ABSTRACT
It is no accident that David Damrosch opens his recent diagnosis of the failure of the university as community with a reading of a classic fin-de-siecle text, Jude the Obscure (We Scholars in fact takes its title from Nietzsche's 1886 reflections on the threat of specialization to thought). In Hardy's novel Jude's conclusion that his scholarly aspirations are too early is balanced by the speculation that his son's generation are too late. Father Time's suicide is a metonym of an incipient decadence, a 'universal wish not to live'. Damrosch contends that this 'archetype of modern youth has proved to be the type of the modern scholar': the isolating tendencies of disciplinarity have stifled scholarly community. The decadence of the university is registered here in the correlation of an exponential proliferation of knowledge production and the 'eclipse of genuine intellectual life'.7 Institutional values and structures reproduce the isolation which tempts academics to desire an end to academic life, a wish confirmed by more than half of the respondents to a recent AUT survey: 'if they had the chance to start afresh, [. . . they] would choose a different profession'.8 Damrosch cites Father Time's laconic suicide note to suggest a connection between the growth of the academic profession and the behaviour and beliefs of its members. But a different emphasis
4 A.H. Halsey, The Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic
Profession in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1992), p. 62. 5 Peter Scott, The Meanings of Mass Higher Education (Buckingham: SHRE
and Open University Press, 1995), p. 11. 6 Peter Scott, The Crisis of the University (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 26.
