Hi Gabriel, thanks for this cri de coeur. My take on the passivity of academics in the face of a corporate takeover with political assistance from both the main parties covers half a century https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/how-my-generation-let-down-our-students-a48. By 2050 some of the buildings will still be there, but higher education will be a forgotten memory of the inmates, if any.
The world revolution I speak of is the third phase of the machine revolution: steam, electricity, digital (the title of the essay). In the early 70s, I asked Trotskyite entryists to the union why we were selling the farm for measly pay rises. They replied "because it is all the scientists are interested in". My reply was in the cited essay. People think academics are intellectual snobs with too many holidays; no politician would lose votes by taking us to the cleaners and the bureaucrats have little else to do than make our lives a misery.
What we call education is a system for taking creative energetic children and turning them into passive Sun-readers with no news and a titillating picture of girls on every other page.
Reading your essay, Keith, I’ve been struck by your ideas that individuals must choose whether to engage with or retreat from the shifting global terrain of informational capitalism. Your framing of a “world revolution” really spoke to my appreciation of the profound reordering of power, knowledge, and identity that many of us are witnessing. I find myself preoccupied with the global shifts you map and the internal contradictions of the university you refer. If, as you suggests, we are living through a revolution, then surely the university should be among the first to respond. And yet, for many of us working within it, the institution feels more like a battleground. What’s happening inside is, in its own way, a kind of class war - which I personally experience as a union activist.
There is a struggle between managerial and academic logics, between those enforcing metrics of productivity, impact, and funding, and those trying to preserve traditional forms of academic work: the lecture, the monograph, the programme, etc. But too often, this defence of the traditional becomes complicit in the very logics it seeks to resist. The defence of the university as a gatekeeper of certification often masks a deeper institutional obedience, one that clings to status, to disciplinary borders, and to credentialing rituals that no longer hold the authority they once did.
This creates what I’d call a double enclosure. Externally, we are fenced in by metrics, funding councils, and digital platforms that have redefined value in terms of visibility and performance. Internally, we are constrained by outdated modes of legitimacy that make it difficult to reimagine what academic work could be, especially for those of us who do not fit the ideal academic profile, who are burnt out, and who are told, implicitly or explicitly, that our worth depends on publishing in certain journals, securing certain grants, adhering to certain styles of expression.
This double enclosure exhausts us. It disciplines us into silence. Increasingly, it feels easier to accept managerial capture or nostalgic traditionalism than to imagine a different way of organising intellectual life.
But if the revolution you describe is real, then we need to ask not only how we engage, but under what conditions we are able to do so. Who gets to speak? Who gets to experiment? Who gets to fail? And who gets listened to when they try to say that something is broken?
Perhaps what is needed now is neither a retreat into traditionalism nor a capitulation to platform capitalism, but the cultivation of a third space: a commons of knowledge, driven by solidarity, care, and insurgent creativity. This means recognising that the university may no longer be the primary site of intellectual life,
and that this is not necessarily a loss. It may be the beginning of something more open, more plural, more just.
See also: https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/money-in-the-making-of-world-society.
Hi Gabriel, thanks for this cri de coeur. My take on the passivity of academics in the face of a corporate takeover with political assistance from both the main parties covers half a century https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/how-my-generation-let-down-our-students-a48. By 2050 some of the buildings will still be there, but higher education will be a forgotten memory of the inmates, if any.
The world revolution I speak of is the third phase of the machine revolution: steam, electricity, digital (the title of the essay). In the early 70s, I asked Trotskyite entryists to the union why we were selling the farm for measly pay rises. They replied "because it is all the scientists are interested in". My reply was in the cited essay. People think academics are intellectual snobs with too many holidays; no politician would lose votes by taking us to the cleaners and the bureaucrats have little else to do than make our lives a misery.
What we call education is a system for taking creative energetic children and turning them into passive Sun-readers with no news and a titillating picture of girls on every other page.
Reading your essay, Keith, I’ve been struck by your ideas that individuals must choose whether to engage with or retreat from the shifting global terrain of informational capitalism. Your framing of a “world revolution” really spoke to my appreciation of the profound reordering of power, knowledge, and identity that many of us are witnessing. I find myself preoccupied with the global shifts you map and the internal contradictions of the university you refer. If, as you suggests, we are living through a revolution, then surely the university should be among the first to respond. And yet, for many of us working within it, the institution feels more like a battleground. What’s happening inside is, in its own way, a kind of class war - which I personally experience as a union activist.
There is a struggle between managerial and academic logics, between those enforcing metrics of productivity, impact, and funding, and those trying to preserve traditional forms of academic work: the lecture, the monograph, the programme, etc. But too often, this defence of the traditional becomes complicit in the very logics it seeks to resist. The defence of the university as a gatekeeper of certification often masks a deeper institutional obedience, one that clings to status, to disciplinary borders, and to credentialing rituals that no longer hold the authority they once did.
This creates what I’d call a double enclosure. Externally, we are fenced in by metrics, funding councils, and digital platforms that have redefined value in terms of visibility and performance. Internally, we are constrained by outdated modes of legitimacy that make it difficult to reimagine what academic work could be, especially for those of us who do not fit the ideal academic profile, who are burnt out, and who are told, implicitly or explicitly, that our worth depends on publishing in certain journals, securing certain grants, adhering to certain styles of expression.
This double enclosure exhausts us. It disciplines us into silence. Increasingly, it feels easier to accept managerial capture or nostalgic traditionalism than to imagine a different way of organising intellectual life.
But if the revolution you describe is real, then we need to ask not only how we engage, but under what conditions we are able to do so. Who gets to speak? Who gets to experiment? Who gets to fail? And who gets listened to when they try to say that something is broken?
Perhaps what is needed now is neither a retreat into traditionalism nor a capitulation to platform capitalism, but the cultivation of a third space: a commons of knowledge, driven by solidarity, care, and insurgent creativity. This means recognising that the university may no longer be the primary site of intellectual life,
and that this is not necessarily a loss. It may be the beginning of something more open, more plural, more just.