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.