BUREAUCRATIC LEARNING

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Through the application of science, human beings in America and other parts of the world have been liberated from plagues, pestilences, threats of famine, hardship and torment that once seemed an unalterable part of the human condition. And until recently, all of this was rewarded by public and governmental respect. In the past few years, however, disenchantment has set in, with the public concluding that the post-war promises of learning were inflated and misleading. Much of science and scholarship has become obsessed with what it likes to think is a public-policy role, with the individual scholar only too happy to serve as policy maker. Unhappily, as the policy maker advances, the man of learning recedes. Bureaucratic learning has also become commercial. The large grant, the entrepreneurially established institute have come to wield great power. Thus a substantial amount of research that does not really require great amounts of money and complex organizations, that is indeed retarded in inspiration by them, demands them anyhow. Grantsmanship, at first a wry joke among academics, is by now a publicly recognized source of banality, trivialization and pretentiousness. Bureaucratic learning has lost its sense of proportion and of the true roots of knowledge.