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Agent of Democracy
debate that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
about the “proper” role of scholars in civic life.
The first position is that the proper role of scholars in civic life
is, effectively, no role at all. Abraham Flexner wrote the classic statement
in support of this position in his 1930 book, Universities: American, English,
German. In it, he argues that the “university must shelter and develop
thinkers, experimenters, inventors, teachers, and students, who, without
responsibility for action, will explore the phenomena of social life
and endeavor to understand them.” While scholars could, as he put it,
“maintain contacts with the actual world,” they were to be held “irresponsible”
for addressing the problems of the world as well as “indifferent
to the effect and use” of the knowledge and theory they produce. 8
Walter Lippmann embraced Flexner’s position in “The Scholar
in a Troubled World.” In this address, delivered in 1932 during the
Great Depression, Lippmann described scholars as being torn between
two different consciences: a “civic conscience” that tells a scholar that
he or she “ought to be doing something about the world’s troubles,”
and the “conscience of the scholar, which tells him [sic] that as one
whose business it is to examine the nature of things, to imagine how
they work, and to test continually the proposals of his imagination, he
must preserve a quiet indifference to the immediate.” By “the immediate,”
Lippmann was referring to the messy, contentious world of civic
life. The main point of his speech was to argue in favor of detachment
from civic life as the right and proper stance of the scholar. As he put
it, “I doubt whether the student can do a greater work for his nation
in this grave moment of its history than to detach himself from its
preoccupations, refusing to let himself be absorbed by distractions
about which, as a scholar, he can do almost nothing.” 9
The second position in the debate, held by what Mark C. Smith
calls “service intellectuals,” is that scholars should reject calls for civic
detachment and irresponsibility by becoming actively engaged in civic
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8 A. Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1930), 10, 15.
9 W. Lippmann, “The Scholar in a Troubled World,” in The Essential Lippmann: A
Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, (eds.) C. Rossiter and J. Lare (New York:
Random House, 1963), 509-510, 515.