“What is the Knapp Foundation?”, “what do they actually do?” and “why should I help them?”
As a charitable body we depend entirely on financial support from people like you. We believe what we do is vital in our society, and yet it takes a while to understand.
We can’t show pictures of animals we have rescued, or children whose health has dramatically improved because of us. What we do is fundamental, yet often difficult to see. Study and scholarship preserves and maintains the practices of how to understand the world, and how to communicate that understanding not just among ourselves, but for everyone. These are the practices of truth itself.
The Knapp Foundation is an association of scholars, organised in the ancient manner of a college, with junior and senior members. We work with and alongside the universities to promote and care for scholarship at the highest levels. We unashamedly attempt to find out the truth of each of the areas we study, and we publicise our attempts, because we believe the truth is not something private, nor that study is a personal or individual pursuit, but is something with which everyone is profoundly concerned. We don’t claim to have the truth, but we do insist on holding to and promoting those practices which yield truth in the public sphere, and allow what is true to become more widely known, understood and discussed.
The pillars on which we have built our foundation are: excellence, tested by some of the most eminent people in their field; freedom from external pressures and influences so that the truth speaks for itself – in whatever field or activity it needs to speak; and collegiality, a shared and open friendship to truth and the practices that preserve it.
On this page you will find a video of our director, in discussion with our first fully-funded Knapp Fellow, explaining why we are building the Knapp Foundation, what the pursuit of truth means to us, how we have structured ourselves, and what we are trying to achieve.
What led us to build the Knapp Foundation? While there are many committed people in the universities (teachers, students and researchers), there are reasons to think that not all is well. The universities have become large-scale businesses, run along technocratic lines. They are now driven by powerful bureaucracies often with very different priorities to those whose work is to teach, study, and research. They are heavily regulated by the state and have lost much of their financial and intellectual independence, finding themselves pressured into roles only indirectly connected with the pursuit of truth. Academics are often now poorly paid, and secure or permanent positions are rarer (in some universities less than half the teaching or research staff have permanent jobs). Students, on the other hand, must shoulder considerable costs (much of it debt) to study degrees that not all of them are convinced they really need. Courses are often less rigorous or demanding than they could or should be. Universities have struggled to maintain the open atmosphere of intellectual enquiry that historically was their hallmark.
In the video we make reference to Adam Ulam’s book of nearly fifty years ago, The Fall of the American University (London: Alcove, 1972). Ulam was one of the first to diagnose the threats the universities (including in the UK) face. Among Ulam’s many powerful points we find him saying
“Over the last twenty years there has grown a belief, as erroneous as it is basically incompatible with democracy, that the university can and ought to instruct society on how to conduct its affairs . . . this claim has had the natural but paradoxical consequence that while trying, and in most cases failing, to do what it should not do, the university has increasingly surrendered its authority to do what it should do: to run its own affairs with minimum interference by governmental authorities at all levels, pressure groups of all kinds, and by the trends and fashions of the moment.”
The university exists to let things be understood for themselves, and as they are: not as we would like them to be, or as fashion dictates. A central aspect of our work is to promote the scholarship, and the means to pursue it, that enable us to understand how things really are: the paths to the originality of truth itself.