The Marketplace of Ideas Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand

The Marketplace of Ideas Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand Louis Menand is critiquing the concept of a liberal education in todays world. He is doing this from the point of view of a professor inside the university system. The book is focused on what happened in fairly recent history.




There is a lot on the production and dissemination of knowledge. This is focused on teaching and research. Libraries are not that well covered in this book. There is more about the creative process of selecting what will be taught inside a university. A liberal education is often thought of as a way to teach people how to learn and grow on their own.


Louis Menand covers recent ideas; interdisciplinary education, the focus and creation of humanities degrees, and common beliefs of professors. Some of it is quite topical: the liberal bias in the professorship and how students are chosen based on the needs of the university are gone over.


This book is a quality title. It is a professor writing for a more general audience. The book is part of a larger series called Issues of Our Time edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Daily Thoughts 2/28/2010

Illustration from the children's book A Book of Nursery Rhymes by Clara E. Atwood, 1901

Daily Thoughts 2/28/2010

Taking the day off to relax and think a bit.

I read some more of The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. He does not mention libraries in the index. He makes a brief mention of libraries as a kind of mine for knowledge. Then he makes a comment about Wikipedia making a lot of the knowledge previously held only in universities available to the public.

Right now, pretty much all of the Western cannon in literature, philosophy, and art should be available as images or texts on the internet. It is only a matter of when they will be scanned in if they are not already there. Most of it is material that is well past copyright. Most photographic images from museums are derivative copies of original works. What is copyrighted is the criticism produced by universities and other places on the work.

This opens up a whole new idea. If anyone can see the work freely, how well will academic criticism hold up to free public scrutiny. It should be very interesting. This scrutiny will be world wide and available to most people with an internet connection. I am not sure that the classics are generally censored in most places.

What will make it even more interesting is that an internet connection does not have to be a computer anymore. Anywhere there is an internet enabled cell phone, will be a place where people can read classic literature which is not under copyright. Because most of it is free, it may enliven the reading of the classics and the literature and images of the humanities; philosophy and art all over the world.

There is a lot of creative potential here, because people will be free to do with it what they want to. I am waiting to see what will happen.