Within the Ivory Towers



I was a professor at a large University in North Dakota a few years back. I had a wonderful time when I was interacting with the students - you know, the teaching aspect. But I abhorred all 'outside the classroom' duties; the bureaucratic red-tape-gobble-goo such as faculty meetings and unspoken University requisites for tenure that occupied most of a new faculties time.
Although the University I worked had more of a teaching-emphasis, I learned quickly that many faculty become part of the "fraternity of professorial entrepreneurs" or essentially "academic capitalists".
It is this strange mutation of 20th-century academia who has the pretensions of an ecclesiastic, the artfulness of a witch doctor, and the soul of a bureaucrat. Rather than committed to the life of the mind, to speaking the truth as he knows it, the Academic Capitalist is dedicated instead to career advancement and the acquisition of ever greater perks, status, and money in the form of cushier appointments at more prestigious universities, reduced teaching loads, grants from government and robber-baron trust funds, consulting contracts with industry, and sinecures at institutes and think-tanks. This goal occupies his time and energy, leaving little of both for the classroom. And it shapes his research, which may be at best conspicuous; that is, significant not for quality but for quantity, driven not by the demands of truth and new knowledge but by prejudices, ideologies, and dogmas of those determining who gets published, who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets tenured, who gets to go to conferences and ‘network’ for better jobs, who gets invited to think-tanks and institutes and centers, and who get the grant and fellowship.
Unfortunately what I started witnessing was conformism is more rewarded than originality, and intellectual fad and fashion are more important than truth…the professor has become just another opportunist on the make, hungry for material rewards.

Posted: Sat - June 4, 2005 at 01:50 AM          

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