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July 2, 2003
Invisible Adjunct has a great post on the rise of the academic superstar (or celebrity) in the declining humanities. She says:
"..the academic superstar phenonemon might actually point to a decline. That is, as the liberal arts sink lower and lower in public esteem .... the cultural gatekeepers to the liberal arts respond to this degradation by seeking to inflate the value, as it were, of a select group of its professors."
It is a covering up the dirt of the ongoing trashing the humanities and the underpaid and unsupported causla teachers who increasingly teach many of the classes. That is the everyday reality behind the glossy facade of a visiting (overseas) superstar dropping in for a few days or weeks.
The celebrities are expected to perform and they are usually judged on their performance not on their ideas. This is an example of the academy copying the media by embracing the virtues of entertainment as culture and marketing their glossy image in the marketplace.
It is way to earn prestige. Buy it in. The corporate university hopes that some of the superstars prestige will rub off on the university and it will look better (more glamorous and fashionable) than its rivals. Hopefully the latter will then look more provincial and pedestrian.
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Innouncement!!!