The Ivory Tower

Research universities announcing seemingly meaningful but domineeringly useless and pompous claims about their cutting-edge research or discovery is no new.

Abstract: This is a historical survey of how and why the notion of the Ivory Tower became part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural vocabularies. It very briefly tracks the origins of the tag in antiquity, documents its nineteenth-century resurgence in literary and aesthetic culture, and more careful assesses the political and intellectual circumstances, especially int he 1930s and 1940s, in which it became a common phrase attached to universities and to features of science and in which it became a way of criticizing practices and institutions deemed to be 'irrelevant'. The paper concludes by reflecting on the tag's relationship to pervasive cultural tropes and how its modern history may be used to appreciate better where science and its academic setting now stand in the ancient debate between the active and contemplative lives.

"...following the figure of the Ivory Tower is tracing the historical trajectory of schemes linking knowledge and the polity, epistemic and social virtue." (25)
"It started as a religious figure, which it remained until nineteenth-century writers respecified it in an artistic context. Its subsequent mobilization to say something about what a university was and should be, and the conditions the university provided for the production of knowledge, largely happened during and after the Second World War, as did its relocation from comment on the imaginative arts to those practices which had the potential to produce materially useful goods - the sciences, engineering and the knowledge of the professional schools in particular...the cultural geography of Ivory Tower usages tracks changes in the recognized social value of different intellectual practices."
"it is a modern instantiation of the ancient religious and secular debate over the active and contemplative lives, negotium and otium: is it better, more virtuous, more authentically human to be engaged with civic affairs or is it better - from time to time or always - intentionally to live apart from the polis?" (26)


Steven Shapin's "The Ivory Tower: the history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses," British Journal for the History of Science, 43:1, 1-27.