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The Ivory Tower: the history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2012

STEVEN SHAPIN
STEVEN SHAPIN
Affiliation:
Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This is a historical survey of how and why the notion of the Ivory Tower became part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural vocabularies. It very briefly tracks the origins of the tag in antiquity, documents its nineteenth-century resurgence in literary and aesthetic culture, and more carefully assesses the political and intellectual circumstances, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, in which it became a common phrase attached to universities and to features of science and in which it became a way of criticizing practices and institutions deemed to be ‘irrelevant’. The paper concludes by reflecting on the tag's relationship to pervasive cultural tropes and how its modern history may be used to appreciate better where science and its academic setting now stand in the ancient debate between the active and contemplative lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2012

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References

1 Ziolkowski, Theodore, The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998Google Scholar, surveys some early twentieth-century literary and intellectual usages of the Ivory Tower tag, with special reference to the poets W.B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.

2 Commentators dispute what kind of neck this is – the Messiah, the Temple, the Church or (not so popular) Solomon's lover.

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27 New York Times, 7 July 1939, p. 18.

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33 ‘Fascism will put art on an economic basis’, Washington Post, 29 May 1927, p. F8.

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45 ‘Conant asks freedom of discussion, Inquiry for U.S. universities’, The [Harvard] Crimson, 28 April 1947, available at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1947/4/28/conant-asks-freedom-of-discussion-inquiry, accessed 25 April 2011. See also Sonnert, Gerhard, Ivory Bridges: Connecting Science and Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002Google Scholar; Kerr, Clark, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967, vol. 2, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 3Google Scholar; idem, The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1869–1960, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 48Google Scholar; Henry Rosovsky, ‘No Ivory Tower: university and society in the twenty-first century’, in Werner Z. Hirsch and Luc E. Weber (eds.) As the Walls of Academia Are Tumbling Down, London: Economica, 2002, pp. 13–30, esp. 13–14.

46 ‘Text of the President's Address at the University of Pennsylvania’, New York Times, 21 September 1940, p. 8; see also ‘Democrats: no Ivory Tower’, Time (30 September 1940), available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,764725,00.html, accessed 25 April 2011.

47 In 1940, the President of Swarthmore College insisted that its Quaker ideals propelled students into socially relevant worldly involvement, and that the college would do them an injury if it sought ‘to amuse them in some ivory tower remote from the world they will shortly encounter’. John W. Nason, ‘Social need met by Swarthmore in Quaker ideal’, New York Times, 14 July 1940, p. 38. In 1942 the President of Sarah Lawrence College defended its supposedly ‘ivory tower’ liberal-arts curriculum against the charge of irrelevance: Constance Warren, ‘Gives support to liberal arts’, New York Times, 7 June 1942. Both of these usages were coloured by wartime circumstances.

48 Edman, op. cit. (11), p. 249; see also idem, ‘The campus stirs to a changing world’, New York Times, 14 April 1935, p. SM3. Rosovsky, op. cit. (45), p. 14, thinks that the first application of the term ‘ivory tower’ to ‘universities or scholars’ was that of H.G. Wells in 1940, but, as indicated here, there were earlier usages emerging from Rosovsky's own Harvard.

49 ‘$4,128,686 is given to Harvard in year’, New York Times, 23 June 1939, p. 19.

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60 Bertrand Russell, ‘Adaptation: an autobiographical epitome’, in idem, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1956, pp. 1–12, 12.

61 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ‘The abdication of philosophy’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Society (1958–1959) 32, pp. 19–39Google Scholar, 20, 22, 24. Exceptions to the norm of modern philosophical irrelevance were said to include Russell, John Dewey and Benedetto Croce. And see Agar, Jon, ‘What happened in the Sixties?’, BJHS (2008) 41, pp. 567–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 579–580.

62 Conant, James B., ‘The advancement of learning in the United States in the post-war World’, Science (4 February 1944) 99(2562), pp. 87–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 89–90. On his return to Harvard after the war, Conant inspired the university's General Education programme, in which the history of science was meant to play a central role.

63 John von Neumann, ‘Impact of atomic energy on the physical and chemical sciences’, in idem, The Neumann Compendium (ed. F. Bródy and T. Vámos), Singapore: World Scientific, 1995, pp. 635–637, 637. The speech from which this article was compiled was delivered at MIT in June 1955.

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66 Wylie, Philip, ‘Knowledge for Man's sake’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November 1953) 9(9), pp. 330–331CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 330.

67 Advertisement for journal in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1947), 3(6), p. 169; also Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July 1947), 3(7), p. 201.

68 Erwin Chargaff, ‘A few remarks on nucleic acids, decoding, and the rest of the world’, in idem, Essays on Nucleic Acids, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1963, pp. 161–173, 161.

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70 Shapin, op. cit. (55), pp. 89–91; idem, ‘Who is the industrial scientist? Commentary from academic sociology and from the shop floor in the United States, ca. 1900–ca. 1970’, in idem, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp. 212–233, esp. 229–233.

71 Barzun, op. cit. (50), pp. 165–166: ‘For the institution [a university], the penalty of not agreeing with the assumption that it is an undischarged debtor to the public is abuse cast in ready-made phrases – ivory tower, lack of relevance, traditionalist views, indifference to consumers, ingratitude for public support, and (supreme insult) elitism’.

72 Watson-Watt, Robert, ‘Physicist and politician’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (September 1959) 15(7), pp. 298–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 298. Watson-Watt was here quoting remarks which he said he made about ten years earlier, though I have not been able to locate the original source.

73 Robert K. Merton, ‘The normative structure of science’ (1942), in idem, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (ed. Norman W. Storer), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 267–278, 268.

74 Bok, Bart J., ‘Freedom of science and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (August 1949) 5(8–9), pp. 211–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 213.

75 Whyte, William H. Jr, The Organization Man, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 206Google Scholar; see also Shapin, op. cit. (55), Chapter 6 (for contemporary views of scientific teamwork).

76 Wells, H.G., The New World Order, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940, p. 133Google Scholar.

77 See, among very many examples, Baron, Nancy, Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010Google Scholar; Lasson, Kenneth, Trembling in the Ivory Tower: Excesses in the Pursuit of Truth and Tenure, Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 2003Google Scholar; Campbell, John R., Dry Rot in the Ivory Tower: A Case for Fumigation, Ventilation, and Renewal of the Academic Sanctuary, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000Google Scholar; Russo, Rosemary, Jumping from the Ivory Tower: Weaving Environmental Leadership and Sustainable Communities, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009Google Scholar.

78 Polly Curtis, ‘Mandelson to announce plans to modernise “ivory tower” universities: Business Secretary wants students and parents to be treated more like customers in proposals to overhaul higher education’, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/03/peter-mandelson-universities-modernise-plans, accessed 10 March 2010.

79 Lita Nelson (director of MIT's Technology Licensing Office), http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2005/11/09/harvard_woos_firms_to_fund_research, accessed 10 March 2010.

80 Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, ‘The kept university,’ Atlantic Monthly (March 2000), available at http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm, accessed 20 November 2010.

81 Examples of such usages in recent book and paper titles are too many to list, but see, for example, Soley, Lawrence C., Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia, Boston: South End Press, 1985Google Scholar; Bok, Derek, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982Google Scholar; Miyoshi, Masao, ‘Ivory Tower in escrow’, Boundary 2 (2000), 27, pp. 7–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 For example, Vickers, Brian (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zur Vita Activa und Vita Contemplativa, Zürich: Verlag der Fachvereine Zürich, 1985Google Scholar; idem (ed.), Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Mackenzie–Evelyn Debate, Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1986Google Scholar. By situating Ivory Tower invocations in this wide-ranging cultural historical context, I diverge from the opinion of Ziolkowski (op. cit. (1)) that the tag is a specifically ‘antimodernist’ gesture. Criticizing the Ivory Tower as a place of disengagement is, I think, neither ‘modernist’ nor ‘antimodernist’, though it does specifically express growing twentieth- and twenty-first-century condemnations of knowledge supposedly unresponsive to the market and to approved political goals. Since Ziolkowski is mainly concerned with a small group of poets, he may well be right about them, but his interest does not extend to the range of usages surveyed here.