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causticusFrom D:
There are several critical factors here that are allowing this Maoist purging to happen, and I’ll try to parse them in no particular order.
1. As Hamlet said, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space…” Academia has become more & more bound in its own nutshell as people are self-selecting joining. When I was contemplating academia in the 1980s, I was fortunate to see the writing on the walls already. I’d planned on getting my PhD in English, but when researching for my Honors Undergrad thesis, I kept reading article after article of petty, small-minded back-stabbing hyper-focused gobbledygook. I already knew how bitter & mean some academics could be. I left. And that was in the 1980s. I can only imagine how it is now. Only a certain type of person will accept this nutshell. Someone of limited intelligence–smart, but not nearly as smart as they believe. Given to cruelty & petty bureaucratic meanness. In short, party apparatchiks.
The hard sciences thought they were immune and were not too long ago. Alas, they too have been swept up as the nutshell encases them.
2. Administrator bloat. Administrators have an entirely different function from academics. Their function is as a giant HR/PR machine for the organization and to enrich their own jobs. IN the age of social media, it is a no brainer that they’d toss out a professor if their company’s image and/or their own jobs are at stake. Negative publicity, even minor, terrifies them. They want to operate in the shadows; the last thing they need is a spotlight, any spotlight.
3. Student as consumer, university as service. The vision is not to educate students, but to please them, and, as one Yale student put it, roughly, “to give them a safe home.” This is now being interpreted as a sort of nursery where scary images are in abeyance.
4. The relatively low pay & non-glory of professors - who have given of themselves 4 years of college, 6 years of grad schools, several years of post-doc in some fields, very crappy $10/hour type jobs in adjunct positions for most, 7 years toward tenured professorship if they’re lucky, then finally, at least, Tenured Professor for $70K or less - leads to a person who is a) heavily invested in the system in a sunk-cost way and b) very bitter and insecure at being invisible (many papers are never read, their ‘enlightened’ brilliant thoughts are read nowhere), & paid less than their plumber and electrician. They therefore tell themselves they are Brilliant & Important, far more wise than mere plumbers or doctors, the true Philosopher Kings. They teach students as a king teaches its subjects. It feels good.
5. The seduction of Soviet thinking for these weak and bitter minds. Lust for power for people who thought they’d be far more powerful than it turns out they are.
6. Fear and cowardice and each thinking, “If I lie low, at least i can research my dream topic I’ve given my whole life for.” This is for the non embittered, modest intellectual, the ‘bystanders.’
There are several critical factors here that are allowing this Maoist purging to happen, and I’ll try to parse them in no particular order.
1. As Hamlet said, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space…” Academia has become more & more bound in its own nutshell as people are self-selecting joining. When I was contemplating academia in the 1980s, I was fortunate to see the writing on the walls already. I’d planned on getting my PhD in English, but when researching for my Honors Undergrad thesis, I kept reading article after article of petty, small-minded back-stabbing hyper-focused gobbledygook. I already knew how bitter & mean some academics could be. I left. And that was in the 1980s. I can only imagine how it is now. Only a certain type of person will accept this nutshell. Someone of limited intelligence–smart, but not nearly as smart as they believe. Given to cruelty & petty bureaucratic meanness. In short, party apparatchiks.
The hard sciences thought they were immune and were not too long ago. Alas, they too have been swept up as the nutshell encases them.
2. Administrator bloat. Administrators have an entirely different function from academics. Their function is as a giant HR/PR machine for the organization and to enrich their own jobs. IN the age of social media, it is a no brainer that they’d toss out a professor if their company’s image and/or their own jobs are at stake. Negative publicity, even minor, terrifies them. They want to operate in the shadows; the last thing they need is a spotlight, any spotlight.
3. Student as consumer, university as service. The vision is not to educate students, but to please them, and, as one Yale student put it, roughly, “to give them a safe home.” This is now being interpreted as a sort of nursery where scary images are in abeyance.
4. The relatively low pay & non-glory of professors - who have given of themselves 4 years of college, 6 years of grad schools, several years of post-doc in some fields, very crappy $10/hour type jobs in adjunct positions for most, 7 years toward tenured professorship if they’re lucky, then finally, at least, Tenured Professor for $70K or less - leads to a person who is a) heavily invested in the system in a sunk-cost way and b) very bitter and insecure at being invisible (many papers are never read, their ‘enlightened’ brilliant thoughts are read nowhere), & paid less than their plumber and electrician. They therefore tell themselves they are Brilliant & Important, far more wise than mere plumbers or doctors, the true Philosopher Kings. They teach students as a king teaches its subjects. It feels good.
5. The seduction of Soviet thinking for these weak and bitter minds. Lust for power for people who thought they’d be far more powerful than it turns out they are.
6. Fear and cowardice and each thinking, “If I lie low, at least i can research my dream topic I’ve given my whole life for.” This is for the non embittered, modest intellectual, the ‘bystanders.’
