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Ferdinand von Prondzynski is right in pointing out that the notion of ¡°knowledge for knowledge¡¯s sake¡± is not a useful justification for scholarly activities or universities themselves (¡°Spinach for spinach¡¯s sake¡±, News, 25 April). Equally sound is Howard Hotson¡¯s response that to attack defenders of ¡°traditional¡± higher education on the basis of that notion is to ¡°attack a straw man¡±.

Similar arguments are echoed in ¡°The revolution that wasn¡¯t¡± (Analysis, 25 April), where, in assessing Margaret Thatcher¡¯s higher education legacy, Vernon Bogdanor recalls the debates following the 1985 publication of the Green Paper The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s. During them, a Conservative backbencher proposed that universities should ¡°give up this Shakespeare nonsense and do something useful¡±, while Enoch Powell offered strongly worded criticism of any monetary cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the contents of higher education.

So what is there for us to learn from more than a millennium of intellectual squabble? When it comes to knowledge, dualistic thinking is prone to failure: knowledge is ¡°of¡± and ¡°in¡± this world, hence it cannot but be useful. The ¡°knowledge for its own sake¡± notion is a ¡°snow man¡± argument: it¡¯s about time it melted away.

Anna Notaro ()
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
University of Dundee