This week we discuss – once again – the global university crisis. What can we say: don’t blame us for obsessing on this theme, blame reality. It seems that things get worse every week, as updates pour in of funding cuts, institutional reforms and growing inequality of the academic labor market. Fortunately, resistance remains vibrant: over the past weeks we have heard of new student occupations taking place both in the Netherlands and London – and how could we overlook the recent strikes in Canada.
This time we address this theme by paying homage to our Academic Slow Food Manifesto. In this we are encouraged by Raluca Nagy, who in her post appearing on Thursday makes a compelling statement about our obsession with productivity, and its adverse effects on creativity:
How many times a year can one be innovative, original or radical? Frankly, how many times is someone innovative, original, and radical over the course of a career? The sad fact is that originality, innovation or radicalism are not really the ends of the academic game, despite much posturing to the contrary. Conformity is the most assured route to academic survival, not originality, a fact that neoliberal quantification is only intensifying. The rapid publication rates ensure mediocrity. And this applies to any academic discipline, not just anthropology.
We take her words seriously, and share two delicacies from Allie’s Archives: Antonio De Lauri‘s wonderful piece on academic knowledge as being essentially bourgeois – one of our most read posts ever. We follow-up with another favourite by Mariya Ivancheva on Wednesday, namely her compelling response to the ‘Casual Researcher’ Gate at Oxford last fall.
We conclude this thematic week with a very particular resistance movement: namely the ‘occupation’ by a group of Allies of the glossy PR campaign currently run by the University of Helsinki to commemorate the University’s 375th anniversary.
Despite much to be upset about, the week thus concludes on an upbeat note: they can humiliate us with their audits and nonsense quantified indicators – but they cannot deprive us of our sense of humour!
