I don't mean to argue whether higher education is or isn't an industry or whether knowledge is power. I grant both propositions. My problem is with what I think Heidegger would call their objectification.

There are times when the patient dies, and the physician's job is nothing more than to be there with a certain quality of attention. There are even times when the patient dies and is healed in death. We have a problem with situations like this in present-day culture, just as we have problems with other experiences which require non-utilitarian mindfulness. Our inclination is to do something material.

To carry on with my medical analogy, two things stand in the way of non-utilitarian mindfulness for many contemporary physicians: 1) the objectification of medical knowledge in a powerful (but not all-powerful) technology, and 2) the commodity value of that knowledge. I submit that there is no warrant in either the technology of medicine or in its commodification for the physician to do anything other than to expand his range of needs. Thus, the instruction to do no harm, in the Hippocratic Oath, has come to mean 'do all that is technically possible to sustain the patient's vital signs.' That this tendency is being restrained by the present economics of medicine I do not deny, but it isn't being restrained in the interest of the relief of suffering. I think this is why a good many medical ethicists go back to Kant.

And, I think the serious questions we face in higher education are how, and to what extent, and under what circumstances, and in what contexts, and in relation to what further contexts we shall understand what we do in universities in light of the realities of life at the end of the twentieth century and in relation to the various ways in which our primary concerns have been theorized and the traditions which constitute us have been transformed and reinscribed in culture. Such a process requires a complex negotiation, it seems to me, as complicated as any corporate merger, maybe almost as complicated as making peace in Ireland. We ought to be having peace talks but we aren't. In fact we're so far from having peace talks that we don't even collectively know that we need them.

In the meantime, an economic theory of university infrastructure is being developed, largely without participation by humanities faculties. Impersonally, I don't think it's a sufficient theory because it cannot account for the complex of non-objective and non-commercial transactions which make up much of humanistic discourse. I don't personally think it's a sufficient theory because it has no means at all of accounting for why I should take up students' valuable time wondering with them what Rilke may have meant by the question at the head of this piece. Many students already look at me as if to say, 'Physician, heal thyself.'

This isn't a new problem for the humanities; it's a familiar one. the German universities solved it in a way with the conception of Geisteswissenschaft. And I think that the humanities in American universities are presently in a position to make a major contribution to theorizing the university via the growing conception of textual and cultural studies. I hope this will happen, though current developments in cultural studies don't give me much comfort.

[Posted at Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 1 May 1998]