Eurovision (song contest) fever is normally a seasonal matter. The first symptoms make themselves felt around February, followed by a full-blown epidemic that ravages the population in May. The peak lasts for about two weeks, after which the whole thing goes into hibernation for several months.

Not so this year. The news last week was that the Eurovision is on a list of topics included in a study unit that makes up a tiny part of University course. As expected, it led to an extended round of university bashing.

The Clouds is a comedy play by Aristophanes. It pokes fun at a fictional school called The Thinkery, among other things, and specifi­cally at Socrates, its head. We learn that Socrates keeps himself busy measuring how far a flea can jump, and discussing whether a gnat hums through its mouth or its anus.

It’s a delicious satire on science and knowledge, of the same kind we find in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. At Lagado, Gulliver visits the Grand Academy, which is inhabi­ted by dotty professors who carry out all sorts of idiotic experiments. One tries to extract sunlight out of cucumbers, another to find a way of building houses from the roof down, and so on.

The academy is clearly modelled on the Royal Society. It is also a spoof of it, because Swift evidently had a very low opinion of the sort of science that is interested in lower forms of life and that produces (if at all) results that are neither tangible nor useful.

A good part of me is extremely amused by satire of this kind. I think it’s a fine pastime to poke fun at universities and academic scholarship. And, since the University of Malta does not currently feature cucumber suntraps or bloated gnats among its research output, the Eurovision is a good place to start.

Except much of what was said in the wake of the Eurovision Course Crisis was not meant to be funny. It was actually people being dead serious, and fairly gormless, about the whole idea of what a university is.

I don’t entirely blame them. In fact, academics have largely themselves to thank for the misunderstanding. I have in mind the sorry sight of university people trying hard to convince the world that the ivory tower is a fantasy, and that the research carried out at their institutions is useful, practical, and a boundless contribution to the wellbeing of society.

University is not there to study only serious things, but rather to study things in a serious way

Not all of it is, truth be told. A good chunk of the teaching and research done at any university – and that includes work in both the sciences and the humanities – is, in fact, fairly useless, pardon my Philistine. Jumping fleas perhaps it ain’t, but neither is it the discovery of penicillin.

Which brings me to some of the questions behind the Eurovision controversy. First, who gets to decide which scholarly fields are useful enough to deserve the time of university academics and students?

The answer to that is: academics and students themselves. That’s what we mean by scholarly autonomy, which is surely one of the core values of a university. To take away that autonomy would be to transform university into a technical college.

There’s nothing the matter with technical colleges, and most of the work they do is directly useful. It’s just that they’re not universities, because the premise of a university is not usefulness narrowly understood, but rather intellectual breadth.

I’m saying that universities are enormously privileged. On the one hand, they derive at least some of their funding from outside sources (the State, in many cases). On the other, they are premised on not letting those sources, or anyone else, dent their autonomy. Put simply, the public gives money to keep university independent.

At face value not a terribly good deal for the public, but there’s at least one thing that redeems the academy. Anyone can study anything at university. Certainly the University of Malta is extremely philosophical about entry requirements. Which is a good thing, because it means that the paying public is not a spectator to academic autonomy, but rather a party to it.

The second question we need to ask is: Are things like the Eurovision too frivolous to merit the attention of academic auto­nomy? The answer is that university is not there to study only serious things, but rather to study things in a serious way.

I’m quite clueless as to what the first ‘serious’ means, but then I wasn’t the one who brought it up. I suppose it means things like Beethoven, DNA and eye surgery (as opposed to the Eurovision, football and the first few seconds following the Big Bang).

The second ‘serious’ is the more productive one. It means to study stuff in a way that’s in-depth, rigorous and systematic. It’s worth taking a second to apply the argument to the Eurovision.

The point of departure is that it is a signi­ficant cultural phenomenon. Studied in a serious way, it can tell us a lot about things like gender, nationalism and political factions. The quality or otherwise of the course will depend on how productively the lecturer and students manage to explore these themes.

The choice is between puritanism and promiscuity. A puritan university is one that limits itself to fields and subjects that are generally deemed useful and practical. A promiscuous one sets no such restrictions and opts instead for a no-holds-barred intellectual curiosity.

As in other things, the puritans may yet prevail. My consolation is that Aristophanes wrote The Clouds almost 2,500 years ago. At this rate, chances are I won’t live to see the demise of the roving intellectual eye.

mafalzon@hotmail.com