In academe, more than anywhere else, one would imagine that the need to anticipate problems and defuse them before they mushroom into ground zero nightmares would be recognized - and acted upon. Instead, much like most institutions grown too unwieldy and conservative and self-satisfying for their own good, academe prefers to let crisis overwhelm it before it responds, like a great lumbering wildebeest, like a soon-to be extinct wooly mammoth, like ... Well, like something about to be naturally selected against.
To connect Aristotelian and evolutionary metaphors, I hold that the greatest evils are often passive -- extinctions of the good. They usually do not result from nefarious conspiracies amongst a small cabal, but from the shortsighted inertia of reactive sloth and failure of vision. People flourish not merely because of the freedom from oppression (the usual watchword of academic freedom) but from the openness of opportunity -- the broadening of horizons -- that takes place amid creative investigation and the enlargement of human imagination.
When instead thought and effort becomes consumed in holding on to ones traditional sinecures, the loss is real, although never seen - it is the loss of potential wasted, of opportunities foregone, of lives becoming those of quiet desperation rather than the glory of the search for truth. The various applied benefits of academe were always unintended spinoffs of its real purpose -- the attainment of wisdom. And wisdom comes, not merely from mastering the most efficient technical ways to realize our ends, but from the ardent and honest pursuit of the knowledge of the goals we ought to seek. True wisdom contains a moral imperative to act, not merely to react.
The demise - whether temporary or permanent -- of the Auburn Horizon is just such a failure of proactivity. Environmental scanning -- which peruses megabytes of information to extract what is useful and important for a narrower form of inquiry -- is not only essential, but has always been a part of the raison d’etre of academe. We call it research. Such new technologies for environmental scanning already exist in an embryonic fashion - search engines like Lycos et al. for the Web, indexes of recent periodicals for the various disciplines (such as the Philosophers Index). As the divisions of cognitive labor continue to grow, but as interdisciplinary needs likewise strengthen, the future will force the development of more tools like the Auburn Horizon. Its demise is thus one more testament to the possible extinction of academia in its current form, and so may unfortunately serve as a canary in the coal mine of academic politics -- an adumbration of the future of liberal education at Auburn University and beyond.
