March 23, 2020
Why I Lost Faith in the Academia
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.
8 Comments
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About the title: “Why I Lost Faith in the Academia?” – isn’t it part of the process that all nihilists have to go through: “Why I Lost Faith in Humanity?” It would be an interesting topic to write about, Chris, describing the process from trusting early childhood to the final, conclusive conviction: “our species is not viable – ultimately self destructive.” I am sure each of us went through a somewhat different process, with different milestones, but I bet, with a lot of similarity. How about it, Chris, you would be the best person I know of who could do the topic justice?
An excellent point & idea (and thanks for the compliment!)
I’m not sure if a single post would be enough to properly analyze it though – volumes upon volumes would be needed! But perhaps I could still write one to give the basic idea.
Funnily enough, this also reminded me of a funny drawing I once saw: a woman comforts a young boy, patting his back and saying “I’m sorry John, but there’s no Santa”. Then on the right side of the image, a young man is in a similar posture with the (now older) woman: “I’m sorry mom, but there’s no God”. 😀
Very funny, as gallows humour goes. 😉
The topic I suggested could be handled as an analytical treatise, or it could be done in a much more personal way (I know it’s very personal for me) – or a mixture of both.
The tone on this one is so personal that I can touch your guts. And yet, I sympathize. The Latin American experience is slightly different, but not so much. Teaching creative writing privately, individually, one-on-one, has been the most rewarding experience so far. And I only have two students! I get to keep in touch with the burning flame that motivates me every day. Well, not every single day, but most of them anyways. On the topic of progressive ideas and academia, though… I’ve forged myself an MLM, so I never thought a petite bourgeois institution (I’ve read my Althusser!) would do s**t for me (or anyone, really). The backstabbing and the egocentrism, to me, come as unconscious, automatic replies to the productivity demanded from a work that needs time and patience. Here I pay my tributes to humanistic thought: the human sciences are a thing of their own and demand this lato sensu culture of the man of letters. Some of its knowledge is intuitive (unconscious, impossible to formalize, etc. – all sorts of consequences escaping the grasp of physico-mathematizable scientism, simply an immaterial manner of commodity fetish), thus rendering it time-dependent. But we live in the eternal now, for this ki-sucking life-destroying alien called kapital has stolen imagination its constitutive desire for future (I’ve read my k-punk too!), hence so many dystopian fictions, and it has rewritten, pasteurized and homogenized whatever we understood as “our” past. Talk about nihilism, I’ve become destructive by now. Just wanna f**k everything up and watch this ruin of what could’ve been a world burn down to the very ashes of misery.
Thank you so much for this intelligent yet also personal, human comment. To expand on what I referred to in the post, your “post-academic” reference touched me perhaps particularly because of its temporal dimension; what comes after the academia?
Most of us spend our lives in autopilot, not questioning, not doubting, not seeing anything beyond the obvious. And you are 100% right on the money when you say that backstabbing and egocentrism are automatic replies (perhaps we could use the term “conditioned”, too) as a result of the productivity demanded. And that’s perhaps precisely the problem.
As far as I’m concerned, it all boils down to being able to see myself in the mirror and not feel shame, guilt, or disappointment – to the point it’s possible at all. I am, after all, an accomplice; that’s what we all are. Let’s take an American earning $1000 per month, which is really low by Western standards. They’re still making more money than about 85% of the global population. The paycheck I got when working at the university (which, although not low, is a very average paycheck by Finnish standards) put me at the top 0.47% globally. That’s more than shocking. It’s obscene. We’re all accomplices.
Ultimately, I’m with Bertolt Brecht: All of us, or none. Which is really not very realistic to expect – I’ve read somewhere that most American homeless people actually don’t want the rich to be taxed, so that nobody will get their money when they become rich and achieve the American dream. You really can’t beat stupidity.
Which makes me really relate to your last few sentences. Sometimes I tell people – especially now, that I see everyone running like a headless chicken – that I wish and pray for an asteroid to hit the planet. It’s the only solution. Or, in the words of a metal band I like, Darkest Hour, “Elevate yourself to the sun/ Burn it black and let the ash rain down/ Roaming through the celestial fields/ A new seed a new beginning”
Well, I guess we’re on the same boat. I used to be more of a metalhead, Darkest Hour still rocks, but I don’t know, it kept me held at leash’s length by this imagination that sheer destruction could seed a new world. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe it, but participating in pacific and not-so-pacific protests, being at labor unions (and seeing how teachers’ union is so disunited, so disjunct, split and torn asunder by pesky little jargon disputes), going into a political party, defending a program, etc. My goodness, life became chaos. But I never lose hope. Being a waiter at night and writing a monograph the day after, cleaning bathroom floors and stealing a beer bottle to have that girl with the enchanting smile come to my place after that one inviting wink she gave me… Life revealed itself so much bigger than academia, my friend. Everything comes after the academia. And before it too. It progressively became paid isolation. Yet everything outside here remains to be studied, analyzed, commented, scrutinized, thought about. And that’s why I quit it. Because it lied to me, it promised a microcosm, a miniature of reality, but it was just an ego fair, choose your patriarch or matriarch and go fight their fights to get a good grade at the end. Not to even get you started on how much we act as if we read, but did not actually read s**t of it. So many papers, articles, split chapters. Why an undergrad would not read a single whole damn book from cover to cover? No other experience could provide a love for literature so blazing to study it. I grew tired of lying. I want to read stuff and to read it slowly, at a pace I can understand it, respecting the original enchantment that got me here back when I was thirteen. I refuse to just quote some now-high-on-international-fashion theory and shake my head in agreement to some armchair authority that never paid my rent (hence why I turned myself to creative writing, teaching through the best fictional texts I’ve read, not through any creative writing textbook). I don’t hate academia. I can’t hate it. It remains as the last stronghold of whatever is left of what we once called thinking. But I can’t stand watch it fall to ruin by sheer lack of action from its professors and, a million times worse than them, the managers. So, yes, if some projects fail this year, next year I will teach in basic education (I guess it’s equivalent to middle and high schools). One of the worst paid checks in Brazil, no doubt. And I could punch my country’s current president to death and laugh my way through it. But I must pass the flame on. I saw it in their eyes, the burning desire for poetry, the charm of words, the song of letters, the spells hidden in rhymes (with or without reason). I stand my ground: hope remains.
I’m sorry for pouring my heart out on that last reply. Thank you for understanding and being so patient and respectful. It’s been far from a calm quarantine. Much respect from overseas. Keep it cool.
No need to apologise my friend! Your comment was so sense-making that it felt something I could’ve written myself 🙂
Today a post on experimental fiction will be publishing, containing a section on House of Leaves and how it mercilessly mocks the academia. Much of what you said will echo there!
Parenthetically, for you and anyone else reading, there’s no need to self-censor on Home for Fiction; it’s fine to write “shit”, “fuck”, and the rest of Carlin’s seven dirty words 😀
Take care!