ABSTRACT
The flavor of the anomaly is heightened when we realize that not only was the ranking of academic eminence to be found within the academy, where simple inertia might explain it even if vested interest is not invoked, but also in the lay world outside the academy. The academic dogma began, after all, in the medieval scholar's study of the sacred: the sacred texts of Christianity foremost. But creative or sterile, leaden or buoyant, scholarship is basically what the academic dogma is about and has been about for close to eight hundred years. As is the case with all dogma, there is an evident, aristocratic character in the academic dogma, the dogma that knowledge is good. But one and all these fields were chosen for representation in the required curriculum, or for the ever enlarging numbers of elective courses, on the basis of intellectual-academic choices; not choices rooted in prior calculation of psychological and moral needs.
