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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

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from: Richard Lanham

Academia as Fox Hunt

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 8:10 PM ET

Dear Jim,

Well, as chance would have it, just as I put my fingers on the home row, my wife Carol comes home with a copy of Paul Naiditch's Problems in the Life and Writings of A.E. Housman. (Paul, a UCLA librarian, had just given her a copy.) Open to any page and you find the raw material with which Stoppard worked. It really does show what happens to the mud of life when genius breathes upon it. As you say, he manages to make Housman into a template for current educational argument, but he does so with a scalpel. I'll allow myself one example: Pattison says to Pater, Jowett, Ruskin & Co., "Personally I am in favour of education, but a university is not the place for it. A university exists to seek the meaning of life by the pursuit of scholarship." I've heard it, though not alas with so candid an epigrammatic compression, from my colleagues a thousand times.

But Housman thought he already knew what the meaning of life was: pure intellectual play. "Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the purpose when you take away God." I've spent a career first agreeing with this and then disagreeing, but it certainly describes the "aristocracy" of scholarship. The sense I have, looking at my 65th birthday next week (50 didn't bother me a bit, but 65 and the Medicare card does remind one, to quote a phrase that comes a few lines after the above quotation, that "you're a long time dead"), that I've been privileged to dwell in a universe of marvelous richness. Maybe, well, hell, there's no maybe about it, it is that I've always wanted to share it that feeds this educational optimism I keep getting such flak for (including from the two students, if I understood them, that wrote the paper about my Electronic Word for your course). As you know, I've worked on and off for 30 years as an expert witness in copyright cases out here in television and movieland, and I've come to see some really smart lawyers close up. They make more dough, lots, but they always have to stop their thinking where the case says to, whereas we can chase the fox (if I may use this metaphor before Tony Blair succeeds in stamping out this venerable sport) as far as it runs. That's what Housman is talking about in the passage I've just quoted, and it is as rich as he thinks it. I wonder what the sophisticated New York audience that is seeing the play thinks about these lines when it hears them. Do they make any kind of sense to them?

Speaking of copyright, and then I'll shut up, because it is Scotch time out here on the West Coast, do you want to talk about it here (copyright not Scotch) in these conversations? I think you let yourself off too easily in Avatars in that last sentence on Page 98. 'Taint that easy. But mostly, I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about the Corelli Barnett book.

Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

Academia as Fox Hunt

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 8:10 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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