The term Ivory Tower originates in the Biblical Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon

The Song of Songs of Solomon, commonly referred to as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, is a book of the Hebrew Bible—one of the megillot —found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim...

 (7,4), and was later used as an epithet

Epithet

An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...

 for Mary.

From the 19th century it has been used to designate a world or atmosphere where intellectual

Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

s engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. As such, it usually carries pejorative

Pejorative

Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...

 connotation

Connotation

A connotation is a commonly understood subjective cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation....

s of a wilful disconnect from the everyday world; esoteric, over-specialized, or even useless research; and academic elitism

Academic elitism

Academic elitism is a charge sometimes levied at academic institutions and academics more broadly, arguing that academia or academics are prone to undeserved and/or pernicious elitism; the term "ivory tower" often carries with it an implicit critique of academic elitism...

, if not outright condescension. In American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

 usage it is a shorthand for academia

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

 or the university

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

, particularly departments of the humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

.

Religious usage

In Judeo/Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 tradition, the term Ivory Tower is a symbol for noble purity. It originates with the Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon

The Song of Songs of Solomon, commonly referred to as Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, is a book of the Hebrew Bible—one of the megillot —found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim...

 (7,4) ("Your neck is like an ivory tower"; in the Hebrew Masoretic text, it is found in 7:5) and was included in the epithet

Epithet

An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...

s for Mary in the sixteenth century Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a Marian litany originally approved in 1587 by Pope Sixtus V. It is also known as the Litany of Loreto, for its first-known place of origin, the Shrine of Our Lady of Loreto , where its usage was recorded as early as 1558.The litany contains many of the...

 ("tower of ivory", in Latin Turris eburnea), though the title and image was in use long before that, since the 12th century Marian revival at least. It occasionally appears in art, especially in depictions of Mary in the hortus conclusus

Hortus conclusus

Hortus conclusus is a Latin term, meaning literally "enclosed garden". "The word 'garden' is at root the same as the word 'yard'. It means an enclosure", observed Derek Clifford, at the outset of a series of essays on garden design, in which he skirted the conventions of the hortus conclusus...

.

The image is Biblical, and although the term is rarely used in the religious sense in modern times, it is credited with inspiring the modern meaning. Today, ivory tower usually describes a metaphysical space of solitude and sanctity disconnected from daily realities, where certain idealistic writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

s endeavor and even some scientist

Scientist

A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...

s are considered to reside. In Odyssey

Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

(XIX.560) two kinds of dreams are distinguished, as they exit from the realm of Morpheus

Morpheus

Morpheus may refer to:Characters*Morpheus , the principal god of dreams in the Greek mythology*Morpheus , a moniker for Dream, a fictional character in the comic book The Sandman...

: true dreams exit through the Gate of Horn, and false dreams through the Gate of Ivory. Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

 put the image succinctly:

There are two gates of sleep. One is of horn, easy passage for the shades of truth; the other, of gleaming white ivory, permits false dreams to ascend to the upper air. (Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

VI.893-896)

An alternative origin appears in the Bible in 1 Kings 22 verse 39. King Ahab's obituary is very damning and refers to his palace "inlaid with ivory". This would mean that the modern usage of "Ivory Tower" is not symbolic, but exactly what it implied in the Bible.

Modern usage

The first modern usage of "ivory tower" in the familiar sense of an unworldly dreamer can be found in a poem of 1837, "Pensées d’Août, à M. Villemain", by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.-Early years:...

, a French literary critic

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 and author, who used the term "tour d'ivoire" to describe the poetical attitude of Alfred de Vigny

Alfred de Vigny

Alfred Victor de Vigny was a French poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life:Alfred de Vigny was born in Loches into an aristocratic family...

 as contrasted with the more socially engaged Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

: "Et Vigny, plus secret, Comme en sa tour d’ivoire, avant midi rentrait". At Oxford University, the appearance of the Hawksmoor Towers, twin creamy-white neo-gothic towers at All Souls College, Oxford

All Souls College, Oxford

The Warden and the College of the Souls of all Faithful People deceased in the University of Oxford or All Souls College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England....

, the only pure research college at Oxford, epitomize the "ivory tower" of Academe. At the George Washington University, in Washington, DC a residence hall constructed in 2004 was named "Ivory Tower," a decision criticized by some GWU faculty for the reflexive irony of giving the dorm such a moniker.

Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

' last, unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower, was begun in 1914 and left unfinished at his death two years later. Paralleling James' own dismaying experience of the United States after twenty years away, it chronicles the effect on a high-minded returning upper-class American of the vulgar emptiness of the Gilded Age

Gilded Age

In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded...

. "You seem all here so hideously rich," says his hero. Thus, there are two meanings mixed together: mockery of an absent-minded savant and admiration of someone who is able to devote his or her entire efforts to a noble cause (hence "ivory

Ivory

Ivory is a term for dentine, which constitutes the bulk of the teeth and tusks of animals, when used as a material for art or manufacturing. Ivory has been important since ancient times for making a range of items, from ivory carvings to false teeth, fans, dominoes, joint tubes, piano keys and...

", a noble but impractical building material). The term has a rather negative flavor today, the implication being that specialists who are so deeply drawn into their fields of study often can't find a lingua franca

Lingua franca

A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...

 with laymen

Layman

A layperson or layman is a person who is not an expert in a given field of knowledge. The term originally meant a member of the laity, i.e. a non-clergymen, but over the centuries shifted in definition....

 outside their "ivory towers". Moreover, this problem is often ignored and instead of actively searching for a solution, some scientists simply accept that even educated people can't understand them and live in intellectual isolation

Isolation (psychology)

Isolation is a defence mechanism in psychoanalytic theory, whereby the person "isolates" the unpleasant idea from the normal emotional response. For example, describing a murder in graphic details without an emotional involvement invokes isolation....

.

In Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, while discussing Turing's 1936-38 stay at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, he writes that "[t]he tower of the Graduate College was an exact replica of Magdalen College Oxford, and it was popularly called the Ivory Tower, because of that benefactor of Princeton, the Procter

Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....

 who manufactured Ivory soap

Ivory (soap)

The name "Ivory" refers to a series of products created by the Procter & Gamble Company , including varieties of a white and mildly fragranced bar soap, that became famous for its pure content and for floating in water. Over the years, the bar soap has been altered into other varieties...

." William Cooper Procter

William Cooper Procter

William Cooper Procter was the grandson of William Procter, the co-founder of Procter & Gamble Company. He was notable for creating a profit-sharing program for employees, the first in America...

 (Princeton class of 1883) was a significant supporter of the construction of the Graduate College, and the main dining hall bears the Procter name. When asked about the reference, Hodge stated: "The story simply came from my interviewing the graduate students of that epoch, whose names you will find in my narrative. Quite possibly the joke on 'ivory' died with the inter-war period - it has a slightly snobbish feel to it, but perfectly encapsulates the bemusement that the English students would have had at seeing new American money generously deployed in so peculiar a manner."

In Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...

's essay 'The End of the Line' (1942), Jarrell asserts that if modern poetry is to survive then poets must come down from the "Ivory Tower" of elitist composition. Jarrell's main thrust is that the allusion rich poetry of the modernist period was over-dependent upon reference to other literary works. For Jarrell the Ivory Tower led modern poetry into obscurity.

Ivory tower is also a term used to describe an entity of “reason, rationality and rigid structures [that] colonizes the world of lived experience,” as explained by Kirsten J. Broadfoot in an article about the possibilities of postcolonial organizational communication. This imagined academic community creates an essence of exclusivity and superiority. Broadfoot explains this as a group that “functions like an exclusive club whose membership is tightly controlled by what might be called a ‘dominant frame.’” In an academic sense, this leads to an “overwhelming and disproportionate dominance” of the United States and the Western world. The ivory tower can be dangerous in its inherent privatization of knowledge and intellect. Academics who are seeking “legitimacy for their narratives from the heart end up echoing the sanitized tone of the Master Narrative.” This becomes a cyclical process as intellects collectively defend the “imaginary ivory tower.”

External links

• Ivory Tower at Wordorigins.org