Treason of the Intellectual!

If something like the QS Rankings for Higher Education existed in the 20th Century, you would have found many of the usual suspects missing from the top 10 universities. Most of the top ten would have been German universities leading up to 1930. So what happened?

Julien Benda's classic study of 1920s Europe resonates today. The phrase "treason of the intellectuals" was a warning shot which went unnoticed.

From the time of the great Hindu | Buddhist and Greek civilisations, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilised society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth Century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals and instead glorified particularism and moral relativism.

The "treason" of which Benda writes is the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. He criticises European intellectuals for allowing political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation, ushering the world into "the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds." From the savage flowering of ethnic and religious hatred in West Asia, it is evident that college campuses are more of a political battlefield rather than intellectual thought.

Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled first in the 1930s precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. Peter Drucker, the management guru, fled the university and the country after just one brush with the Nazis on campus. In a few months, 15% of professors were fired, many of them Jews or professors who disagreed with the Nazi ideology and so-called German values. Albert Einstein left Germany a couple of years later. German higher education was doomed! Isn't it strange that a poorly educated man like Adolf Hitler and his thugs could sway a nation to madness? Well, the evidence seems to indicate academicians' reasonably active role in furthering the madness. German academia, including students, was highly politicised. Does it sound familiar? Dr Martin Heidegger, considered to be one of the world's greatest philosophers, was an active member of the Nazi party till 1945. Many accomplished professors got themselves plum positions at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, participating in unspeakable horrors. That is the treason that Benda is prophesizing.

The absolute mayhem on many elite American universities following the terror attack on Israel and its aftermath is a case in point. The inability of professors to get or retain jobs purely on merit, the world over, is alarming. The number of Indian intellectuals travelling abroad to study and work in universities worldwide is something to consider for India and Indians. For a country that prided itself on its universities and was an intellectual leader of the world from 500 BCE to 1200 CE, it has been a free fall since then.

As Rohn said, If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.