A response to The Harper Review’s winter 2025 proposition, “Should the ivory tower endure?”
Dear editors,
When’s the last time something extraordinary occurred in your life?
We live mundane lives, adhering to the status quo. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman argues that 95 percent of consumer decision-making is subconscious, and psychological research estimates that nearly half of our actions are habitual. Yet films depict lives filled with coincidences, remarkable characters, and surreal colors and hues. They are like an ivory tower to everyday life. When I crave novelty and alternative possibilities, I indulge myself in films. In Disney films, princes and maids fall in love, overcome impossibilities, and live happily ever after. In Chungking Express, Faye secretly renovates Cop 633’s flat, washes away traces of his ex, and allows his heart to mirror that flat, gradually and unknowingly opening up to Faye. But as the films’ credits roll and I return to the broad daylight, the Disney fable of love becomes an immature fantasy and Faye’s voyeuristic acts resemble that of a creep. The fact is: Cinderella doesn’t exist in a society where inequality pervades and love in Chungking Express is too eccentric and incidental to be real. These fantasies are too vulnerable to stand criticism from the outside world, where laws and rigidities besiege these creatures cultivated in the ivory tower.
In my world, films meet higher education during a film analysis class at the Logan Center in Spring 2022. Experimental and avant-garde films were the focus. Nothing was stable or mundane. There were constant challenges to the status quo through the re-imagining of traditional cinematic elements such as shots and compositions. We viewed Mothlight by Stan Brakhage, where a tape of earthly materials passing through a projector was arguably considered a “film.” We discussed an extraordinary act by Robert Ryman, who produced a blank canvas that is now valued at over a million dollars. Such were the most interesting phenomena to the class but the most irrelevant nonsense to the outside world. In this way, the class was an exemplary ivory tower of higher education, built to tumble another, in this instance, of films.
Are we out of touch?
“How the democrats lost the working class” was the headline on today’s New York Times front page (January 4). Similar headlines have appeared several times since the past election. They revolve around the puzzling realization for college-educated democrats that working-class people, who they thought they represented, are among those one in two Americans that they demonize as Trump supporters. While reading the article, a scene replayed in my mind. It was last summer when I studied history abroad in Paris. The class was strolling on a narrow sidewalk when a homeless Parisian occupied the path. After exchanging uncomfortable looks, the class circled around, and no one had left anything for her. But just a moment ago we were dissecting class struggles and social justice! On campus, most UChicagoans probably support redistribution policies, but how many of us always tip? When sheltered by an ivory tower, it is too easy to challenge what’s out there, for when the rigidity falls apart outside, the sheltered do not bear the turmoil.
An extraordinary disillusionment
Extraordinary and out of touch, the ivory tower shelters anyone who sidetracks and re-imagines the status quo. The activists for the marginalized, the dreamers of utopias, the self-righteous missionaries, the higher man above the mass. These are the most hopeful people for re-imagining the mundane, yet the most miserable when reality disillusions them.
Disillusionment is costly. The disillusioned are carriers of misery when the world offers endless beauty and outlets for happiness. To remain stubborn and self-righteous while getting things wrong is even costlier; the stakes can be as high as the fate of a nation.
But extraordinarity is necessary. In the ivory tower of higher education, this is more than the lack of the mundane; it signifies change, deviation from the status quo. The change is out of touch as much as the status quo is common sense, and nonsensical as much as the status quo is self-justifying. Thus the most extraordinary changes are also first the most ridiculous, from Galileo to Rosa Parks to Ed Diener…
So the ivory tower must endure. An ivory tower with less misery, self-righteousness, and estrangement, whether possible, is my utopia.
Extraordinarily,
Jacob Zhang
Image: Louis-Auguste Bisson and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, The Portal of Saint Ursinus at Bourges, rue du Vieux Poirier, albumen print, 1854 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).