On the Term "Ivory Tower"

I have always despised the term "ivory tower"--invariably employed in cheap dismissal of those in the employ of institutions of higher education as comfortably isolated and insulated from what bullying idiots swaggeringly call "the real world."

As the regular reader of this blog is apt to be aware I have long thought that a great deal is wrong with "the higher learning in America"--much, much more than most will admit. However, that academics really have led an isolated and insulated life remote from the real world's concerns--or ever had it--is not one of them. As Upton Sinclair showed in his study of the matter in The Goose-Step, in the absence of considerable independent means the requisite comfort and security for such isolation and insulation simply did not exist--all as the best scholars were always deeply interested in the larger world, and eager to engage with it, even though their administrators frequently opposed their doing so, and often punished them for it, with this remaining the case today. After all, whatever else one says of places of higher education and those who work in them it is wealthy businessmen and their political hacks who call the shots in them, with this well worth remembering when it seems to us that our scholars are all but required to adhere to theories as remote from reality as Aristotlean physics or Ptolemaic astronomy to any understanding of the cosmos as we know it today (the postmodernism of our humanities, the physics envy of our economics, etc.). Academics use those theories not because they live in "ivory towers," but because those who are in control deem any genuinely worthwhile intellectual approach quite out of the question, and require them those they would employ to stultify or justify rather than truly study and teach.