“Science is what is taught.” (Roland Barthes)

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.

A scholar knows what is known by others. Scientists make discoveries, and researchers gather information, but scholars “keep the books”; they maintain an awareness of all the research that has been and is being done on a subject. Scholars can be scientists or researchers too, of course, but we should keep their functions and responsibilities distinct. The scholar’s job is to review the literature and keep it up-to-date. On issues that are being debated, the scholar must have an understanding of both sides of the question and must be able to represent each fairly. The scholar must also have a good sense of the history of the question and the interests that drive our inquiries into them. This awareness can sometimes make it difficult for the scholar to make up their own mind. But, ideally, the scholar will also take a postion. After all, the scholar knows what is known. Scholars hold their beliefs within a totality of beliefs held by other knowledgeable people. With all that knowledge, it would be distressing if the scholar didn’t know what to believe! How would you or I decide?

In academic writing, the reader is a peer. I often say that scholarly writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. These people are familiar to us because we know many of the same things and share many experiences with them. I tell students to imagine the most serious fellow student in their cohort, for example, which lets them call to mind someone who has read the all required reading and attended all the course lectures. It could even be someone they have talked to outside of class about the topics they have studied. But, all this familiarity notwithstanding, it is important to remember that the reader is indeed an “other”; they are someone else who knows. They have an entire personal history that you can never know and this history has shaped the way the read your words, the way your text affects them. That is, while you are in complete control of the text (you choose which words go in which order) you are not in control of the reading. This otherness of reading must be respected.

Scholarly writing is directed at various things. We call some of them “objects” and we use the concepts of our theories to think about them. We have methods to give us data about them that we can then analyze to provide us with knowledge. A lot of our scholarship, however, is also about that knowledge itself: what is already known in our field or, in some cases, what is falsely believed by our peers. Our writing must direct itself at these ideas too, and it is very important to distinguish between statements that are about the world and statements that are about the thoughts of other knowledgeable people. To this end, we must master the art of citation, referencing. Sometimes, we will write about, not the things in the world, but our equipment for knowing about them: our concepts, our methods, our data, and our instruments for gathering it. In our more philosophical moments, we’ll write about what Kant called “the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of objects.” In all cases, it is about the direction of our attention.