#who care only for their stupid ass profit margin bullshit

[jasonntodd]

so much for climate activism and trying to save our only fucking planet but sadly, i should’ve known better. i’m only disappointed and not surprised that those in office were motivated essentially by profits more than doing what’s right for our future.

[criticalotterstudies]

It was curiosity, not stupidity that killed the Dodo. For too long, we have held to the unfair myth that the flightless Mauritian bird became extinct because it was too dumb to understand that it was being killed. But as Stefan Pociask points out in “What Happened to the Last Dodo Bird?”, the dodo was driven into extinction partly because of its desire to learn more about a new, taller, two-legged creature who disembarked onto the shores of its native habitat: “Fearless curiosity, rather than stupidity, is a more fitting description of their behavior.”

Curiosity does have a tendency to get you killed. The truly fearless don’t last long, and the birds who go out in search of new knowledge are inevitably the first ones to get plucked. It’s always safer to stay close to the nest.

Contrary to what capitalism’s mythologizers would have you believe, the contemporary world does not heap its rewards on those with the most creativity and courage. In fact, at every stage of life, those who venture beyond the safe boundaries of expectation are ruthlessly culled. If you’re a black kid who tends to talk back and call bullshit on your teachers, you will be sent to a special school. If you’re a transgender teenager like Leelah Alcorn in Ohio, and you unapologetically defy gender norms, they’ll make you so miserable that you kill yourself. If you’re Eric Garner, and you tell the police where they can stick their B.S. “loose cigarette” tax, they will promptly choke you to death. Conformists, on the other hand, usually do pretty well for themselves. Follow the rules, tell people what they want to hear, and you’ll come out just fine.

Becoming a successful academic requires one hell of a lot of ass-kissing and up-sucking. You have to flatter and impress. The very act of applying to graduate school to begin with is an exercise in servility: please deem me worthy of your favor. In order to rise through the ranks, you have to convince people of your intelligence and acceptability, which means basing everything you do on a concern for what other people think. If ever you find that your conclusions would make your superiors despise you (say, for example, if you realized that much of what they wrote was utter irredeemable manure), you face a choice: conceal your true self or be permanently consigned to the margins.

...

The ideas that do get produced have also become more inaccessible, with research inevitably cloaked behind the paywalls of journals that cost astronomical sums of money. At the cheaper end, the journal Cultural Studies charges individuals $201 for just the print edition, and charges institutions $1,078 for just the online edition. The science journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta costs $20,000, which makes Cultural Studies look like a bargain. (What makes the pricing especially egregious is that these journals are created mostly with free labor, as academics who produce articles are almost never paid for them.) Ideas in the modern university are not free and available to all. They are in fact tethered to a vast academic industrial complex, where giant publishing houses like Elsevier make massive profits off the backs of researchers.

Furthermore, the academics who produce those ideas aren’t exactly at liberty to think and do as they please. The overwhelming “adjunctification” of the university has meant that approximately 76% of professors… aren’t professors at all, but underpaid and overworked adjuncts, lecturers, and assistants. And while conditions for adjuncts are slowly improving, especially through more widespread unionization, their place in the university is permanently unstable. This means that no adjunct can afford to seriously offend. To make matters worse, adjuncts rely heavily on student evaluations to keep their positions, meaning that their classrooms cannot be places to heavily contest or challenge students’ politics. Instructors could literally lose their jobs over even the appearance of impropriety. One false step—a video seen as too salacious, or a political opinion held as oppressive—could be the end of a career. An adjunct must always be docile and polite.

All of this means that university faculty are less and less likely to threaten any aspect of the existing social or political system. Their jobs are constantly on the line, so there’s a professional risk in upsetting the status quo. But even if their jobs were safe, the corporatized university would still produce mostly banal ideas, thanks to the sycophancy-generating structure of the academic meritocracy. But even if truly novel and consequential ideas were being produced, they would be locked away behind extortionate paywalls.

The corporatized university also ends up producing the corporatized student. Students worry about doing anything that may threaten their job prospects. Consequently, acts of dissent have become steadily de-radicalized. On campuses these days, outrage and anger is reserved for questions like, “Is this sushi an act of cultural appropriation?” When student activists do propose ways to “radically” reform the university, it tends to involve adding new administrative offices and bureaucratic procedures, i.e. strengthening the existing structure of the university rather than democratizing it. Instead of demanding an increase in the power of students, campus workers, and the untenured, activists tend to push for symbolic measures that universities happily embrace, since they do not compromise the existing arrangement of administrative and faculty power.

It’s amusing, then, that conservatives have long been so paranoid about the threat posed by U.S. college campuses. The American right has an ongoing fear of supposedly arch-leftist professors brainwashing nubile and impressionable young minds into following sinister leftist dictates. Since massively popular books like Roger Kimball’s 1990 Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1992 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race on Campus, colleges have been seen as hotbeds of Marxist indoctrination that threaten the civilized order. This is a laughable idea, for the simple reason that academics are the very opposite of revolutionaries: they intentionally speak to minuscule audiences rather than the masses (on campus, to speak of a “popular” book is to deploy a term of faint disdain) and they are fundamentally concerned with preserving the security and stability of their own position. This makes them deeply conservative in their day-to-day acts, regardless of what may come out of their mouths. (See the truly pitiful lack of support among Harvard faculty when the university’s dining hall workers went on strike for slightly higher wages. Most of the “tenured radicals” couldn’t even be bothered to sign a petition supporting the workers, let alone march in the streets.)

But left-wing academics are all too happy to embrace the conservatives’ ludicrous idea of professors as subversives. This is because it reassures them that they are, in fact, consequential, that they are effectively opposing right-wing ideas, and that they need not question their own role. The “professor-as-revolutionary” caricature serves both the caricaturist and the professor. Conservatives can remain convinced that students abandon conservative ideas because they are being manipulated, rather than because reading books and learning things makes it more difficult to maintain right-wing prejudices. And liberal professors get to delude themselves into believing they are affecting something.

...

In Hyde Park, where I live, the University of Chicago seems ancient and venerable at first glance. Its Ye Olde Kinda Sorta Englande architecture, built in 1890 to resemble Oxbridge, could almost pass for medieval if one walked through it at dusk. But the institution is in fact deeply modern, and like Columbia University in New York, it has slowly absorbed the surrounding neighborhood, slicing into older residential areas and displacing residents in landgrab operations. Despite being home to one of the world’s most prestigious medical and research schools, the university refused for many years to open a trauma center to serve the city’s South Side, which had been without access to trauma care. (The school only relented in 2015, after a long history of protests.) The university ferociously guards its myriad assets with armed guards on the street corners, and enacts massive surveillance on local residents (the university-owned cinema insists on examining bags for weapons and food, a practice I have personally experienced being selectively conducted in a racially discriminatory manner). In the university’s rapacious takeover of the surrounding neighborhood, and its treatment of local residents—most of whom are of color—we can see what happens when a university becomes a corporation rather than a community institution. Devouring everything in the pursuit of limitless expansion, it swallows up whole towns.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species