On The Academic Ivory Tower
Your Thursday Letter 5th March 2026

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Hi Scholar,

Recently, I came across two texts – one historical and the other fictional – which made me think all sorts of things about the academic ivory tower. It is that thinking which I reproduce in this essay.

The two texts, and the two scholars at their centre – Theodor Adorno and Joseph Knecht – represent the kind of oppositional views on the ivory tower that most debates on the matter tend to produce: one position that embraces it, and another that rejects it. Thinking with, through, and across these texts, I however found myself dissatisfied with the ivory tower debate itself, which tends to be framed primarily in terms of what scholars owe the world – that is, the scholar’s contribution to the world. 

What the texts did raise for me, however, was a different question:

What does the world do for the scholar?

On The Academic Ivory Tower

— Written by The Critic

In the months leading up to his death in 1969, Theodoro Adorno would come to remark in an interview with Der Spiegel:

For most scholars today, the ivory tower is something to be feared – something to be broken out of. The concern is that the work we do might not have any meaning if it remains confined within the walls of the academy. After all, the charge of remaining in the “ivory tower” is a critique frequently directed at academic work by wider society. And in many ways, we have come to accept this critique. Scholarship cannot remain within academic circles alone; it must somehow inform practice and the practical, everyday world. 

There is something quite unsettling at the prospect of accepting the ivory tower. 

Adorno was not only an influential academic figure but also a prominent public intellectual in postwar Germany. That is, his work had weight both inside and outside of the academy. 

What had then prompted him to declare that the ivory tower was not something that troubled him, and indeed something he seemed prepared to embrace?

Scholar, Continue Reading?