I am in higher level education in the public university system. I used to view academia as a source of hope in society, and perhaps a progressive institution in someways, or some kind of source of hope with their supposed focus on science and research. After some years here, this “image” I had of academia has been shattered.
What are your perceptions of academia and research institutions, as Marxists?
While studying (sociology and politics) my lecturer told me a time they where commisioned to do an investigation into heroin users in Glasgow and come back with reccomondations for policy.
They go and interview 100’s of people, conduct experiments, come back and tell them
‘we should legalize drugs and setup safe consumption rooms in order to reduce harm as much as possible’ (Glasgow has some of the highest rates of drug deaths in the world for context)
They tell her ‘we dont like your results, we wont be pursuing any of your reccomondations unless you can make it say that we need to criminalize them’
Anyway, academia is mostly just a way for a company to advertise itself now a days. It works by only things that make profit and make company/politician look good will be funded; Academia is mostly compromised in the upper echeleons of it, with many well do-ers and intulectual energy being wasted.
The role of academia under any regime of political economy is complex because there will always be incentives to defend the system in place while the standard of seriousness can’t just make it easy propaganda for the ruling class.
The easiest position for an academic to have is to criticise without opposing: being critical is a way to reinforce something (hence why communists encourage self-crit), only by actively opposing something you can destroy it.
I’m a horticulturist. My university is completely coopted by the largest agribusinesses in the region. Our buildings, our grants, the consulting that underpaid staff do on the side- it’s all tied in some way to major corporations and the admins setting the curriculum are all directly paid by them. As a result, none of the natural science courses have any kind of radicalism or actual environmentalism to them. They heavily push neoliberal solutions to systemic problems that they refuse to identify as such. The research is guided by corporate interests and whims, and if it identified them as the people directly destroying the land here then I have no doubts it’d be suppressed and the researchers responsible purged. The product of that research is therefore how best to abuse a cow and how to get the most wheat out of a plot of land in the shortest amount of time.
My spouse was taking animal science classes, teachers saying things like, “The way the system works is pretty bad for the animals and the people who work with the animals… but there’s nothing to be done about it.”
My spouse standing there in a barn outside of the main campus thinking/saying out loud, “But here is where we’re supposed to figure out what’s wrong and how to do it better…”
Day 2 of the revolution, after all of the hospital administrators are shot in the stomach and left on the ground, all of the liberal academics are going to be made to write “If education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” 100 times in front of their class. This is the happybadger promise.
In as few words as possible: U.S. academia functions as an MLM* scheme where your best career prospect after getting out will be in academia, preparing further students to leave academia only to return, ad infinitum.
Except for STEM degrees. Then you might be able to get a job for the military industrial complex.
Almost no one I know who finished university wound up doing the kind of work they studied for. One’s in healthcare. The rest are still doing odd-jobs or wound up back in academia.
*MLM = multi-level marketing, not Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
In as few words as possible: U.S. academia functions as an MLM* scheme where your best career prospect after getting out will be in academia, preparing further students to leave academia only to return, ad infinitum.
Yup. Graduate students are expected to do so much unpaid work, at least here in Canada. Not just that, but we (at least in my program) still pay tuition despite not taking courses. We constantly do unpaid work for our own (or our supervisor’s) research. We pay out of pocket to present work at conferences. We pay thousands of dollars to publish our work. We have to beg and grovel for the chance to get funding, and the funding system hasn’t changed scholarship amounts in over 20 years. All the presentations, publications, funding applications, etc. are just fodder for your CV, so you can have better odds at doing more presentations, publications, and funding applications.
It’s such a rigged system.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be that opposed to having to stay in Academia and just do research, if the entire institution and system around submitting research wasn’t such a corrupt pile of shit. I honestly fucking love doing research, even in my free time, I always have a million tabs open, always trying to read new stuff. Just can’t stand the elitism and classism in Academia. Wish being an independent researcher was a more realistic thing.
Its another tool used to reinforce/perpetuate the system that it resides within.
You’ll find classes that might be able to fly under the radar and professors/instructors that can get away with injecting some more radical anti establishment ideas into a class but for the most part… its just another means of reproduction.
