HISTORY OF IVORY TOWER AND ITS STATUS IN THE 21st CENTURY: UGANDA IN PERSPECTIVE

by Oweyegha Afunaduula December 19, 2024, 8:28 am

This article draws heavily from the research and ideas unearthed by Stephen Shapin (2012) for and against the ivory tower concept in his paper “The Ivory Tower: The History of a Figure of Speech and its Cultural Uses”. I proceed to review the status of ivory towerism in Uganda and the tendency of power both in and outside the universities to preserve and perpetuate it in the academia more for control and domination than excellence.

Kolar (2011) looks at ivory tower as an impractical often escapist attitude marked by aloof lack of concern with or interest in practical matters or urgent problems; and as a secluded place that affords the means of treating practical issues with an impractical often escapist attitude; especially a place of learning.

The use of the term ivory tower and its application to universities started in the arts in the USA in the 1930s. That is when universities were defended as ivory towers against rising fascism. Ivory tower talk spread to other universities globally as a place of knowledge or art producers. And the 1937 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science passed a timely resolution on the ‘Promotion of Peace and Intellectual Freedom’, noting that science and its applications were powerfully transforming material and cultural realities and that, for this reason, all nations’ scientific societies should ‘cooperate not only advancing the interests of science but also in promoting peace among nations and intellectual freedom in order that science may continue to advance and to spread more abundantly its benefits to all mankind (humankind)’ Reporting this resolution, a Chicago newspaper announced, ‘Science stepped out of its ivory tower today to bring a new influence upon distracted human affairs.’ Science, it was said, left its Ivory Tower, but it did so to protect the disengagement and autonomy necessary to science (Shapin, 2017).

The fact that we talk about Ivory Towers has a lot to do with old history, but the deep historical and the present-day references of Ivory Towers are very different. This essay charts those changing meanings: it tracks some consequential changes in how we think about the nature of knowledge; the conditions for the production, maintenance and transmission of knowledge; the proper agency of knowledge-making; and the relations between knowledge and virtue, both individual and political. These sorts of things could be, and have been, addressed abstractly and programmatically, but there is some interest in tracing change through the history of a phrase used to express ideas about the relationships between knowledge and value (Shapin, 2012).

‘The future of mankind’, Russell wrote, ‘more and more absorbs my thoughts … [I]n a world such as we now live in, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on abstract matters. The everyday world presses in upon the philosopher and his ivory tower begins to crumble’. Since then, ‘the modern scientist has often been associated with the idea of an ivory tower.

The physicist, Hans Bethe, whose attitudes to the post-war development of nuclear weapons were complicated, invoked the Ivory Tower tag in pointing out how much had changed and how difficult it was to pronounce upon what scientists should and should not do. He was a realist, not a purist:

In 1953, the author Philip Wylie, famous for the pop cultural commentary A Generation of Vipers (1942), summarized his odd view of historical change in science–society relations: ‘In the last century …science surely has progressed far enough to note that its “ivory tower” attitude has served its purpose: science today is permitted to proceed in any direction without human interposition and it is able to “think” as abstractly as it can.’

Those attitudes, aligning scientists with the civic virtues, grew stronger through the post-war decades. It was said that science no longer lived in an Ivory Tower; it had been drawn out of the Tower by wartime necessities and by the continuing mobilization of the Cold War; that state of affairs was likely to be permanent; and this was widely judged a very good thing. However, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists circle invoked the Ivory Tower, for example, in ways that paralleled pre-war injunctions that intellectuals and artists must enlist in the struggle against fascism. One of the earliest issues of the Bulletin advertised the journal as a venue in which scientists could understand, engage with, and act politically in their changed circumstances. The atomic bomb had destroyed both Hiroshima and scientists’ traditional disengagement: it ‘shattered the scientists’ “ivory tower”. However, a few American scientists accounted the loss of the Ivory Tower a disaster. The biochemist Erwin Chargaff, writing in the early 1960s and enjoying fewer of the material benefits that had been bestowed on the physicists, bitterly equated the crumbling of the Tower to the loss of intellectual as well as moral integrity: “Many of us, when we were young, thought that it was the task of the natural scientist to understand the ways of nature. But it has come about in our times that what man desires – or at any rate what some men desire – is to change these ways. It all started as a search for truth; but hundreds of thousands, at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki, paid with their lives for such lovable inquisitiveness. What an ivory, what a tower. Many socially responsible, were more measured.

The physicist James Franck, famous for trying to prevent the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, invoked the Ivory Tower in 1947 to reflect on recent historical change and to warn against a coming era of scientists’ complacency and complicity. He posed three questions to his colleagues: ‘Why did we hide in the so-called ivory tower, why did we leave it, and what are we planning to do now that we have left it?’

Teller used the tag to remind scientists of their moral and political responsibilities in the fight against communism.69 There were alternatives – you could do science with no clear links to power, profit or human welfare – but it was just this conception of science that was thought to be, and was, on its way out.

With the passage of time, the Ivory Tower figured largely in addressing not only the proper relations between ‘science and society’ but also the relations between disciplines and subdisciplines. The ability to invoke the Ivory Tower with such different valences, and in such politically charged settings, enhanced the value of the tag and powered its institutionalization in post-war culture, just as the internationalization of the changes affecting the scientific community assisted the rapid spread of the tag from its pre-war American native habitat. As many contemporary commentators realized, the Ivory Tower was fast becoming an unambiguous pejorative.

In the USA the remaining defenders of the Ivory Tower were fast losing the fight. By the late 1970s, the Ivory Tower was judged to be an almost incontestably Bad Place, and its badness – in the United States and, increasingly, elsewhere – was taken more and more for granted by the end of the twentieth century. If you had a constituency outside academia, or if you wanted to advertise yourself as having such a constituency – not necessarily the same thing – then the Ivory Tower was the figure you used to bash your backward colleagues or to devalue tendencies to bound, distinguish or disengage academic practices from those of external patrons, clients or critics.

The scientists; the applied social scientists; the policy wonks; the business school faculty; the proponents of a vocational, ‘labour-market’ conception of university education; and – in a different mood – the advocates of diversity and community engagement took the lead, but the genre of the ‘leaning Ivory Tower’ was becoming an institution, and the figure was available for a very wide range of people wanting to identify what was wrong with academic disengagement.

As the university became more enfolded in civic, commercial and military life, even as access to it was greatly expanded, the Ivory Tower – in its now characteristic academic construal – was presented as a pretty dusty place. The universities came to be conceived as integral to society. Hear this voice, ‘Universities are not islands’, said the secretary of the wonderfully, and multiply, renamed Department for Business, Innovation and Skills which has the universities in its care, ‘they are not ivory towers, they have to respond to the world around them’.

Within the university, the Ivory Tower is invoked by some practitioners against others, and by universities of some types and tendencies against others. The engineering and business schools look with distaste on the Ivory Tower tendencies of the philologists and the philosophers.

Today, almost no one has anything good to say about the Ivory Tower and specifically about the university in its supposed Ivory Tower mode. Those who might be supposed to value a degree of disengagement largely keep their heads down, or, if they wish to limit the continuing enfolding of the university in civic economies, invoke the Ivory. (Shapin, 2012).

In Uganda’s Makerere University the ivory tower still gives pride to the staff, administration and students. Its Main building still retains its name “The Ivory Tower Building”, which was also called the Ivory Tower or the Makerere University Ivory Tower. It is the main administrative building at the university. It is among the oldest buildings of the university. It was built at a time when its value to societal change was being was beginning to be doubted in the USA where it sprouted up. Fate struck in the new Millenium when unscrupulous people reduced it to ashes. Fortunately, both the University administration and the Uganda government were committed to committing funds to raise it out of the ashes. When it was raised, the pride in ivory tower was rekindled at a time when society was increasingly calling on the university and its academics to commit more academic and intellectual energy to pull down the ivory tower and lead the struggle for democracy, freedom, justice and social change. However, while speaking at the re-opening of Makerere University’s iconic Main Building, the Ivory Tower, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni did not mention these highly cherished ideals. Both in and outside the university. Instead, he urged academics to focus on innovation and practical solutions that drive national development, particularly in the fields of science and value addition, and to address socioeconomic issues (Adam Mayambala, 2024). However, the latter is useless unless addressing it is done simultaneously with addressing ecological-biological issues, sociocultural issues and abuse of time -all of which are integral to the spectrum of environmental issues. If not the environment, which is the theatre of all human activities continues to deteriorate because environmental development is ignored and or excluded from development.

By encouraging separation of the humanities and the social sciences from the natural sciences in addressing problems, issues and challenges of society; by hyping the natural sciences; paying the the natural science knowledge workers far more than the knowledge workers in the Humanities and social sciences, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, is also hyping ivory towerism in the natural sciences. He does not encourage, interdisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary (Non disciplinary) teaming, critical thinking and reasoning in pursue innovations. Yet these knowledge cultures free scientists to think and reason together with non-scientists to innovate socially, culturally, ecologically and environmentally relevant solutions. Without challenging disciplinary discourse, which sustains academic and intellectual imprisonment, disciplinary ivory towerism proceeds like before. The discredited science purity is sustained yet the world, especially with the advent of internet, has moved away from it to make science an actor in socio-cultural, socio-economic and sociopolitical change possible and scientifically based.

Oyugi (2021) contends that change of universities in Uganda, from ivory tower to entrepreneurial universities, will prepare the students with the conduct, states of mind and attitudes with which to be self-reliant and contribute to job creation and advancement.

The ‘ivory tower’ mentality came to Africa late. Extradisciplinary (nondisciplinary knowledge discourse predominated before penetration of the Continent by the white colonialists. The ivory tower mentality seems to be typifying typify most of Africa’s academics and Uganda’s on all university campuses in the 21st Century. However, there is proliferating argument argument is that African academics are not playing their critical role of transforming Africa’s socioeconomic and political conditions for the better, through activism. The academics have thus failed to become change agents. African academics need to be activists and not conformists, as seems to be the case in present times. Also, it notes that as activists, they must champion social justice in Africa in order to propel democracy and social advancement causes on the continent. Academic neutrality is not an option in the present times, as it makes academics complicit to the tyranny and bad governance that is prevalent in most African countries. They must champion social justice in Africa in order to propel democracy and social advancement causes on the continent (Ndangwa Noyoo, 2017).

Citing Martin Luther King Jr. Ndangwa Noyoo (2017) states: “A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true”.

Most academics in Africa in general and Uganda in particular have found themselves trapped in the conspiracy of silence, academicism and scholasticism, and are onlookers as the struggles for democracy, freedom and justice, are being waged, most academics have coiled their tails, closed their ears and eyes and allowed fear to seize them. This is well-demonstrated in Uganda where Kiiza Besigye and Kamulegeya were kidnapped from Nairobi, Kenya, by soldiers of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) led by General Muhoozi Kainerugaba as Chief of Defense forces (CDF) and General Tibuhaburwa Museveni as Commander-in-Chief. While Africans elsewhere in Africa and Ugandans abroad in and outside the ivory tower have condemned the kidnapping of Uganda citizens from beyond the international boundaries of the country, the ivory tower in the more than 50 universities of the country has stood our as a centre of conspiracy of silence. It is as if the academics and their administrators have connived to give academic cover to the gross abuse of their fellow citizens’ right to democratic participation, freedom and justice.

Besides, African rulers in general and the Uganda ruler in particular, are likely to continue to accuse academics and intellectuals of evading their responsibility in ecological-biological, socioeconomic, socio-cultural and sociopolitical change. Yet they are the ones that have erected and continue to erect sociopolitical environments that create fear and silence among academics and intellectuals, pushing them to withdraw into ivory towerism. In Uganda academics and intellectuals cannot unleash their full potential as change agents when they are confronted with numerous obnoxious laws, and when the environment is over-militarised. Ivory towerism in Uganda serves the interests of power to conquer, dominate and subordinate society to the individual. It is anti-democratic and social change.

The ivory tower must be pulled down if the universities are to play a critical role in meaningful change for democracy, freedom, justice in all spheres of life in Uganda today and tomorrow.