Why do so few scholars and their students regularly read and engage with The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and the handful of other periodicals devoted to fostering informed debate, discussion, and thinking on a range of topics, both political and literary? ~Damon Linker

On behalf of academics, I would have to say that for most of us, most of the time, there is less and less time to engage with these things on a regular basis as research, dissertation-writing, article-writing, coursework and teaching take over.  This summer I have enjoyed a respite from a lot of that after getting a good deal of work done on my dissertation, but the days of maniacal hyper-posting are coming to a close, as they must during the school year.  I intend to remain involved in regular blogging and attuned to the political scene, but I believe that I am actually unusual in the degree to which I take interest in political questions anyway.  People I know here at Chicago and at other graduate schools, who are undoubtedly better scholars than I am because they clearly work harder at it, are often amazed at my familiarity with current events and the political debates of the day, to which they dedicate only a small portion of their time.  In the end, they do not take an interest because, well, there is so little that is actually intellectually interesting about these topics.  Who needs the NYRB when you have dozens of specialist journals with their own particular sets of reviews and articles to digest?  Those are the reviews you are interested in reading as an academic.  Of course there are politically active academics and those who do make time to involve themselves in these discussions, but this is very much rooted in the quirks and character of the academics in question.  For some people, there really are limitations on their time that prevent them from following the contemporary debates, but for others it is simply not the way they want to spend their free time.  I would say that this is normal for most academics and most graduate students. 

By the time all of that work is done, there are relatively few who want to start delving into the problems of the latest political debates.  Academics will stay informed of things in the news, but they are hardly going to throw themselves into the fray–especially those who do not yet have tenured positions.  Academics probably think that they have plenty of informed discussion going on in their midst (perhaps they are right, perhaps not) and do not need to go to TNR, the Review of Books or anywhere else in the printed press for engaging with political and literary topics.  Besides, in the highly specialised world of modern academia what is the incentive for most academics to take an interest in the commentary of generalists, who are unlikely to tell them anything in the area with which they are unfamiliar?  Hyperspecialisation is a real problem for academics, and it is something that I hope to never fall into, if I haven’t already, but it is what our academic institutions are geared towards creating. 

Pope Benedict’s words in Regensburg about the university and the community of reason it represented were remarkable for how alien they would have sounded to so many people at American universities, where scientists look askance at the rest of us, social scientists look askance at the humanists, and vice versa, and the divinity, business and law students live in their own universes.  At Chicago, the division is dramatised by many of the science buildings being clearly on one side of Ellis and the rest of the University being on the other (and the scientists will refer to the rest of us as being on “the other side of the street,” which might as well mean “the other side of the planet”)–and the law school is off in its own world across the Midway.  You can tell how bad things have gotten when the buzzword of choice for everything you do is “interdisciplinarity,” which is the tired, half-hearted attempt to rebuild the shattered sense of university.