A response to The Harper Review’s winter 2025 proposition, “Should the ivory tower endure?”
Dear editors,
The “ivory tower” should endure, but please, come down once in a while. Come down from the tower and bring more people up, as many as you can! Dare to make those who reside in the tower represent the world they wax poetic about.
The socio-economic, racial, and political tragedy of the American educational model demands attention. But so long as what Jonathan Kozol aptly describes as the “savage inequalities” coloring our public educational model endure, so too must the ivory tower.
We need the elites. We need the intelligentsia to remain just privileged enough so they don’t get too bogged down by day-to-day burdens. We need them to have the luxury of a life of the mind. Ivory tower intellectuals like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Roxane Gay, and Judith Butler serve to better our country. They are well-informed, civically engaged, and highly educated. They contribute radical, thought-provoking ideas influencing public policy, driving national discourse, and shifting political priorities.
Sure, one doesn’t need to be a member of the academic elite or the modern intelligentsia to be a highly intelligent, intellectually motivated, and civically engaged person. Somebody once told me you can receive a Harvard-level education with the swipe of a New York Public Library card.
What you won’t get with your public library card, however, is the power and privilege that the ivory tower affords. One needs proximity to power and profit in order to make significant changes within the established system. How many presidents and Supreme Court justices went to Yale again? Was it not the University of Chicago where Dr. Kimberlee Crenshaw and her peers published their revolutionary writings on Critical Race Theory?
The current political moment demands that the ivory tower not only endures, but actually flourishes. With the second coming of President-elect Donald Trump, ongoing global power struggles, the rise of the U.S. tech-industrial complex, tragedies in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, inflation, and all the other headlines, we need a space for intellectual refuge, creativity, and critique.
But there is a pervasive cultural rot in our educational system even, and perhaps especially, at the elite level. The decline in the rigorous examination of ideas coincides with a strange and worrisome reorientation towards party over country. We are in danger of losing our infatuation with the American ideals on which our country was founded. Instead we worship the strange dogmas of lazy minds.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche warned us to beware of such false idols at the turn of the century and bravely overcome them—most didn’t listen. Nietzsche was then, and remains now, in good company. The Romantics, Transcendentalists, and Postmodernists all had their own warning too.
So, when we venture down into the world below, let’s not forget what we learn there. It is our responsibility to remember. But please, go on and get back up. There’s work to be done.
Responsibly,
Sophia Gutierrez
Image: Samuel Palmer, The Lonely Tower, etching on paper, 1879 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).