The danger in the academic world

"To my mind our danger [in the academic world] is exactly the same as that of the older system [the scholasticism of the late medieval period]. Unless we are carefull, we shall conventionalize knowledge. Our literary criticism will suppress initiative. Our historical criticism will conventionalize our our ideas of the springs of human conduct. Our scientific systems will suppress all understanding of the ways of the universe which fall outside of their abstractions. Our ways of testing will exclude all the youth whose ways of thought lie outside our conventions of learning. In such ways the universities, with their scheme of orthodoxies, will stiffle the progress of the race, unless in some fortunate stirrings of humanity they are in time remodeled or swept away."

Alfred North Whitehead
Essays in Science and Philosophy