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Quite a nice little series I seem to be creating… This is the second “why I became disillusioned” kind of post after that on making Android apps. I’ve spent 12 years at the university – as a student, researcher, and teacher. But it’s time to admit it: I’ve lost faith in the academia; perhaps irreparably.

If you visit the academic section of the Home for Fiction main page, you’ll see a little quotation there. It’s something one of my academic mentors once said.

We won’t change the world simply by reading literature a different way, even against the grain. It’s a matter of whether we want to be a part of communities outside the university, where issues of equality are the daily reality.

I also note there that “I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way, and every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction.”

Well, let’s reverse that somewhat.

Every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction, but I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way.

This has been a major reason why I lost faith in the academia.

So, the Academia Is that Place of Radical Thought, Right?

Yeah, I wish…

Nowhere else have I seen more fossilization of thought and… dinosaurification of people than in the academia. No place else, in the private or the public sphere even comes close to being as conservative as the university.

No other area of professional activity must be as paradoxical as the academia, asking you to write a ground-breaking university thesis by following the most old-fashioned and self-defeating practices, “enhanced” by some good ol’ backstabbing, clique activity, and enslavement of thought.

Some time ago I wrote an article explaining how going through a relevant degree perhaps can make you a better author. I there explained how it’s not about what you learn through a degree but because of it. To put it bluntly, you have to deal with so much mediocrity of people – in stark contrast with the quality texts that surround you – that it’s a maturing process. You get rid of many of your disillusions and naivete during a university career – as a student, researcher, or teacher.

But in this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that I would lose faith in the academia. I did so as a result of its utter inability to truly, authentically be at the forefront of progressive thought.

Oh, by the way, let’s quickly define “radical”, “progressive”, and “conservative”, because they’re the kind of words people get very upset about.

In this context, “progressive” and “radical” refer to courageous, groundbreaking thought that depends on nobody, pays lip service to no entity, cares about nothing but intellectual freedom and truth, and generally accepts no compromise.

That’s not the academia I experienced – which is conservative to its very core.

What a Conservative Academia Looks like

Oh my, where do I start…

If you’ve read Kafka’s The Castle, then that’s exactly what the academia looks like.

Basically, you have faith in the system working because, hey, it’s a system precisely predicated on reason, right? Only, you quickly realize that not only is that not true – and the academia is like any other field, where backstabbing and injustice are a regular occurrence – but it’s actually worse.

The reason?

It’s full of self-centered egomaniacs with sickening petite-bourgeois attitudes. The overwhelming majority of them are so comfortable in their bubble of comparative privilege that they have all but lost touch with reality. They’re forming closed groups, impossible to penetrate, and team work degenerates into a bunch of people that, like children, run all together.

It goes without saying that in such a framework, these people are the last you should rely on for progressive, ground-breaking thought. It’s likelier for a lion to voluntarily become vegetarian than for fossilized academic elitists to help undo the very system that put them there in the first place.

So, You Lost Faith in the Academia. What’s Next?

A friend of the blog said sometime ago that I cross some boundaries and enter a territory he’d dub “post-academic theory/criticism”. I must say, I quite like this term and felt very flattered. Indeed, it was partly the motivation behind writing this post.

We all live contradictory lives. We play roles, every day – the hardest role being yourself – and some of these conflict with one another. And so, you get from me this post yet at the same time you see me listing my academic achievements.

Similarly, one day I’m telling you how being a published author is not what you think, yet in my bio on Amazon or Goodreads you’ll see me referring to myself as a published author – the implication being that it should draw the attention of potential readers.

Would I ever get back into the academia?

I’d be either a liar or ignorant if I said “absolutely not, not a chance in a million”. At the same time, I’d be a hypocrite if I became the very petite-bourgeois exemplification I spent this post blasting. And so, unless some unthinkable systemic change occurs, it seems the academia and I will have to remain separated.

Which is absolutely fine.

After all, you can’t miss something that never was.