The brutal repression of student protests from Amsterdam to Los Angeles is exposing failings at the heart of our universities, says Patrizia Nanz of the European University Institute
The academics I know are all pretty miserable these days. They can see that it’s a corrupt, exploitative system and they feel powerless to change it. They spend their time writing grant applications and chasing money, then pumping out papers they know are fairly trivial, but they have to write them to keep the funding coming in. Some of the scientific disciplines are in a slow state of crisis due to a serious loss of confidence in the credibility or value of much of the research. And the younger ones know they’ll never get tenure and are on a shit career track potentially forever. But even the ones with tenure seem pretty unhappy, working for these organizations that relentlessly seek money and superficial prestige.
This is so far from what academia ought to be about, and from the enthusiasms that brought these people into it in the first place. I got out 20 years ago because I found this stuff repellent then. It’s worse now. it’s sad that our society can’t provide a place for smart and enthusiastic people to do honest research without all this corrupting quasi-commercial (or sometimes simply commercial) influence.
And it’s why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics’ noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we’ve not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it’s gonna be hard to undo. I’m no lover of tech-bro “disruptions”, but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.
The academics I know are all pretty miserable these days. They can see that it’s a corrupt, exploitative system and they feel powerless to change it. They spend their time writing grant applications and chasing money, then pumping out papers they know are fairly trivial, but they have to write them to keep the funding coming in. Some of the scientific disciplines are in a slow state of crisis due to a serious loss of confidence in the credibility or value of much of the research. And the younger ones know they’ll never get tenure and are on a shit career track potentially forever. But even the ones with tenure seem pretty unhappy, working for these organizations that relentlessly seek money and superficial prestige.
This is so far from what academia ought to be about, and from the enthusiasms that brought these people into it in the first place. I got out 20 years ago because I found this stuff repellent then. It’s worse now. it’s sad that our society can’t provide a place for smart and enthusiastic people to do honest research without all this corrupting quasi-commercial (or sometimes simply commercial) influence.
Yep.
And it’s why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics’ noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we’ve not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it’s gonna be hard to undo. I’m no lover of tech-bro “disruptions”, but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.