The intrusion of money and management rationality—or what passes for rationality— at the heart of the university belongs to a wider movement: the transformation and measured flattening of all social bonds. A positive aspect of this is the freedom from hierarchical and religious bonds, including the “mandarinat” and certain types of selection. Accessibility becomes a permanent question. Negative aspects are obvious: the grabbing of the minds and especially public resources. The inexorable flattening of social bonds, however, is a new praeparatio evangelica, in the sense that modern individuals are progressively freed from the survivalist need to abide by the social network to which they belong and may become more open to the risks of living a more universal life in which generosity of spirit does not abide by the old “do ut des.” This is the spirit, one hopes, of modern taxation and social security systems (see Maimonides on this, and to the contrary, Bush et co). In the pursuit of knowledge, the grace spoken of by Plato in the Republic becomes accessible to all. Yet, here too, the “signs” or markers of knowledge have become liquid, not only because one can buy ever more discrete parts of it but also because the nature of what passes now for knowledge is a collection of ingenious transactions, a recomposition of notions and symbols, in a notation system (quotes, footnotes, CVs, departmental accounting, etc.) where the share of discovery becomes more and more mysterious. But here too I think of something similar to the praeparatio evangelica: beyond a transaction that has knowledge as its proclaimed goal (but in reality survival and power), more people than ever are free to seek further, knowing that the more specific the prize, the more suspect it is of manipulation or at least inadequacy. The pricing of knowledge leads to a reflection on the pricelessness of knowledge, on its gift aspects, much as in the economic domain the more specific and universal pricing is, the deeper the realization that the real value of certain objects is beyond price.
