Academia Versus the World Outside: Institutionalized Knowledge and Its Discontents

Academia versus the World Outside lays out the givens of the knowledge industry located within the ivory tower, colleges and universities. It then moves outside academia to consider this restricted world the way most people see it. The contrast between these two views of academia explains and is at the basis of the left-right animosity of our day.

The knowledge industry, a creation of the post-Enlightenment modern age along with other industrial and post-industrial enterprises, is based on creating and adding to a store of knowledge as its own end. This makes academia alien to the more random and personal nature of knowledge acquisition in our everyday lives, as indeed every industry is alien to everyday life in the modern age. Yet most academics are so immersed in the peculiar project they have chosen as their life’s work that they are either unaware of or unsympathetic to the fact that people outside live very different lives with very different presuppositions. Most non-academics, for their part, find academia strange, and for very good reason. Academia versus the World Outside makes this contrast and conflict clear from both directions.

This book is aimed primarily at academics, most of whom so take for granted the givens of what they do that they fail to understand why the vast majority of people outside find academia alien. This has led to an increasingly hostile and utterly predictable left-right political conflict, academia tending increasingly left and the world outside increasingly right. The goal of this book is to reduce the tension between both sides: if read by non-academics, this book may help these understand the givens of a world as strange to everyday life as any other specialized industry in the modern age.

Bruce Fleming has taught at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, the National University of Rwanda, and, for more than thirty years, at the US Naval Academy. He is the author most recently of Democracy’s Achilles Heel: The Rocky Marriage of Relative and Absolute, The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia, What Does ’Art’ Mean Now?, The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor, Masculinity from the Inside, and Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers.