Useful Uselessness
At a recent meeting of the advancement community of The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Dean Rashid Bashir recommended we read Abraham Flexner’s essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” to understand the importance of our college’s research enterprise, so I did. Flexner’s essay was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1939, in the eve of World War 2. His opening statement is alarmingly applicable today: Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women—old and young—detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? Flexner promotes basic research for its own sake, resisting the urge to say they every project ...