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March 08, 2003
The discussions on academia have been kicked along by this post by Baraita. The comments to Naomi's post are high class and very informative. Those that blog on this post are polygut and Journey man Renee and Pem's post on 'academia' at Deep language
Those are the links to the American discussion for Australian readers. So what did Naomi Chana aka Baraita say? Well, she says things that very relevant to Australia:
"... like Dorothea, I am a professor's daughter, and I can tell hundreds of stories. I know people who have left (or were forced out of) academia and are thriving, just as I know people who left academia and are still suffering because of it. I know ex-academics who think they benefited from stints in grad school or the professoriate, and those who think it was a massive waste of time. I know current academics who hate their jobs, those who tolerate them, and those who love them. I just don't get why this is any different than any other profession!"
Very true. We can tell similar stories in Australia. But as Dorothea points out we need to step beyond the:
"...it’s-just-people approach As I said earlier today, I think there’s a system at work with a really truly nasty way of perpetuating itself through abuse among other things."
And that's the crucial point. We need to think in system terms here. So what can we say about that?
To her great credit Naomi spells some in detail the way the academic system works:
" We have unnecessarily long and harsh apprenticeships, problems with representation and unionization, a rigid caste system within the profession, several levels of underpaid and underexploited underclasses, widespread disregard for the physical and mental health of almost everyone, undue reliance on questionably relevant measures in assessing progress, endemic confusion over what our primary role in fact is, job-search protocols which are inefficient at best and ludicrous at worst, oodles of nepotism, not enough awareness about various types of harassment, assorted failures to appreciate free speech on both ends of the political spectrum, and continued dominance by our society's privileged (as regards culture, race, religion, age, class, and gender) and exclusion or co-optation of the underprivileged."
Yes yes yes. It is no different in Australia. Of course, none of this is to say that academia is any worse than a hospital or a state bureaucracy. It is to say that the social relations/structure of academia constitutes a way of life that makes people sick.(See Ivory Towers Revisited.) This flawed way of life has a history. Consider Nietzsche's remarks on scholars in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (p. 148)
"I have seen how carefully they prepare their poisons ; they always put on protective gloves... We are strangers to one another, and their virtues are even more opposed to my taste than their falsehoods and loaded dice."
Naomi reckons that "the best way to deal with this creaky and intermittently unsafe structure is not to bulldoze it and start over but to rehabilitate, renovate, and remodel. There is something worth saving and adapting here."
Yes for those who have a job. And that depends on the discipline and job market. Its really bad news for the Humanities in Australia. What has happened in Australia is that many who got their PhD in the Humanites have been forced to leave because there is no work--other than scraps of teaching gained through bootlicking. Its called structural adjustment and the fall out is unemployment, which more or less obliges PhD's to retrain--to become lawyers or enter political life. So a lot of luck is involved.
The weight does need to be given to the negative: to the human suffering from the effect of power relations in the academia, governance by the state and market forces. It is this that enables us to talk about the crisis of the universities.
I introduce the big movers (state and market) because these shape and govern the form of life in academia and the conduct within that form of life. And the old scholarship form of life has gone; replaced by the academic entrepreneur in the academic capitalism where the technosciences (biotechology in Australia) are the main suppliers of research and knowledge to the market. Hence we have a profound shift in knowledge: knowledge becomes commodity in an information soceity.
That's a Marxist account, for sure. But the economic analysis is also the perspective of the liberal state governing the conduct of a population within its own territory. The political elite and the senior academic mangers are seduced by, and besotted with, the creation of high-tech-value. That is the royal road to the wealth of nations. They have little concern for academic tradition and scholarship, celebrate the new academic entrepreneur, and are indifferent to the university as an ethical institution in civil society. Utility rules in public policy.
The consequence of the state shaping educational institutions through market instruments the universities of today are survivors of another era, that of modernity. The old liberal university is passed its use-by date and it is half-transformed into the corporate new. This is symbolized by this remark by Ken Parish
"The new NTU [Northern Territory University] facilities in Alice Springs (such as they are) are co-located with Centralian College, a senior secondary school and TAFE college. The office where I spent most of my time was immediately adjacent to the School of Hairdressing!!!!"
Those who work in the old humanities---eg., philosophers--- work in a world of ruins. Why? Because the old ethos or culture is hollowing out and the new information/technoscience revolution happening around us no longer bothers to pay homage to the old academic ethos built around scholarship, independence, disinterested inquiry etc.
Its bleak picture I admit, and it is quite at odds with the upbeat American writing about academia that is full of hope, celebrates liberal individualism and modernity, and quite at home with the logic of the information and techno-scientific revolution.
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Are there any possible solutions to this problem for us here in Australia in the Humanities other than a Marxist inspired revolution?