I am also struck by what this movement says about the state of universities. It reveals a deep rift between students and administrations. The latter have grown hugely over the past decades and become massive bureaucracies, also generating their own corporate interests. The voices of students and faculty have been gradually marginalised in the process, making productive dialogue often difficult.
Yet we must also be vigilant about the academic culture: when we say that universities must be a “safe space”, this is not only true in terms of physical and emotional integrity (which are paramount) but also in terms of intellectual integrity: a university is a space in which one can be, and should be, safely challenged, rather than confirmed in their convictions.
I’ve been saying for a while that western civilisation, whether you’re a fan or not, has been dying in the universities and that this will leak out to the rest of the culture. The corporatisation, commodification and production-line-ification have been rampant from the educational to the research aspects of the institutions … all without dismantling the underlying feudal structures which are quite good at corrupting higher values in the name of succeeding at the KPI games of the commodification etc.
Unfortunately it’s a boiling frog situation and many academics idealise detatchment from the real world however problematic their institution is. That the for-profit journal system could be built entirely around academics’ labour simply by offering “prestige credits” is astonishing for an allegedly intelligent demographic but tells you all you need to know about how corrupted by libertarian values and behaviours a bunch of clever people trying to attain prestige by proving how clever they are … can get.
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.
