Striking the Right Balance: Of High Walls and Divisions of Labor

Extract

The academy and the military would seem to be radically different institutions. Militaries are fundamentally hierarchical: at the end of the day, orders must be obeyed. At least in principle—and the emphasis here is on principle, since anyone who has lived within the academy knows how far reality departs from this purported ideal—academic disciplines prize the questioning of presuppositions and foster an antiauthoritarian culture. In military units, individuals must sublimate themselves to the group. Scholarship, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is often a lonely enterprise, whose costs are borne by and whose rewards accrue to individuals. The contemporary US officer corps disproportionately identifies with the Republican Party, while academics tend to identify with Democrats, and sometimes farther to the left. Samuel Huntington (in)famously saw as inherent and necessary the cultural divergences between military and civilian life. This would all the more powerfully seem to apply to the armed forces and the academy, to uniform and gown.