the country at large thus has a responsibility to invigorate the academic pursuit of knowledge.

To be human is to be curious. Aristotle recognized as much in the first lines of his “Metaphysics,” and over sixteen centuries later, Thomas Aquinas elaborated a moral dimension of this observation: the knowledge of truth and the proper direction of its pursuit respectively pertain, per se, to intellectual and moral virtues. It is a moral imperative, then, to reasonably sate man’s hunger for knowledge.

Academia exists to engage in that pursuit. In asking questions about Jane Austen’s treatment of Regency-era social mores, or differences in crime policy across Latin American countries, or the nature of consciousness, researchers aim to discover how and why the world works the way it does.

However, academia’s pursuit of knowledge is hampered by its longstanding overspecialization problem. Professional pressures incentivize researchers to concentrate their work on certain narrow subfields, while limited intellectual viewpoint diversity leaves other fields wanting further inquiry.

What, then, is to be done?

I believe the answer might look similar to the Editorial Board’s prescription for undergraduate admissions: increasing the diversity of the applicant pool as a mechanism for selecting a more specific set of students. Like elite undergraduate institutions, top Ph.D. programs face a surplus of qualified candidates — so much so that even the fraction that are admitted still often find themselves part of a so-called Ph.D. glut in the academic labor market.

In a world where Ph.D. applicants come from a more diverse set of intellectual, ideological, and socioeconomic backgrounds, graduate programs would have more latitude to pick out students who might contribute to less well-traversed routes of inquiry.

Colleges might have a role to play in funneling a broader swathe of their students into academia. But they can not reach those students whose growth in a culture that undervalues intellectualism prevents them from making it into the halls of academe in the first place.

What is needed instead is a Coleridgean national project of education purposed to lift vast new numbers of young people up to love learning. When middle and high school students skip canonical works of literature, when they slide by without really grasping the fundamentals of algebra and geometry, when their understanding of the economic and political circumstances that have molded their communities into their current state is limited to catchy slogans, they miss out on the fundamental building blocks of an intellectual life.

To some extent, this problem has policy solutions. Schools can beef up math and reading requirements for graduation, and reintroduce more demanding reading lists. But a national project that aims to instill a love for learning across lines of class, race, and gender requires a deeper cultural shift.

This shift begins with our public figures. The vice president of the United States graduated from Yale Law School — his speech and conduct should reflect that, rather than ape a caricature of an uneducated person. But it also requires a change in the attitudes of ordinary people to prioritize education, both in and out of school. At risk of sounding like a Luddite, parents should hand their little children books, not phones. Teachers can give students agency by fostering affirmative participation through science fairs and history exhibitions, and librarians and museum directors can make their spaces more open to the young.

A national culture shift will not fix every problem that the pursuit of truth in academia faces. Publishing pressures, for instance, may persist. However, an early start — beyond its general benefits to society — will open the pipeline through college into the professional pursuit of new knowledge for a tremendous number of young people equipped to mitigate, if not eliminate, that profession’s problems.

One would be hard-pressed to imagine, à la Aquinas, a more virtuous way to construct the pursuit of knowledge. Let each person, in their own small way, begin this work.

Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Cabot House.