A little humility to bring mutual understanding

So great has been the pre-occupation of the postwar world with enhancing the role of universities as places for training, improving and finishing the young that their role as creators of knowledge has fallen somewhat into the shadows. This stimulating essay has been written to show how, in the 20th century, the academy finally eclipsed the authority of religious and private study as a source of knowledge production and "academised" society by establishing the university's primacy in the production, validation and application of knowledge.

The university played the decisive role in rejecting the belief in any world beyond human creation and comprehension; in this a vital role was played by the social sciences, which appeared on the scene just as universities were undergoing their modern revival and expansion. Here, the academy came to lay down all the procedures by which outsiders can comment and intervene while taking the central role in conferring, through its peer-reviewing networks, validity on opinion. The social sciences, creations of the expanded academy, have entrenched the belief that we can, through our own efforts, take a grip on the social world and mould it - echoing the authority of the natural sciences in showing how the world around us can be figured and reconfigured.

Social science has driven the expansion of higher education and created the demand for its special insights - mere constructs, abstract and unobservable - that in turn justify further expansion.

Academic knowledge becomes reified into the codes of administrators, teachers and managers. Thus high-rise apartment blocks were originally promoted for their social benefits but survive long after the consensus has moved on. The concept of "intelligence" offered a "scientific" way to select for a differentiated school system but lingers in the discourse of teachers and social workers long after its academic rejection. Academic metaphors and models come to be entrenched as fixed "scientific" certainties instead of opinions.

Academic researchers gain public recognition by applying their theories, while the professionals take up their ideas to maintain their influence in relation to clients. But the gulf between academic reasoning and public understanding is growing: the top social-science journals have abandoned ordinary language, disappearing into ever narrower specialisms comprehended only by the "interpretive elite".

Meanwhile academy-based tuition has replaced learning on the job. The accreditation granted by formal instruction is needed in obtaining employment because of the increased power of the belief that the necessary skills of work are obtainable only in the academy.

What the authors prescribe is that academics take responsibility for the public understanding of their methods and assumptions and open up towards the "periversity" of professionals, industry, politicians and public. This transparency would involve a loss of authority, but the gain would be in the raising of public understanding of the academy's scope and limits.

Anthony Smith recently retired as president of Magdalen College, Oxford.