"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors"
About this Quote
A neat little guillotine of a sentence: culture, in Simone Veil's telling, isn’t a shared inheritance so much as a closed-loop production line. The sting is in the verb "wielded" - culture becomes a tool, not a horizon. And the punchline is the recursion: professors manufacturing professors, an academic perpetual motion machine that converts prestige into more prestige while mistaking self-replication for social value.
Veil, a lawyer and public figure shaped by the hard stakes of 20th-century French politics, isn’t taking a cheap shot at learning. She’s aiming at gatekeeping disguised as enlightenment. The subtext is institutional capture: when cultural authority is concentrated inside universities, "culture" can be defined in ways that reward the people who already hold the keys. Credentialing replaces curiosity; the canon becomes an internal currency; debate narrows to what can be cited, examined, and promoted. The line reads like a warning about class reproduction, too: the professoriate as a social caste that justifies itself through the very standards it sets.
The context matters because France has long treated culture as state-adjacent power - elite schools, elite tastes, elite administrators. Veil’s career in law and governance put her on the other side of that membrane, where culture isn’t an end in itself but something that must answer to citizens, rights, and consequences. The quote works because it refuses the romance of culture and exposes the incentive structure underneath: if your system’s main output is more of itself, you’re not cultivating a public - you’re breeding a bureaucracy of taste.
Veil, a lawyer and public figure shaped by the hard stakes of 20th-century French politics, isn’t taking a cheap shot at learning. She’s aiming at gatekeeping disguised as enlightenment. The subtext is institutional capture: when cultural authority is concentrated inside universities, "culture" can be defined in ways that reward the people who already hold the keys. Credentialing replaces curiosity; the canon becomes an internal currency; debate narrows to what can be cited, examined, and promoted. The line reads like a warning about class reproduction, too: the professoriate as a social caste that justifies itself through the very standards it sets.
The context matters because France has long treated culture as state-adjacent power - elite schools, elite tastes, elite administrators. Veil’s career in law and governance put her on the other side of that membrane, where culture isn’t an end in itself but something that must answer to citizens, rights, and consequences. The quote works because it refuses the romance of culture and exposes the incentive structure underneath: if your system’s main output is more of itself, you’re not cultivating a public - you’re breeding a bureaucracy of taste.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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