I came across the following passage in "The Academy: Reform or Secession?" by F. Roger Devlin in The Occidental Quarterly, Winter 2006-7. I'd be interested in discussing its accuracy with any Neo-Thomists and Josef Pieper fans lurking about here.
The word [school] is derived from the Greek schole, meaning leisure. This is liable to surprise men today, who are accustomed to speak of “schoolwork,” and perhaps have memories of caffeine fueled all night term paper sessions. So we must clarify our terms. Work, in the sense relevant here, is activity valuable as a means to some end distinct from the activity itself. In a modern society this usually signifies providing a service or producing something with market value. Term paper writing is not an industry and does not put food on the family table, so it does not fall under the definition. Leisure must be distinguished not only from work, however, but also from recreation and idleness. (It is characteristic of the modern age not to draw these latter distinctions.) Recreation is necessary to enable people to resume work; it is therefore in the service of work, an accidental consequence of the law of diminishing returns in regard to work. Idleness is any rest or activity valuable neither intrinsically nor as a means. Leisure, in the proper sense, is activity pursued for its own sake. Watching television does not qualify. It is a measure of our civilization’s decline that many confuse leisure with recreation, or even mere entertainment; in fact, worship may have been the original or primitive form of leisure. Nothing but confusion can result from trying to understand leisure in economically rational terms, which are appropriate in relation to productive work. Imagine, e.g., interpreting a church or monastery as a “salvation factory” whose efficiency might be measured by comparing inputs and outputs. How would a manager determine its “bottom line,” decide when to expand operations or when to scale them back? Even to speak in this way would indicate a failure to grasp the character of religious institutions. Now, the origins of the university lie in the Christian Middle Ages, and its mission has traditionally been understood in terms of the sacredness of truth and the intrinsic value of knowledge. It never tried to justify itself in terms of economic value produced. “Academic leisure” was, indeed, once a rather common expression. Now, such leisure does indeed require that the wolf be kept from the door, and “an empty belly does not like to study,” as a German proverb has it. But one must distinguish a stipend which allows the scholar to fulfill his vocation from payment for services rendered (proper in the world of industry). One endows a school; one does not invest in it. There are many areas of higher learning with no obvious economic or professional purpose: philosophy and theology, philology and literature, pure science, history. These have never been the sole focus of the university, but have, by their very lack of economic utility, had a special role defining it as a distinct type of community.
