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March 17, 2003
Dorothea over at Cavet Lector has said said that her anti-academic rantings of the previous week have been chopped to pieces in an email from T.V. She says it was a:
"Gorgeous job. Really spectacular.I replied asking T.V. to post the chop, but it wouldn’t hurt if you wrote too. Seriously. This is good, thoughtful stuff, and you shouldn’t be deprived of it."
That email has been published by Turbulent Velvet here Joseph at reading & writing reckons this "is the final word on the recent discussion regarding life inside & outside of the academy."
T.V affirms the view that academia today is a sick mode of life that damages people. See Ivory Towers Revisited (Tuesday March 4, 2003).
In commenting on the debate T.V.says that:
"...respondents gild the lily too much: the fact is that the academy is a soul-breaking place even for those with tenure-track and tenured jobs. I mean, look at me: three months ago I left academia permanently just one year from tenure because I couldn't stand it anymore. I stuck it out all the way to midlife, and when it got close to job security it just looked like prison doors closing."
If this is so, then why is academia a soul-destroying place? Dorothea did not do this. T.V. says:
"You claim that you're criticizing the "system," and not the people, but there's so little systemic analysis in your rant that your criticism falls by default back on the people in the system."
But T.V offers no account of what is wrong with the academic system either. All that is said is that '"systemic" critique has to take some responsibility for its tone and approach.' Contrary to Joseph, this is not the final word on the recent discussion regarding life inside & outside of the academy, for what is needed is an account of why academia is a soul-detroying place.
So what account can be given? Can we give an account? I suggest one in terms of the breakdown in the conventions of the liberal university as scholars become entrepreneurs.
What is offered is a tragic account of the break down of the academic conventions of the liberal university, due to it beccoming an educational corporation. Convention, or nomos, refers to the ethical agreements and practices of the liberal university. Academics are trained inside these conventions. These structure everything they do and it is difficult to depart from the world they constitute. They are a part of our subjectivity and they enable our character to remain stable against events within and without the univeristy as an ethical institution.
Conventions change a society changes. Those of the liberal university are breaking down due to economic reforms imposed by the state; the impact of the self-organizing market; and the actions of university administrators responding to market pressure. This change in convention is experienced as a betrayal of the conventions of the liberal university: trust has gone as the common understandings breakdown or are corrupted. There is a disintegration of the university as a moral community.
It is time of great social upheaval and dislocation; a rendering of the world of the liberal university. What made academic life in the liberal university habitable is no more. Market relations now increasingly govern the academic ways of living, talking and acting in the educational corporation. Violation and betrayal of the pre-market conventions are the norm.
What rises between disintegration of the old and the rise of the new market order is a sense of disorder, a lack of structure. This gives rise to suspicion, distrust and questioning; and a sense of despair from being contaminated by the cash nexus of market relations.
Maybe the conventiosn collegial trust and confidence never were? Maybe the most trustworthy academics were untrustworthy all along. They actually abused the conventions in their daily practice whilst saying that they upheld them, that cherished them and they acted to preserve them. They defiled the conventions in their everyday practice and their poisons worked to corrode our stable character.
When conventions break down so does communality, and we become self-contained, trusting no one and avoiding eye contact. We live a life on the defensive, keeping our dark thoughts and feelings private, always looking for the next betrayal. We live a life of non-relation as words become less expressions of trust, affirmation and recognition and more instruments to further self-interested ends.
It is a tragic account because revenge and power plays now take over the world of academic value. The death of academic nomos leaves nothing behind for a human life. Academia is experienced as a world of ruins even if the good do no die young, or blinded academics are not running on all fours wild for the blood of their attackers.
That then is my account the fact of why the academy is a soul-breaking place even for those with tenure-track and tenured jobs.
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I suppose that I would need to hear more details about how the academic community has suffered from its entanglement with commerce; it is hard to see how the emphasis on publishing serves an economic need. For myself, while I am happy in my university position, I consider a great deal of academics to be unfruitful and irrelevant. Academics think that they should be listened to, but they have made themselves unlistenable. I don't know if this contributes to unhappiness, but it should.