T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution 22 The University, Metrics, and the Good Life Robert Frodeman, J. Britt Holbrook, and Kelli Barr Knowledge and money have no common measure.—Aristotle In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the best of all lives is the life of contemplation. Outside of the cash nexus, indeed separate from any societal function, contemplation is the godlike activity of thought thinking itself. With the decline of monastic life, the academy might be thought of as the last bastion of reflection. But whether Aristotle would find much con- templation there today is doubtful. Driven by economic crisis and the need for greater and greater output, academic life is increasingly characterized by impatience and anxiety. In his or her daily activities, the contemporary academic is more likely to be found with shoulders bent over a keyboard, answering a daily avalanche of email, and hurrying from teaching to per- sonnel meetings to the pursuit of grants. But what is contemplation? Is it a distinctive form of thinking? Isn’t thinking just a matter of getting mentally to work? If we seek help from ety- mology, the English ‘contemplation’ comes from the Latin contemplatio, the silent gazing on the divine. Of long use within Christian theology, the term itself contains templum, which identifies the marking out of a sacred district or sanctuary. Contemplatio was itself a translation of the Greek theoria, which in its nontechnical sense simply meant ‘seeing.’ Overall, ‘contemplation’ points to a slow, recursive type of thinking—not the rock dropped in the pond, but rather the waves that move out across the water. It is a type of thought that is now decidedly out of favor—commonly viewed as unproductive and indulgent. David Fincher’s film The Social Net- work (2010) highlights our alternative reality. Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerberg exemplifies our understanding of intelligence today: swift, tech- nological, and leaning toward the autistic. The opening scene, a conversa- tion between Zuckerberg and a soon-to-be former girlfriend, shows what has been lost. Where the girlfriend displays an ambient intelligence, sensitive on a variety of registers, Zuckerberg’s intelligence is narrowband. Processing information at the speed of light, he lacks the capacity for empathy or a feel- ing for diferences of tone and nuance. Irony escapes him: as the girlfriend increasingly voices her irritation he asks several times “is this real?” For Zuckerberg, her slower way of thinking is the sign of inferior intelligence—a fact codified by her attending Boston University rather than Harvard. Brey et al 2nd pages.indd 307 Brey et al 2nd pages.indd 307 1/3/2012 1:16:17 PM 1/3/2012 1:16:17 PM