Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

politics and political theory. It will be argued that the art and science of citizenship, as expressed by civil society or by individuals in power, are both the primary goals and pragmatic functions of higher learning. This idea grows out of what can be readily observed through history to be the political function of the academy and clearly suggests a vocational purpose with noble goals. However, it is necessary to reconcile this idea with the deep, abiding notion that achieving higher states of knowledge requires detachment. This difference remains a source of conflict within the academy.

The idea of knowledge as its own end was rehearsed in Newman's oft-quoted The Idea of the University(1852/1976, part 1, discourse 5), though it found its clearest expression within the German university model, created by Wilhelm (Baron) von Humboldt (Hammerstein 1996b, 621–626). These sentiments were also conveyed by Oakeshott in his study The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989).² In this, he expressed a terrible dismay at the presence of professional training in the university curriculum: ‘the great and characteristic gift of the university was the gift of an interval; putting aside of routine, a break from the tyrannical course of irreparable events to look round upon the world without a sense of an enemy, or pressure to make up one's mind’. Oakeshott wanted the university to offer the opportunity to cultivate ‘highest and most easily destroyed of human capacities’, what Keats called ‘negative capability’—that is, the capability of being uncertain or in doubt without irritably racing after fact and reason—so that students would have an opportunity to practice suspended judgement in which the ‘neutrality of liberalism is so pale a shadow’ (127).

Fuelling Oakeshott's lament was a desire to preserve the sanctity of detached human judgement, unfettered by the mundane and achieved by an ability to converse intelligently, as well as the ability to reflect deeply on the human condition. His sentiments speak to powerful university traditions, clearly articulating the spirit of higher learning in an idealised form. Today, a great majority of scholars and scientists subscribe to these ideals as part of a noble tradition, even though the thinking behind them may be well out of fashion. There exists no coherent set of illuminating