Cities of Intellect
Expertise, Community, and Identity
Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
New for me
Universities fascinate and challenge me as institutions partly because of the antiquity of the idea of what we now call “universities.” Modern histories usually look back to universities at Bologna and at Paris, but it is equally fair to stretch the timeline back to ancient Egypt and to China. The idea and practice of gathering scholars, teachers, and students in a durable institutional configuration is centuries-old.
Antiquity and durability marry churn. “The university” is in a process of almost constant if sometimes subterranean change, both in itself and in its relationships with communities and worlds beyond its literal and metaphorical walls. “Harvard” has been “Harvard” since the early 1600s, but underneath the Harvard name, brand, and legal identity the practices, purposes, and effects of “Harvard” have turned over and over again. What makes “Harvard” “Harvard” is not only an intellectual parlor game; it is one key to figuring how what “Harvard” should do, or be today (if you are running Harvard, or working at Harvard, or a student or graduate of Harvard).
I am fascinated and challenged by cities for many of the same reasons. People both want and need to live together. They do so for a wide variety of reasons and at a wide variety of scales. Again, durability paired with change has long been the order of the day. “London” has long been “London,” and (not “but”) “London” today is not even the “London” of 30 years ago, in many respects, let alone the “London” of 100 or 200 years ago. The appearance of institutional continuity belies the experience of institutional change. Sometimes, even disorder. Students at Harvard have been protesting one thing or another since at least the late 1700s.
At the same time, and in both settings, I am fascinated by the diversity of those configurations, through time and right now. No two universities are precisely alike; even Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, so similar on the surface, are in their details quite different institutions. London and Paris, Chicago and Atlanta, New Haven and New York.
Not for nothing did Clark Kerr marry the two in the phrase “City of Intellect” in his reflection on the mid-20th century university. The link goes to Nicholas Dirks’s more recent reflection on Kerr and that phrase.
I will bring this home, concretely:
This morning, I woke up to the news that among this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is Joel Mokyr, long-time faculty member at Northwestern University and a celebrated economic historian. The Nobel committee’s press release cites his work “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.”
I met Joel Mokyr once, in 2012. He was a keynote speaker at the first IASC Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commons, in Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium. (IASC being the International Association for the Study of the Commons, an organization that gathers and advances the work of researchers in the tradition of Elinor Ostrom; Ostrom herself was among its founders.) His talk focused on the Republic of Letters, a 17th and 18th century correspondence network among people whom, today, we would call “scientists,” in Europe and the American colonies. Anticipating the book that he published later as A Culture of Growth, Mokyr argued that the economic transformation of Europe was underwritten, to a significant degree, by the open sharing of “scientific” knowledge via the Republic. Knowledge sharing promoted (and promotes) innovation, in short, a tangible payoff of the instinct that “knowledge commons,” as a descriptive phenomenon, can be linked empirically to improvements in social welfare.
Mokyr’s talk had a specific impact on me. I gave my own talk at that conference, an early version of the work on “constructing cultural commons” (later retrofitted with the “knowledge commons” moniker) that I and my colleagues Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg had published a year earlier. The depth and power of Mokyr’s presentation (not to mention his stature as a scholar) was empowering: we were on a (not necessarily “the”) right track, intellectually speaking. We had not simply found an audience; we had found a fellow traveler of a special sort.
Years later, as a contributor to a knowledge commons book on privacy policy, law, and practice, I went back to Mokyr and the Republic of Letters. On the shoulders of a giant, as it were, I re-read his work in the light of our “Governing Knowledge Commons” research framework, a device that had grown in scope and detail since 2012. And I argued that knowledge sharing as such was (and is) not the explanation for economic growth, at least not in the context of the Republic. I emphasized the character of the community as such, and the interplay among the participants, the knowledge they produced, the knowledge they shared, and the institutional matrix that held them together, that is, the Republic of Letters as a species and case study of knowledge commons and a precursor to the modern research university.
The book (“Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons”) is available here, in an Open Access format. My paper is here.
What others have to say
Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition, “Is Social Media Destroying Democracy - Or Giving It To Us Good and Hard?”
For the most part, social media doesn’t manipulate “good” people into accepting “bad” information. It simply reveals popular perspectives on reality that elites previously excluded from mainstream discourse, often for good reason. It is this public revelation and normalisation of popular ideas that explain social media’s most dramatic and dangerous impacts, including its connection to right-wing populism. … [A]s the public sphere became democratised, audiences, content creators, and entrepreneurial politicians have learned that right-wing populist ideas were far more popular than they realised. … As a result, deep fears about social media’s democratising impacts have been sublimated into a superficial discourse about algorithms. But algorithms are not the problem. The problem is that right-wing populism is popular. The problem is democracy itself.
(As Williams acknowledges, the essay condenses and re-states some of his own earlier writing as well as related commentary by others. It reminded me of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” from 2008, among sources that Williams does not cite. And it steered me into reflecting on the state of higher education today. Over the last 80 years, since World War II, mass expansion of the number of people attending American colleges and universities has been an enormously positive thing in many respects, maybe in most respects. But it has come at a number of costs to society, financial and otherwise, to the character of higher education, and to many of those students themselves. Have we gotten what we wished for? Is AI the straw that is breaking the proverbial camel’s back, exposing the fragility and incoherence of the system that we have built?)
David Hummels and Jay Akridge at Finding Equilibrium: Two Economists on Higher Ed’s Future, “How University Research Finds Its Way into Commercial Innovations.”
There are really interesting reasons that university science rarely translates directly to commercial successes like Warfarin but offers great value to society nonetheless. We’ll talk about three. One, what happens in the innovation pipeline between basic science and commercial applications. Two, idea spillovers. Three, research that generates social and economic value that cannot be commercialized. …[F]or the most part, what happens in universities is science for its own sake. Deepening our understanding of the physical and human worlds is the end goal, and worthy, regardless of whether some specific understanding makes its way into some particular consumable outcome. That means that a lot of what we produce as researchers will never directly make it into commercial use because the science is driven primarily by the individual curiosity and insights of the researcher.
(The essay hints at but does not directly explain that the sorts of “science for its own sake” research that is often the core of the university research enterprise (though not always) is not the sort of research that typically dominates corporate R&D systems. Governments and philanthropies fund the former and private companies fund the latter as part of a grand public policy bargain that was worked out during the Cold War. Basic science is intellectual infrastructure, a species of public good in economics terms. Corporate science is, typically, not; it is typically framed as a private good (or source of private goods). These two systems are complements, if they’re working well, not competitors. The Bayh-Dole statute (1980) changed some of the bargain, but not all of it, much of the change being for the worse.)
Jordan Furlong, “Three core attributes of tomorrow’s lawyers.”
The killer feature for humans, when competing with AI on relational matters, is their personal trustworthiness. A person might consider an AI to be trustworthy, if they also trust its corporate designer to prioritize that person’s best interests, to keep their information confidential, and to demonstrate fidelity in all their dealings with them. Personally, I wouldn’t trust any AI designer as far as I could throw them in that regard.
But a person can and will trust another person on all these points — if that person proves themselves worthy of that trust. Through repeated demonstrations of judgment, concern, and discretion, a lawyer can gradually build a client relationship that’s founded upon the lawyer’s personal reliability. I suspect that for the legal profession, the whole post-AI ballgame is going to come to down to trustworthiness — the capacity to consistently and legitimately earn the trust of other people, and to form and maintain a relationship built on that trust through good times and bad.
(I have been a fan of Jordan’s writing about the future of lawyers and law for a very long time. I am quoting him here more because I want to give him a little added visibility and less because this particular essay stands out, even while I like it. That said, I would like to see more attention paid to how AI systems are affecting what we mean - the collective, imprecise “we” - by references to the institutions within which lawyers and other legal professionals operate: “the legal system,” “the justice system,” and “the rule of law.” And Jordan’s points about humans and trustworthiness extend well beyond law, lawyers, and law practice. Oh, the humanity!)
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
Just completed this week: David Goldblatt, “Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency” (Harper Collins, 2025). Again I start with the publisher’s description:
Injury Time is a sharp and thought provoking look at contemporary British society through the lens of football; a society shaken by more than a decade of economic, political and social upheaval, whose causes and consequences have proved hard to grasp.
Set against the backdrop of Brexit, Covid and today’s ‘polycrisis’ – spanning economic decline, war in Europe, political unrest and climate change – this book argues that football provides an unmatched vantage point for understanding the nation’s state of affairs. From grassroots clubs battling for survival to the rise and fall of Russian oligarchs in the sport, the game’s tragedies and triumphs echo the larger shifts shaping Britain.
With striking examples such as Marcus Rashford’s anti-hunger campaign and the uproar surrounding Gary Lineker’s tweets, Injury Time underscores football’s central role in public conversation. Football, Goldblatt contends, is the ultimate societal bellwether – a reflection of Britain’s virtues and flaws alike.
Which is to say that Goldblatt, who is phenomenally witty and fluid writer, is not only writing about football (soccer), the milieu in which he achieved a certain degree of celebrity as a journalist and historian. This a book that uses football as its currency. So the reader can take away an enormously rich and detailed account of the contemporary British game, plus a scintillating if more than occasionally scathing take on contemporary British society, culture, and politics, and finally a template for using mass sport to examine social, cultural, and political issues almost anywhere, and at almost any time.
Next up: Mark Blyth, “Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge University Press, 2002). There is some heavy lifting ahead.
Thanks for sticking with me.