Thanks less to her philosophy than to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she coined the phrase "the banality of evil", Arendt is today probably the best-known of the many distinguished scholars who taught at the New School. After the fourth or fifth time her name came up in one afternoon, I was overcome at first by annoyance, and then by sadness about the state of academia.
What, I wondered, had gone wrong? Why did they prefer to use Hannah Arendt as a mantra instead of exploring her views on liberty and individual responsibility? Why was there so little dissonance voiced and why was the mood so uniform, even conformist? Why did I have the sense that my friend's warning rang true?
The New School is not, of course, representative of all New York universities-just as New York is not representative of all America. But that isn't the issue here. The real question is whether identity politics isn't pervading so much of academic discourse that it has grown stale. That would be fatal, since universities determine the ways in which we gather and distribute knowledge. Should academia pursue politics? Doesn't ideology — whether Left, Right or anything in between — hinder the pursuit of knowledge?
Academia, especially the humanities, thrives on outrageous claims, quirky perspectives and even downright silliness. It is the last paradise of wilderness in an otherwise manicured world. This is how it should remain. However, for academics to do their job properly they must make arguments that are bold, not old.
Leaving Greenwich Village, the words "power", "suppression", "struggle" still echoing in my ears, I felt that these arguments had been recycled too many times — the worst that can happen to any scholarly endeavour. Minerva will be dowdy and grey, not fresh and enticing. As for her devotees, the professors, their battlegrounds have been fought over too often and their intellectual swords have grown rusty. Perhaps it is time for academics to step out of their political comfort zone and into an arena where the weapons of choice are risk and unpredictability. What I encountered in the New School was certainly not the banality of evil; but was it, perhaps, the evil of banality?
