Academic Narcissism

Narcissus was the youth who was so infatuated with his own beauty that he could find no greater pleasure than to contemplate his reflection in the waters of a spring. In the end he pined away. Psychoanalysts have given his name to the erotic aberration characterized by excessive devotion to oneself. It might also be given to the condition spreading rapidly through our modern universities. They are becoming so infatuated with their makeup that, instead of pursuing the search for truth, they spend an increasing amount of time sitting by the fountain contemplating their own features.

The outstanding manifestation of academic narcissism is the volume of Soviet-style self-analysis dedicated to the improvement of the mechanics of teaching. There is not a month in which the subject is not discussed at great length, and not a year in which committees of professors do not take time off from their pursuits to consider how to make the face of a modern university more attractive to students, and how the consumers of education could be served better than they are already. It has led to new advising procedures. A faculty member must now be on call to help his assigned wards untangle their academic difficulties, thereby encouraging them to walk on crutches rather than on their own feet. He must consult with his colleagues on what sort of examination to give and what textbooks to use, thus being forced to waste his time reading a large number of similar books with whose substance he is long familiar and from whose absorption he knows beforehand that he can learn nothing new. Though few things are more time-consuming and sterile than this form of collective action on the part of a formerly highly individualistic academic community, little can be done about it. For according to the tenets of progressive education, the master to be served in institutions of learning should not be the professor but the student.

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Leopold Kohr

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Narcissus was the youth who was so infatuated with his own beauty that he could find no greater pleasure than to contemplate his reflection in the waters of a spring. In the end he pined away. Psychoanalysts have given his name to the erotic aberration characterized by excessive devotion to oneself. It might also be given to the condition spreading rapidly through our modern universities. They are becoming so infatuated with their makeup that, instead of pursuing the search for truth, they spend an increasing amount of time sitting by the fountain contemplating their own features.

The outstanding manifestation of academic narcissism is the volume of Soviet-style self-analysis dedicated to the improvement of the mechanics of teaching. There is not a month in which the subject is not discussed at great length, and not a year in which committees of professors do not take time off from their pursuits to consider how to make the face of a modern university more attractive to students, and how the consumers of education could be served better than they are already. It has led to new advising procedures. A faculty member must now be on call to help his assigned wards untangle their academic difficulties, thereby encouraging them to walk on crutches rather than on their own feet. He must consult with his colleagues on what sort of examination to give and what textbooks to use, thus being forced to waste his time reading a large number of similar books with whose substance he is long familiar and from whose absorption he knows beforehand that he can learn nothing new. Though few things are more time-consuming and sterile than this form of collective action on the part of a formerly highly individualistic academic community, little can be done about it. For according to the tenets of progressive education, the master to be served in institutions of learning should not be the professor but the student.