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The Dangerous Academic is an Extinct Species
Nair, Yasmin
http://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-speciesDate Written: 2017-05-18 Publisher: Current Affairs Year Published: 2017 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX20649 Nair analyzes current academia and the structures in place that prevent academics and students from putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo. Abstract: - Excerpt: But over the years the university became corporatized. It became a job training center rather than an educational institution. Academic research became progressively more specialized, narrow, technical, and obscure. (The most successful scholarship is that which seems to be engaged with serious social questions, but does not actually reach any conclusions that would force the Professor to leave his office.) The ideas that do get produced have also become more inaccessible, with research inevitably cloaked behind the paywalls of journals that cost astronomical sums of money. At the cheaper end, the journal Cultural Studies charges individuals $201 for just the print edition, and charges institutions $1,078 for just the online edition. The science journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta costs $20,000, which makes Cultural Studies look like a bargain. (What makes the pricing especially egregious is that these journals are created mostly with free labor, as academics who produce articles are almost never paid for them.) Ideas in the modern university are not free and available to all. They are in fact tethered to a vast academic industrial complex, where giant publishing houses like Elsevier make massive profits off the backs of researchers. Furthermore, the academics who produce those ideas aren’t exactly at liberty to think and do as they please. The overwhelming "adjunctification" of the university has meant that approximately 76% of professors… aren't professors at all, but underpaid and overworked adjuncts, lecturers, and assistants. And while conditions for adjuncts are slowly improving, especially through more widespread unionization, their place in the university is permanently unstable. This means that no adjunct can afford to seriously offend. To make matters worse, adjuncts rely heavily on student evaluations to keep their positions, meaning that their classrooms cannot be places to heavily contest or challenge students' politics. Instructors could literally lose their jobs over even the appearance of impropriety. One false step -- a video seen as too salacious, or a political opinion held as oppressive -- could be the end of a career. An adjunct must always be docile and polite. All of this means that university faculty are less and less likely to threaten any aspect of the existing social or political system. Their jobs are constantly on the line, so there’s a professional risk in upsetting the status quo. But even if their jobs were safe, the corporatized university would still produce mostly banal ideas, thanks to the sycophancy-generating structure of the academic meritocracy. But even if truly novel and consequential ideas were being produced, they would be locked away behind extortionate paywalls. Subject Headings |