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Leaving Academia

Malcolm Gaskill explains why the “bad old days” weren’t so bad after all
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The “bad old days” of academia were bad in many ways, Malcolm Gaskill writes, with professors teaching class drunk, unfair workloads, favoritism, and indolence. But we’ve also lost something with the arrival of pedagogical and research metrics and an “infinitely expanding” university bureaucracy: experimentation, intellectual curiosity, and determination. He explains in the London Review of Books:

In the ‘bad old days’ students were, as they are today, taught with commitment and passion, but sometimes eccentricity added a spark. Provided he – and it was usually a he – turned up fully dressed and sober and didn’t lay hands on anyone, the crazy lecturer could be an inspiration. Expectations were less explicit, the rhetoric and metrics of achievement were absent, which made everyone feel freer. Even applying to a university seemed less pressured, because it was so unclear what it would be like when you got there. You absorbed teachers’ anecdotal experiences and sent off for prospectuses, including the student-produced ‘alternative’ versions mentioning safe sex and cheap beer. Even after matriculation I had only a vague sense of the structure of my course. The lecture list was to be found in an austere periodical of record available in newsagents. Mysteries that today would be cleared up with two clicks on a smartphone had to be resolved by listening to rumours. This news blackout has been replaced by abundant online information, the publication of lucid curricular pathways, the friendly outreach of student services and the micromanagement of an undergraduate’s development. Leaps of progress all, if it weren’t for the suspicion that students might develop better if they had to find out more things for themselves. We learned to be self-reliant and so were better prepared for an indifferent world; we didn’t for a moment see the university as acting in loco parentis. Excessive care for students is as reassuring as a comfort blanket and can be just as infantilising.

* * *

Undergraduates today can’t know how it felt to belong to a state-funded institution whose low-pressure otherworldliness allowed for imagination and experimentation, diversity and discovery. The student experience didn’t need defining because it wasn’t for sale: it magically happened within a loosely idealistic, libertarian countercultural framework. The last thing anyone at a university wanted to wear was a suit: now you can’t move for them. Today’s watchwords are value and satisfaction. Even if it’s a good thing for fee-paying students to have a say in what their money buys, a transactional mentality has led to paradoxical demands for more contact hours and the right not to use them. Whereas lectures have long been optional, seminars and tutorials have remained compulsory. This is now under threat, along with the basic principle that attendees at a lecture are passive consumers and seminar participants are active producers. These days the customer is usually right and the lecturer more like a generic service provider. Supporting observations include students’ failure to learn their tutor’s name after 12 weeks, a tendency to refer to ‘teachers’ and ‘lessons’, dependence on prepackaged fillets of text – whatever happened to ‘reading round the subject’? – and unabashed admissions that set work has not been done. Why pretend the dog ate your homework when you own the homework?

In other news: Speaking of academics, they have also ruined literary journalism, says an anonymous writer in The Critic: “I never met a freelance reviewer who couldn’t give a better sense of the average novel than an assistant lecturer at the University of Uttoxeter.” Agree or disagree?

Here we go again. Remember Warren Kanders? He resigned from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art after artists and museum staff thought it some great sin for him to own a company that produced nonviolent military and police materials, including tear gas. Now an “advocacy group” is trying to get Tom Gores, a board member at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, removed because his equity firm owns a prison phone service that the social justice police have determined to be “evil.” Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, speaks like a little tyrant: “‘We’ve been trying to get him for some time to take meaningful action,’ Tylek told Hyperallergic. ‘For a while he delayed, and now we’re at a point where he’s run out of time.’” He’s run out of time. Let’s hope the LACMA doesn’t cave, but it probably will.

Meanwhile, museums across the country have been hit hard by the pandemic and may not recover. Though in Britain, there could be space for a “Museum of Colonialism”—at least that’s the suggestion of William Dalrymple.

Jeremy Black reviews David Martin Jones’s History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics: “Jones . . . assesses what he correctly presents as ‘the erosion of academic integrity.’ In it he analyzes ‘the decline in academic standards and the consequent research bias towards progressive normativity, and a default position critical of Western democratic states and their traditional institutions.’ The culture of grant-giving institutions comes in for particular criticism from Jones, and rightly so. His comments could be amplified if looking at departments of History, English Literature, or, indeed, academic life as a whole. Moreover, Jones is happy to name names, as in ‘it was perhaps Tony Blair’s favourite philosopher, Anthony Giddens, who best exemplified the manner in which academic theorizing about the post-historical world could link theory to policy and establish its otherwise abstract concerns at the core of public and foreign policy. . . . The embedded utopianism of the third way thus replaced an outdated world historical materialism.’”

Stefan Beck reviews Elisa Gabbert’s collection of essays, The Unreality of Memory: “Gabbert’s disaster essays are brimming with facts and insights that recalibrate that relationship. We learn that the Titanic sank not because it struck an iceberg but because of the highly improbable way it did. We learn that the eruption of a supervolcano such as the Yellowstone caldera would be a million times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy — and that nothing whatsoever can be done to mitigate its power. These essays are deeply frightening, if the reader lets them be. More than that, though, they reveal that the unthinkable is often the inevitable, and that accepting one’s place in a vast, infinitely complex, and indifferently violent system may be psychologically healthier than it sounds.”

“Unlimited vacation. No dress code (just don’t show up naked). No approval needed for expenses. And if you criticize the company, you might get rewarded with a promotion.” Netflix CEO explains his philosophy of management in a new book. Does it work?

Painting Blue Hill: “The Farnsworth Museum in Rockland has recently published a catalog, Maine and American Art, that plumbs themes of identity and place through works in its collection, timed to coincide with the state’s bicentennial. The region has been a fertile place for art-making since long before European colonists arrived, and the essays in the Farnsworth catalog make frequent mention of the Wabanaki tribes and allude to the Red Paint People, whose fine stone adzes and sculpture have been excavated along the coast—allusions that serve to expose the perspective of the rusticator, tourist, itinerant, and the idealist in the art that we associate with Maine.”

Photo: Santuario della Foresta  

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