The Age of The Scholar - Dialogue/Monologue 2

　鶴見俊介氏の『思い出袋』(岩波新書2010年）が、あるMLで取り上げられていました。鶴見氏の新刊だそうです。鶴見氏のかねてよりの持論である舌鋒はますます鋭さを増しているとのことです。

　「大学とは、私の定義によれば、個人を時代のレベルになめす働きを担う期間である」(p．８１)。「なめす」とは、革製品を作るときに「毛皮の毛と脂とを除いて柔らかにする」ことですが、文脈にそくして考えると「画一化／規格化」とも読み替えられるかもしれないとMLでは注釈がそえられていました。このMLを読んだとき、私の頭には以下の文章がパッとよぎりました。人間というのは、読んだ文章をどこかで覚えているものなのだなと思いました。

　　However high our opinion of ourselves, universities are not the creatures of modern industrial society. Nor should they be enslaved to that society. They spring rather from a ancient, broad, and deep tradition of mind and spirit. Nurtured in adventure, boldness, and fresh vision, they have always recognized at their best that their responsibility is not to minister to utility but rather to call men to moral and spiritual, and to intellectual responsibility. It is only thus that they can ever hope to serve the real needs of society.

　　The present chief danger for a college or university is then that, from preoccupation with business life, or from fatigue, or from a lack of grasp on what the spirit means for life, it will yield to the pressures that are always working to make it conform itself to the world --not at the world's novel, creative best, but at its less thoughtful, almost meaningless ordinary.

　　Thus it is possible for a university without being aware of it to slip into a servile relationship with the culture in which it finds itself and so betray its real reason for being. This danger as it now presents itself to us in a new form is apt to grow as colleges and universities look increasingly to government and business for the sustenance the must have to keep alive.

　　Limited dependence of this kind need not necessarily be harmful, but it cannot fail to be dangerous if there is not a clear, prior recognition of the way universities does not stand as in some sense a critic of society and a force always calling for fresh endeavor, it cannot be the university.(Nathan M. Pusey)