Scholarly Truth and the Hunger for Progress

Public trust in the academy has been waning for more than a generation now, and in that time, the public support of academic scholarship has been under an almost constant threat of drastic cuts. As accountability has been bureaucratized inside the university itself, scholarship has also come under the suspicious eye of cost -benefit accounting performed by external agencies. This narrow version of accountability may press so far against autonomy that "tension" seems too weak a word to describe the divergence. Scholarly autonomy, if it means anything, means that the individual scholar, answerable to no judging body higher than his scholarly peers, is able to give the law to himself concerning the nature of the work and how it is to proceed.