OOOO!!! An academia thread!
I agree with you, that the democratization of the academy in the US was driven by it’s commodification, as that has been a key mode of creating greater diversity and democracy in the US… Lizbeth Cohen (among others) has focused on that in her work (esp. A Consumer’s Republic, though she doesn’t deal directly with academia in that book). It’s also very much a myth that at some point, it was the life of the mind and that it’s gotten frittered away by allowing “the wrong sort of people” into the academy. It’s a ridiculous proposition. The job market has long driven the dictates of the academy and not understanding that is just ahistorical and wishful thinking.
I’ve found many of the academics, those who are tenured and comfortable, to be completely out of touch with the rest of us here, who have something to say, but are not getting a platform to say it. It was years before PhD GTAs in my department got a raise, and yet they didn’t want us going out and having any sort of employment outside of our stipends… when many of us have to deal with having families or the rising cost of living in a gentrifying city (which many of the profs are actively helping to gentrify). They want us done in 5 years, and it’s hard for many people to do that without actually going hungry. The majority of tenured faculty got their degrees in a completely different environment and they need to acknowledge that things have changed, but they just aren’t willing to do so. In way, they are rather conservative thinking, even when they are “liberal” minded… if that makes sense.
Incidentally, I was just talking to a friend who is the daughter of academics today, and she says things have always been political and kind of shitty. Both got their degrees and jobs in the 1970s, and both have been at or near the top of their departments. It’s never been this pure, life of mind place, but has always been politically driven environments.
Anyway… time to revive this thread and fix the university system, maybe?
