At the mercy of the pack

Elias Canetti describes a "pack" as "an ungrowing
group of men in a state of excitement whose fiercest
wish is to be more." The description comes from Canetti's brilliant but mostly ignored Crowds and Power, which describes the pervasiveness of this paradoxical type of social group. While aptly showing that packs are one of the fundamental units of society, Canetti doesn't bring his analyses fully into the present. Still, as he moves into the 1940s, totalitarian regimes, and the like, the overwhelming sense is one of stasis. The primitive social groupings he describes have been transplanted but not transformed: it isn't too hard to see that Yale and the other Ivies are packs themselves.

Canetti differentiates between "inward" and "outward" packs, and Yale is evidently the former. The inward pack "forms around a man who has died." Yale, as with all the Ivies, is named after its founder, who embodies the tradition that the school attempts to uphold. Inward packs have no external goals, and from this comes the notion of the ivory tower, the image which is simultaneously attacked by those outside the university and inevitably embraced by academics. William H. Gass, Washington University's man of letters, stated, "The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene....The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward....Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can."

All these causes are academic in their non-practicality. The word "academic" means just as much: non-vocational and non-pragmatic. Yale is not an ivory tower by choice, but by definition. It always seeks to be more, but not to expand outward. It achieves through constant population flux.

There is no greater embodiment of the inward tradition than what Canetti terms "communion," the ceremony of pack increase performed at the common meal. In its most primitive form, it is the group eating of an animal, which is then incorporated into the pack through the process of transformation. From inception, the common meal was a crucial part of the great universities, as well as of their bastard siblings, New England boarding schools such as Exeter, Andover, and Choate. In years past, supper was the time at which both faculty and students came together to reaffirm their unity and to celebrate academic life.

Yet at the university, the food itself is unimportant. The university strives to distance itself as much as possible from both the preparation and disposal of the food. Hired workers make the food and are removed from contact with the faculty and the students. Most telling are the disposal systems that specifically prevent diners from being able to see the ultimate destination of the used trays that are turned in after a meal. A perfect example is the long conveyor belt in Commons that goes for many yards before then taking a blind turn into the adjoining kitchen.

With the de-emphasis on the food, what remains are only the people themselves, giving rise to an increase process Canetti terms "self-consumption." This process occurs because the university has turned so far inward on itself that the incorporation of external animals serves no purpose.

Transformation arises not through external incorporation but purely through an internal metabolism, through the consumption of the knowledge of others and the perpetuation of the collective intelligence. While possibly a nobler goal than eating the flesh of animals, it leads to a type of cannibalism. Since the pack revolves around the desire to increase, coupled with an inability to expand, what results is a self-propagating but self-consuming process of infighting.

More specifically, what results is a process of triage between the pack's members, resulting in one of two outcomes. With failure and the consumption of one by the others comes exile from the pack, followed by replacement. With success comes prominence and complete envelopment into the pack.

This success is called tenure.

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