This is the scholarly lion at columbia university. It cannot roar. It can’t charge. It can’t even move. It is only a statue.

One wonders, frankly, what kind of comment on scholarship is implicit in this puzzling object, with its ruffled main, its gnarled lips, its green face the color of sea-beaten algae or refrigerated mold or weathered bronze, its thick lips, its empty eyes, its stiffened limbs. Are scholars meant to be like lions, brave and heroic, ready to seize the truth in their jaws, to roar at lies, to stand guard before virtue and prestige? Or are scholars here represented as statues, statues of something that might once have been brave when it was alive and lithe, but that now is halted, appropriated and bronzed?

To make matters semiotically worse, the lion here is technically not called “the scholarly lion” but “the scholars’ lion”:

But this datum of course does not offer us any simple interpretations either. We gather that the statue was presented on Dean’s Day, April 3, 2004, in honor of the 250th anniversary of Columbia College. It appears to be a commemorative gift to the University by the class of 1971. So whatever the relation between name and object, the whole assemblage appears to signify the university’s commemorative relation to itself, a token of its high self-regard and a compliment on its longevity. (Why celebrate anniversaries, after all, unless the aging process itself is taken as an accomplishment, longevity taken as a virtue?)

But why should scholars possess a lion? Is it their guardian? Their pet? Their mascot, symbolizing them in a peculiar combination of valor and animality that seems totally contrary to the received image of scholarly activity? Perhaps the scholars’ lion is their symbol because it condenses everything that, ideologically speaking, scholars are not. The lion, a bodily incarnation of public action, seems almost the inverse of the scholar, a spiritually ethereal figure closeted off in the library.

Further investigation only suggests more puzzles. For one thing, this statue seems to have won the award for “best metal testicles” from the Village Voice. And for another, the Columbia Lion, of which this is one incarnation, is said to be the basis for the famous MGM lion that roars at the start of all those films. Who would have thought that that lion had any connection to scholarship?

And – here’s a more traditional anthropological question for you – what does it mean that universities have totem animals? Doesn’t that rather give the lie to the fantasy of universities as quintessentially modern, progressive institutions? What then is the lion telling us about the university’s relation to history and tradition? What is a statue as a commentary on an institution’s place in society?

There’s something contradictory in the way that the Ivy League universities represent their place in history: while claiming to maintain their traditions, their alumni groups, their internal identity in much the same way (they insinuate) it has long existed, they aspire to be places that create the mass future, that reproduce society and the world in new and better ways. As if their internal stasis could correspond to their dynamic effects on their surroundings. Surely no one ever asserts this in so many words, but even if this formula is over-simple, I expect one could document a very unsteady ideological compromise between what’s supposed to be fixed or even past-oriented and what’s supposed to be changing and future-oriented, in these elite universities.

“The task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.”

This strikes me as an interesting take on the way the university finds its place in history. There are so many other ways of imagining the university’s historical trajectory: It’s the proud offspring of Western Europe, spreading around the globe to bring enlightenment. (This sounds like Whitehead, but is oriented towards transmitting a prior civilization rather than creating a new one.) Or it’s the ruin of an elitist institution, bereft of its mission of teaching reason or national culture, a degraded victim of neoliberal processes of corporatization, privatization, and auditing. Or it’s a cyborg composed of part medieval tradition, part incoherent consumerism, part mega-scientific research, a patchwork of past and present struggling to stay in motion.

Whitehead’s future-oriented vision of academic work seems so completely different from the academic life I experience, so laden with tradition, so self-consciously burdened with the past. But it’s not only an interesting historical vision; it’s also an interesting political vision. To say that the university’s task is the creation of the future is also to argue that universities should have a vast amount of political power, since it amounts to making them responsible for the fate of the world. Or at the very least, it amounts to a claim that the university is a very, very important institution.

To whom does this claim appeal? I looked up the quote on Google, hoping to find a link to some book by Whitehead. Instead I found a fascinating and peculiar list. It became obvious that the quote from Whitehead appeals to presidents, commentators, and fundraisers who hope to make the university seem noble. Or, at least, very, very important. The quote is mentioned in these places:

• The University of Wyoming’s strategic plan.
• A speech about universities to Australian journalists.
• A 2005 commencement speech at the University of Buffalo.
• A fundraising appeal from the University of Georgia which suggests that “a deferred gift is the best way to help the University create the future.”
• A speech on environmental quality at the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation. The speech quotes Whitehead in order to praise universities as engines of economic development.
• An announcement for a speech by Stanley Katz, along with a link to the Chronicle article I started with.
• A couple of engineering journals that also mention Katz.
• Finally, the transcript of a speech by Frank Rhodes (ex-president of Cornell University) to the 1998 Commission on the Future at Florida State University. He quotes Whitehead as a way of making the Commission’s task seem more noble, describing Whitehead as “a kind of text that preachers offer at the beginning of sermons.”

What’s especially interesting about this speech by Rhodes is that, after his speech, he answered questions from the floor. One of them was about “what criteria could be suggested for making choices between graduate programs.” That is, what criteria should be used for deciding which programs to fund – or, perhaps, which to kill off. Rhodes acknowledges that the question is painful and wishes that he didn’t have to answer. But he goes on to suggest some criteria for these choices:

• The current ranking of a program (and how far it would have to go to be highly-rated).
• The ‘linkage’ to other campus programs or the ‘added value to the rest of campus.’
• The benefit for the people of the state.
• The contribution of the program to the intellectual life of the campus community.

I could go on about these criteria, in which the highly contradictory values of administrators are on display, in which the values of the businessman, the legislator, the national ranking agencies, and the traditional campus community are all juxtaposed. But for now perhaps it’s enough to observe that we’re back where we started, with the closure of a philosophy department in Florida. The creation of the future requires killing off the past, perhaps? Let’s remember that philosophy was once alleged – by Kant, for instance – to be the master discipline that was more fundamental than all the others. It’s interesting that this erstwhile master discipline doesn’t seem necessary to the university anymore. It will be interesting to see what kind of resistance is offered to the department’s closure. A departmental petition has garnered 1500 signatures, along with some super-interesting justifications and rationalizations in the comments. My favorite:

How can any university call itself great without a Doctorate in Philosophy? Philosophy, it is “the love of knowledge.” Is the University of Florida’s love of knowledge diminishing? Have the courage to uphold the love of knowledge for its own sake, without regard for the potential of financial return. Remain a great university. (#1525)

And indeed, the administrators have lately changed their decision, according to this page: they now plan to suspend ph.d admissions for three years, rather than to close the program entirely. Incidentally, an article in the Independent Florida Alligator indicates that undergrad philosophy enrollments have risen 10% in the past three years.