A response to The Harper Review’s winter 2025 proposition, “Should the ivory tower endure?”
Dear editors,
In Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game, it is centuries in the future and there is only one form of pure academic pursuit left, which combines all science, mathematics, music, and cultural research into a single activity: the Glass Bead Game. The game is reserved for only the brightest scholars, who consolidate in the remote province of Castalia, where the life of the mind sits above all else. All academic progress is sequestered from the outside world behind the enigmatic rules of the Game and within the minds of the taciturn intellectuals who spend their lives training to play.
The protagonist Joseph Knecht displays early talent in music and is admitted to Waldzell, Castalia’s most prestigious institution. Through years of training, he improves his skills, joins the Castalian Order, and dedicates his life to the Game. After decades of scholarship, he ascends to the highest position in the Castalian Order, the Magister Ludi, “Master of the Game.”
But Knecht is not happy. His teenage friendship with fellow student Plinio Designori haunts him. Plinio sees the order of Castalia as harmful, holing away knowledge behind endless layers of abstraction so that it no longer impacts the outside world. Castalia is an ivory tower in every sense. Plinio objects to “how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart.”
Eventually Knecht leaves his position against the wishes of the Castalian leadership. But when he resigns, he does not say that the Glass Bead Game is too abstract to be productive. Rather, he laments, that when “the Glass Bead Game is destroyed, Castalia and the world will suffer a loss, but they will scarcely be aware of it at the moment”. Abstract knowledge is incredibly valuable, but the outside dangers of economic uncertainty, possible warfare, and shifts in political power are credible—nay, inevitable—threats to Castalia which the Order chooses to ignore. In his resignation letter, Knecht explains, “We eat our bread, use our libraries, expand our schools and archives—but if the nation no longer wants to authorize this, or if it should be struck by impoverishment, war, and so on, then our life and studying would be over in a minute.”
Unfortunately, the scholars are in no position to save Castalia in times of uncertainty. To be a political executive, Knecht explains, would “require wholehearted delight in extroverted activity, a bent for identifying oneself with outward goals, and of course also a certain swiftness and lack of scruple about the choice of ways to attain success. And these are traits that a scholar … does not have, because for us contemplation is more important than action.”
The ivory tower cannot endure forever no matter how valuable or invaluable it is. It will always corrode under the demands of the outside world. The tower—at least in the form of furthering research, since storing current knowledge is as simple as archiving papers on a hard drive—will never be fully self-sufficient, requiring outside donations or government subsidies to endure.
At the University of Chicago, our endowment depends on alumni donors that have foregone academic pursuit for career wealth and glory, on hundred-million-dollar bequests set aside for the donor’s wishes, and on government grants that academics are beholden to—far from an institution of pure academic research. Questioning whether the ivory tower should or should not endure commits the same error that Plinio warns Knecht about: that is, putting what is theoretical three steps above what is practical.
Pragmatically,
Daniel Chen
Image: Elihu Vedder, San Gimignano, oil on canvas, 1850 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).