For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense.  Wrong from the start--

--Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

In the summer 2001, as a young doctoral student, I visited Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick for a few weeks. I clearly remember one of our meetings, probably near the end of the visit, to discuss something I had written. “When you first got here,” he said dryly, “you were writing prose.” That was true. I had been writing the sort of referential prose that was (and still is) familiar fare in Science and Technology Studies, and which Steve is something of a master of. One presents one’s thoughts as the natural continuation of one or another rationally reconstructed history of ideas in which one presumes to be a participant. But my “true Penelope” was Wittgenstein and this urbane pose was starting to cause a strain. I wanted to “provide a clear view of the language” to produce a “perspicous presentation”; indeed, I was trying to “get off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind and on to a part that will register,” as Pound had put it somewhere. “Philosophy must really only be composed in the manner of poetry,” said Wittgenstein. So I had stopped writing paragraphs and had begun making “remarks”. Wrong from the start?

A paper presents the result of study. It represents what the writer has learned through deliberate action, often within a well-defined period of time. Here, “study” may refer merely to a few weeks of an undergraduate class or a reasearch project spanning several years. The paper will not always specify the method by which the results were achieved, but the reader should be able to imagine the means by which they would arrive at them themselves. In some cases, the paper will include a detailed methodology that, ideally, puts the reader in a position to replicate the result. In other cases, the paper will be based solely on the reading and thinking that the writer has done. Do notice, however, that even such a “scholarly” or “theoretical” paper, by virtue of its references, allows the reader to “replicate” the “study” that was done. The reader can consult the same texts and give them the same careful consideration. In all cases, the intended reader of a paper is a peer, an intellectual equal, someone who is qualified to tell the writer that they are wrong. A paper opens the results of the writer’s study to the criticism of other knowledgeable people.

Note: Three weeks ago, I decided I would write a paragraph every morning in a well–composed moment: In twenty-seven minutes, I would write at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing and support, elaborate, or defend it. This morning, I appear to have hit my stride, producing exactly 200 words that the WordPress text-editor helpfully tells me will take one minute to read. This is nice to see, since I often tell my authors and students that a paragraph represents one minute of your reader’s attention. I also tell them it “normally” fills about half a page, and it struck me, looking at the character count, that 1168 is just over half of the 2275 characters that my institution, the Copenhagen Business School, defines as the “normal page” for purposes of examination. It’s comforting to know that my rules of thumb comply with the law of the land.

Study is the deliberate pursuit of learning. Sometimes it is so deliberate that it deserves an article; we talk about “the study” we have done or what “a study” has shown. (If you thought I meant something else by “article”, you’re also right, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s post.) When a student “studies” something it is often simply a matter of attending a class, reading the required texts, and doing the assigned writing. A scholar studies something through a more formal process of formulating a research question framed by theory and answering it on the basis of methodically collected data. Sometimes, to be sure, students are asked to engage in scholarly work — when they write research papers, for example — but their results are often not novel enough to make a “contribution” to the discipline. To learn a method, they discover for themselves what they could have read in a book. Scholars, by contrast, are motivated to conduct studies because they have questions that are not answered in the literature. Indeed, they study the subject on behalf of their peers in the discipline and intend to share their findings with them.

A student learns what is known. What is sometimes called “academic” knowledge consists of everything that can be learned deliberately, all the truth (and even a little wisdom) that can be “passed on” through instruction. As a rough, imperfect approximation we can say that the university curriculum consists of what can be learned by reading a book and demonstrated by writing a paper. But there are of course trades that require instruction in workshops and, accordingly, more practical forms of examination. For this reason we sometimes distinguish between the student and the apprentice. But academic competence also includes a number of “craft skills” that are more easily presented and examined orally, or through exercise and observation. It might, then, be more accurate to define a student as someone who can learn something “in a class” — a group of people you shout at, as the Romans put it. That is, a student learns things that can be communicated by people who already know them to people who don’t. The student, ideally, pays attention.

If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students.

John Henry Newman (1852)

Schools disseminate what is known. They are sites of the distribution, not the production, of knowledge. They are organs of the propagation of knowledge, or, if you will, propaganda organizations for science. In their classrooms, the same messages are tirelessly repeated; in their laboratories, the same experiments are endlessly replicated. Only rarely is something new discovered in these activities, except by the student who had been innocent of an idea. They maintain our knowledge; they are the institutions of our intuitions. It is true that universities, and especially research universities, are more than just schools, but the important thing is that they are also schools; they must devote some of their energies to reproducing the past. Some time ago, it was decided that, at a certain level, it was best to have those who are working at the frontiers of knowledge carry out this transmission, and there is, to my mind, a particular wisdom in this arrangement. Since there can be no genuine learning without curiosity, it is proper that students are exposed to teachers who have conditions under which to satisfy theirs. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth,” said Whitman. In that sense, schools keep our souls functioning properly; they are conservatories of the spirit.