Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 9 | Issue 2 Article 7 January 1997 Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon Carol Weisbrod Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Carol Weisbrod, Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon, 9 Yale J.L. & Human. (1997). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol9/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Weisbrod: Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon Book Review Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon David Damrosch, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. 225. $32.50 Carol Weisbrod* We have various images of the life of the scholar. One is suggested by Wordsworth's description of a statue of Newton: "The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."' Another image is less noble, as Jaroslav Pelikan has recently reminded us, though no less isolated. Dr. Causabon, the infinitely disappointing husband of George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, is a scholar hard at work on a pointless inquiry, independently and forever.2 In his recent book, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the * Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law, University of Connecticut Law School. 1. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, in THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF WORDSWORTH 139 (Houghton Mifflin 1964) (1850). 2. Pelikan writes that the picture of Causbon in Middlemarch is "one of the most chilling depictions of a pendant in all of literature ...." JAROSLAV PELIKAN, THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY: A REEXAMINATION 3 (1992) (discussing GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH (Bert G. Hornback ed., Norton Critical ed. 1977) (1871-72)). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1997 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 9, Iss. 2 [1997], Art. 7 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 9: 443 University, David Damrosch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, intends to propose a "new model of the scholarly community and of its relation to society at large."3 In so doing, he adds two unusual figures to our set of scholarly images, Tamino and Papageno. Tamino and Papageno are Mozart's seekers after truth in the Magic Flute,4 in a setting described by Professor Damrosch as Sarastro's dungeon. In effect, these two can be seen as the contemporary graduate student and the contemporary academic, seeking enlightment not alone in an ivory tower, but in the silent depths and isolation of a separated community. We Scholars is a "secular sermon," 5 polemical while still tentative. Its basic point is that what is called the academic community should become a real community. Damrosch's goal is not to argue against the values represented by the traditional academic, individualist model but to argue against the monopoly presently exercised by the association of isolation and research. 6 Professor Damrosch has a wide circle of friends. They include people from varied disciplines.7 He also knows people outside the university.8 His friends and colleagues appear throughout the book, adding their perspectives and comments to his account. Finally, they testify to his point and show Damrosch as an embodiment of his thesis. Professor Damrosch believes that disciplinary specialization and a definition of isolation as the condition of scholarship have resulted in a unfortunate situation. His solution is to have conversation and community among and between gregarious specialists. The book proceeds with two dimensions of university life in mind, the first generalist and specialist, the second (largely a trait in individual personalities) the sociable and the solitary. While the intellectual generalist or specialist may or may not have started out as gregarious, 3. DAVID DAMROSCH, WE SCHOLARS: CHANGING THE CULTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY 5 (1995). 4. For a review of the plot of the opera, see WlLLI APPEL & RALPH DANIEL, HARVARD BRIEF DICTIONARY OF MUSIC (1960): Tamino (tenor), seeing a picture of Pamina (soprano), daughter of the evil Queen of the Night (soprano), falls in love with her. Accompanied by the bird-catcher Papageno (baritone), he goes out to rescue her from the temple of the high priest Sarastro (bass) where she is held captive, guarded and pestered by the moor Monostatos (tenor). Sarastro, who holds Pamina only in order "to guide her to wisdom," finds Tamino worthy, and also promises that Papageno will find a companion-Papagena (soprano). But various ordeals (injunction against speaking, passing through fire and water) are necessary before the two pairs of lovers are united. Id. at 164. 5. DAMROSCH, supra note 3, at 208. 6. Id. at 103. 7. See, e.g., id. at 193 (paleontology); id/ at 188 (cellular immunology); see also id. at 60, 95. 8. He refers to friends outside the university residing in places such as Tribeca and Soho. See id. at 277. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol9/iss2/7 2 Weisbrod: Building Community in Sarastro's Dungeon Weisbrod 19971 it is clear to Damrosch that the present condition of the university (and particularly the training of scholars) leads to the association of substantive specialization and the production of academic isolates, whose only contact with the idea of community, a very limited one, comes from dealing with other specialists in the same specialty.9 "I am not positing any absolute or one-to-one correlation between a scholar's personality and the writing that scholar will produce," he writes, "but there is a general family resemblance. 10 Damrosch believes that "[a]t some middle range in between one's private self and one's public teaching and writing, there exists what could be called one's scholarly personality. ... " Modem scholarship, he concludes, "has taken on a markedly introverted cast ....,1 David Damrosch's book on the university-one of a number to be published recently-argues that when people are accustomed to intensely individual work over a very long time, in the end they are less able to work collaboratively. Damrosch's work is a rich account of the state of the universities, including responses to many current discussions of the university and a good deal about the changes in higher education in the last one hundred years. Causabon, it is clear, is a man who "flunked sandbox."' 3 The argument of the book is that this is true, in effect, of many if not most academics. Gregarious intellectuals are screened out of academic life by the model of the isolated researcher. In general, Damrosch says, "We do freedom better than we do home."' 4 The image of Sarastro's dungeon is used by Damrosch in connection with Julius G (...truncated)