PERSPECTIVE ON HIGHER EDUCATION : Ivory Tower Has Grown Too Tall : Where are the impressive research programs on poverty, unemployment, homelessness or the drug epidemic?

Is the modern university sufficiently engaged in service to the nation? Are today’s scholars too much in the ivory tower, unresponsive to national and world affairs? These questions, never wholly dormant, recently have been raised with renewed intensity.

Harvard University President Derek Bok argues in his important new book, “Universities and the Future of America,” that “university leaders have not worked sufficiently hard to bring their institutions to attend to our most important national problems.”

Bok, who is retiring after 20 years at Harvard’s helm, candidly critiques higher education’s failure to engage itself in solving crises beyond the campus. He notes that “there has been no dearth of criticism regarding the vicissitudes of general education, the neglect of undergraduate teaching, the abuses of intercollegiate athletics and the yearly surge in college tuitions. Yet no such outcry has occurred over the lack of strong schools of education and public administration or the failure to mount impressive research programs to increase our understanding of poverty, chronic unemployment, homelessness or the virulent drug epidemic.”

Given the nation’s historic link between higher education and service, it’s troubling that this essential function is now often overlooked. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1837 address to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, argued that “he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdoms.”

In 1906, an editor celebrating the leadership of William Rainey Harper at the new University of Chicago articulated what he believed to be the essential character of the American scholar. Scholarship, he observed, was regarded by the British as “a means and measure of self-development,” by Germans as “a means in itself,” but by Americans as “equipment for service.”

And historian Frederick Rudolf, in describing 19th-Century American educators, observed that “all were touched by the American faith in tomorrow, in the unquestionable capacity of Americans to achieve a better world.” This commitment to practicality was remarkably enhanced by the Land Grant College Act of 1862, which gave federal land to each state to support education in the liberal arts and provide training to undergird the nation’s agricultural and mechanical revolutions.

Today, however, while “service” is routinely listed as a priority by many universities, it is accorded little attention, even in programs where the application of knowledge is most appropriate.

Twenty years ago, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman of Harvard pointed out that the affiliation of professional schools with universities had tended to dampen their commitment to service, even though the original purpose of these schools was to bridge theory and practice. Professional schools, according to Jencks and Riesman, have, oddly enough, fostered “a more academic and less practical view of what students need to know.”

The universities’ current detachment stems, at least in part, from internal priorities. The conventional view of scholarly excellence tends to be hierarchical, contributing to what some observers have called the “culture of separation.” Tenure and promotion depend more on research and publication than the application of knowledge, and unless and until the reward system is changed, it’s unlikely the academy will address itself to national needs.

Another reason colleges and universities have rejected service is that so many functions have been dumped into the category that it has lost all meaning. The term now is taken to include sitting on committees, advising student clubs and performing department chores.

As important as these functions are, they should not be confused with scholarship. As Emerson argued, action is an intellectual resource for the scholar, and service has lost meaning precisely because it is often disconnected from intellectual life. Too frequently it means not doing scholarship for the common good, but merely doing good works.

One of the great strengths of the university is its capacity to stand back, to engage in objective critique. Being “too much of the world” can compromise the integrity of the academy at its very core. Surely, the university must continue to be a center for free inquiry and reflection.

Still, the application of knowledge to contemporary social and civic concerns can and should be a more highly valued part of scholarly endeavor. What’s needed on America’s campuses today is a recognition that the application of knowledge is scholarly work that flows out of serious inquiry and, in turn, leads to new knowledge and new insights.

Universities need not transform themselves into centers for social service or political action. Their work, at the core, is disciplined inquiry and critical thought. Still, in medicine, in law, in business and in education, for example, learning and practice should be better joined, reconnecting the academy more vitally to the larger society.