The Scourge of Academicism

In this article by Kathleen Stock on the harassment of “gender-critical” academics by “trans-activists”, one sentence jumped out at me:

Universities are the places where particular answers to these questions first get conceptualised, and then sent out into the world, to be acted upon by policy-makers.

It seems that a lot of academics genuinely believe that ethical, political, and social ideas and values all originate in the institutions in which those academics work. The ideas and values that play such an important role in our culture and socio-historical life apparently all trickled down from the ivory tower eventually reaching the hoi polloi.

A blinkered and unwarranted sense of their own importance is almost definitive of academics. They seem incapable of critically reflecting on their own class position and social role.

No Solidarity in the UCU

The UCU (University and College Union) has just held a ballot on whether to have strike action over low pay and casual contracts. Only 41% of members bothered to vote, legally invalidating the ballot (though the clear majority of those who did vote voted for strike action). This is the second time the ballot has been held – the first ballot had a lower than 50% turnout too.

What kind of idiot joins a trade union, pays the monthly fees, only to undermine the union’s strength and influence by not bothering to vote either way in a strike ballot? It requires a combination of selfishness and stupidity not to realize that whatever personal benefits you expect to get from being in a union will be severely compromised by you contributing to the weakening of its clout. And yet academics are supposed to be (or think of themselves as being) the most intelligent people in the country.

What is truly sickening about the results of this ballot is that the lower-paid academics and those on casual contracts went out on strike last year to protect the pensions of the higher-paid academics. The (successful) strike over pensions was about something that only really benefits higher-paid permanent staff. Those at the bottom end of the academic pay scale joined that strike to keep the union strong and to show solidarity. With the result of this recent pay ballot, the higher-paid permanent-contract academics have slapped the lower-paid or casualized academics in the face.

What all this suggests is that the two sets of academics have antithetical interests and should perhaps split and form separate unions. The higher-paid academic bigwigs are likely to be involved in the decision-making process that sets the abominably low pay rates of the ‘lower-end’ academics in the UK (the lowest in the English-speaking world). These lower-paid academics are the ones who do most of the research and teaching, while the higher-paid ones sit around ‘managing’ things ineffectively. The lower-paid ones need to strike and rebel against this dysfunctional system, and demand higher salaries. It looks like this fightback needs to begin with splitting from the UCU and forming a new union.

Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson on Transcendence

Up until near the end of a very interesting discussion on transcendence, I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement at everything said. However, just before the end of the hour and a half the participants agreed that university funding should be abolished (Scruton) or significantly cut (Peterson) in order to stop the rot caused by ‘postmodern’ identity politics on the humanities.

Such an action would only serve to ensure that access to a decent humanities education would be restricted to a privileged wealthy few – privileged merely on the basis of birthright and not on ability (always a recipe for inbred mediocrity). All the high-falutin talk of cultivating in students an appreciation of the excellence of the canonical works of our civilization and tradition turned out to be for a tiny clique and not for humanity in general. There we have the distinction between left and right in a nutshell – it does not lie in the difference between relativism and an appreciation of high-culture, but in the distinction between universalism and exclusivism.

A Pseudonymous ‘Journal of Controversial Ideas’?

Such a journal has recently been proposed and is planned to be up and running at some point in 2019. Opinion on the proposal seems to be divided into two distinct groups:

  • those who believe it is sadly necessary for there to be a forum for controversial ideas to be expressed pseudonymously to protect the authors from censorious baying mobs of McCarthyite right-wingers, politically correct left-wingers, and university administrators
  • those who believe that hiding behind pseudonyms amounts to a cowardly abdication of academic responsibility

These two positions are not mutually exclusive; therefore it is quite possible that they are both right. I would, nevertheless, like to add two points to the ‘debate’:

  1. Implicit behind the purported need for this journal is the suggestion that those who publish in non-pseudonymous academic journals (i.e. nearly all academics) do so in such a manner that aims merely to further their careers and avoid any detrimental effects on their careers. The question then arises of why anyone should ever bother reading something that was written with a view to avoiding damaging consequences for the author’s grotty little academic career. In such circumstances (i.e. all of academia), how could anything genuinely worth reading ever get written?
  2. The proposed journal will be peer-reviewed, which ensures that no genuinely controversial ideas will ever get published in it. The purpose of peer-review is to make sure that nothing that is controversial within the mainstream terms of a particular discipline will get published in a recognized journal.

Academic reference letters are already sexual harassment

In recent years, academia in general and institutional philosophy in particular have often been said to have a problem with sexual harassment. There is currently uproar across the humanities over the alleged behaviour of Avital Ronell towards a doctoral student she was supervising. The case seems to mirror in many ways the earlier case of Colin McGinn. Both cases involved allegations of sexual harassment through inappropriate e-mail correspondence, correspondences that the accusers felt they had to go along with in order to humour their famous and powerful mentors. The accusers felt that their careers depended on playing along with and humouring the esteemed professors who were sending them sexually suggestive e-mails.

Amidst the furore, most of the discussion has focused on the supposed moral and professional failings of the professors. Academics seem to be blind to the role that the very system of academic patronage that put them in their places and that they perpetuate enables and even encourages sexual harassment. Graduate students and junior academics have to impress on a personal level the individual academic who is supervising them. They cannot go any further in their careers unless they get a highly personalized letter of recommendation, or reference letter, from their ‘mentor’. The very institution of academic reference letters is implicitly sexual harassment from the outset. It should come as no surprise when the system of personalized patronage manifest in reference letters produces blatant cases of sexual harassment.

Meta-Bullshit

Les Green, a teacher of the philosophy of law at some college in Oxfordshire, put a post on his philosophy blog about “bullshit” in academic paper titles. As you might imagine, bullshit provides fertile soil for such titles. As background, he presents a brief typology of bullshit, referring to great authorities in the field, like G.A. Cohen and Harry Frankfurt. As an example of Cohenistic obscurantist bullshit Green proffers the following sentence: “Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability.” It is put forward as a random piece of unmitigated bullshit cobbled together by Green himself. It is actually a direct quote from Judith Butler, who is herself paraphrasing Derrida’s critique of J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory. It is clearly a meaningful sentence that makes a genuine claim, particularly when seen in the context of Butler’s argument (or Derrida’s for that matter). Whatever one may say about the merits or otherwise of these arguments, the sentence is manifestly not the piece of obscurantist bullshit that Green claims it is.

So why did Green say it was bullshit? By way of an explanation, I suggested adding the category of meta-bullshit to his typology. I sent this comment to his blog:

What we have on our hands is a fourth kind of bullshit, a bullshit about bullshit, a meta-bullshit, one in which the accusation of obscurantism is used to obscure the accuser’s intellectual laziness, parochialism, and refusal to engage seriously with any thought that does not originate in the narrow institutional confines of anglophone analytic philosophy.

Despite the comment being pertinent and to the point Green refused to allow it to be posted. The comments he did allow are generally sycophantic. For example, the first comment on his post merely quotes some of his potty humour and adds the comment “Perfect!” to it. Green appears to want to close himself off from any kind of criticism whatsoever. Not a good quality in either a philosopher or a blogger.

What is institutional ‘affiliation’?

Scholars are always required to divulge something called their ‘institutional affiliation’ when publishing an article or presenting a conference paper. This may be fair enough if a scholar’s employer somehow contributes to making the research behind the article or paper possible. It could be argued that this is the case with most academic employment contacts. It is most certainly not the case for scholars who work as hourly-paid ‘adjunct’ teaching staff. Such ‘adjunct’ scholars usually put down their employer’s name as their ‘affiliation’ when publishing something, but they really shouldn’t do this. Freelance hourly-paid scholars should put down ‘independent scholar’, as that is what they actually are. There is no reason why their grotty and exploitative employers should get any credit (e.g. in research rankings) for their publications.