Universities and people working for them experience widespread anxiety: their funding is cut, their work pressure is high, their freedom of expression is reduced, polarisation in political opinions prevent safe public debate, research findings are increasingly questioned, and they rapidly seem to be losing social prestige. The political environment in which they operate can be characterised as increasingly 'autocratic'. On other channels, much has already been said about why academics are victims. In this contribution, Martin de Jong critically examines to what extent academics themselves are to blame for their plight and they can do more to contribute relevant societies issues and breed trust in what they do.
Ruling the knowledge economy
For a long time, we academics believed that our work served society and we were well worth our not unsubstantial tax-payer's money. The results of our high-level research fed into our teaching tasks; therefore the former not the latter were the key to our own career and wider societal progress. The impact we reached through publications in top journals made our reputation in the world; we checked university rankings and our private citation scores every year and celebrated our rising reputation. And if it did not rise, we undertook measures to stop the decline. We worked hard, very hard, to make it all happen. Our economies were grateful to us. It was our knowledge that made technological progress possible. It was our growth predictions taken from sophisticated models that were echoed in the media like weather forecasts. It was our social science findings that told what (tiny) problems made political and legal systems stutter and civilisation thrive. We were evidently the beating heart of the knowledge economy and proud to be.
Rather 1 Euro in the pocket than 10 promised by university people
And then, as if out of nowhere, we saw big mouth politicians coming to power. They flaunt scientific knowledge, do not enjoy reading, but specialise in screaming instead. They refuse to be contradicted instead of enjoying dialogue as they should. We now have leaders who showing chilling determinations and have higher skills than us in playing online and offline wargames, and they are eager to show it. We even have ministers of science and education with very similar backgrounds to our own who used to tell the very same story as we still do... until they took office. Their current claims expressed in their barber char, however, are that we should be much smaller and poorer because 'the people' want it. In the ballot box they have shown that they would rather have 1 Euro in their pockets than 10 promised by university people. Meanwhile, the budgets for expensive weaponry are bound to more than double in the coming years. In a growing number of nations administrative organs no longer feel obliged to execute decisions reached by legal bodies. Regular elections are still held in most of them, but the trust that votes will be counted fairly has dwindles and for good reasons. Are wo no longer living in the knowledge society? Are we reaching the end of rule-of-law and representative democracy as we know it? Is technology more than ever serving the needs of those who enjoy controlling other people and have the means to exploit tons of extra natural resources to boost their excessive lifestyles? If we academics are no longer the masters of the universe, then who will be serving? And how will we be serving?
An assembly line for brain products
There may have been things that we did not notice during all those long years of our rise to knowledge power. When I was a young scholar, my professors were happiest if they had weekly encounters with ministers and captains of industry. My professors had their subordinates, including myself, write consultancy reports about administrative issues the organisations these organisationals chiefs faced and then drafted two-page executive summaries based on our work. Soon after they would give presentations about the findings and policy recommendations and impact was born. Publishing mattered, but for most disciplines outside hard-core engineering this was in book format and not every year. But the relentless drive to boost productivity did not only overwhelm physical assembly lines, it also hit the world of brain jobs and turned scientists into mental production workers. As a consequence, the assembly line of article manufacturing emerged. The first challenge was to lift the number of articles produced per year, and then when the market seemed saturated, the number of journals went up steeply and so did the required quality control measures to secure high standards. This increased research work pressure, especially for young scholars. And since they still had their teaching'load' (=burden) to fulfil alongside their far more important publication tasks, there was no time to serve ministers or captains of industry anymore. Time and money was spent on interaction with academic peers in Canada, Brazil and New Zealand and the discussions with them were much more conceptually advanced and methodologically sound. And as long as public budgets were available for science and education, we could even pay thousands for inducing large and profitable publishers to make our work available online and open access: a huge global market was yearning at our feet. Unfortunately, the knowledge produced was no longer of the type and style that practitioners would enjoy reading. They turned to other sources for drafting their policies and structuring their organisational reforms. We also lost the capacity to explain the relevance of our jobs to masons, carpenters, waiters, mechanics, nurses and primary school teachers. We earned far more than they did, and it was normal. Did we not spend many more years studying hard to achieve what we have now?
The danger of living in a different neighbourhood
While we examined an empirically coherent world seen through the lens of our abstract and rigorous scientific models, the world lying behind our models was undergoing a remarkable transformation. We thought we could help make technological development green and sustainable, but the profit-maximisation oriented mechanisms of shareholder capitalism decided otherwise. We assumed for long that we could relive societal tensions with enlightened neoliberal economic policies, but found that effective purchasing power for most people has barely increased in recent decades and the gaps in wealth across population groups have risen dramatically since the 1970s. We believed that we could teach people to like and welcome foreigners and that democracy and rule of law were strong enough to secure everybody's most basic rights. But we lived in different neighbourhoods than 'the other half' did and knew neither what made the despicable white xenophobes tick nor how the dangerous Islamic strangers that lived next to them lived their daily lives. How could we know what their problems were? How could we expect that immigration and growing poverty would come to overthrow the legal and political stability we had taken for granted for so long? There was no analytical model to tell us and our spending on and trust in drawing lessons from history and the humanities had reached a historical low. We talented academics have become experts in tiny niches of the vast global research agenda, but we lost the big picture. We are cracks at concepts and methods, but we lost memory and empathy. And although we protest against the injustice done to us, fight for our budgets and decry the risk of losing academic freedom, we seem to be receiving remarkably little sympathy from the rest of society. Are we doomed?
Conjunctural versatility, structural decline
Our fate is not carved in stone. Electoral processes and outcomes in Europe and America are unpredictable and can be influenced. Annual budgets for higher education are and will always be part and parcel of political and administrative negotiations which are open ended. But broader long-term socio-economic, political and cultural development urge us to be extremely cautious: structural inequalities persist and in fact continue to grow, with no real action taken against it in either the public or private spheres. Demagogues who are able to express citizen dissatisfaction without providing effective solutions find more and more effective channels to convey their messages. Environmental problems grow from bad to worse but we have not been able to mobilise effective measures to stop degradation and the belief that this will still be possible decreases by the day. Anxiety about the arrival of tiny numbers of desperate asylum seekers catch more attention than the effective integration of large groups of autochtones and allochthones in society even though that would be far more effective in reducing tensions in vulnerable urban districts. Given this long-term evolution, it is safe to say that prospects are not good. And yet, we academics are theoretically in an excellent position to study the phenomena above and conclude useful things about them. Funding we just barely do, or rather: funding arrangements do not encourage us to do so. If we made an effort to step up our relevance, we would know what makes for real societal impact and engaged scholarship. We would spend more time making our teaching excellent and make enlightening our students the hallmark of our teaching excellent and make enlightening our students the hallmark of our achievements. We would conduct more fieldwork the relevance of which can be explained to anyone and engage less in advanced modelling that intrigues only ourselves and people like us. We would rarely study economic models without relating them to their socio-political context but rather establish research agendas that find parallels in history with the current times. We would not say that anything related to mathematics is useful and university applicable and brush aside the humanities as too vague and deserving of further financial cutbacks until they basically vanish from the university curriculums. We do not have intellectual baggage to make a difference in offering robustness to society in handling crises, but shall we? Are we willing to adjust our attitudes?
Executing the executive
Until fairly recently, it seemed extremely unlikely that in Europe or North Americas authoritarianism would show a return as it has. One nation was known for having superstrong checks and balances tightly woven into the very fabric of its political institutions: the United States. But see here is a black swan: even there these checks and balances crumbled in the face of submissive parliamentary representatives, charismatic leadership brooking no resistance, legal bodies struggling and often falling to overturn executive decisions, public malfunctioning, media consumed as entertainment, academics focusing on issues peripheral to large majorities of the American electorate and massive public discontent.
Authoritarianism in its purest form implies that those who are in charge of the 'executive' also manage to control the 'legislative' and the 'judiciary' (as in the classical trias politica), and wield dominant influence inside the 'implementative' (bureaucracy), 'consultative' (advisors and lobbyist) and 'commentative' (various media channels), as in the modern sextas politica. The American presidency is well underway realising this, and so is the Hungarian. No existing political system in the world is immune to authoritarianism, and we can expect more to follow. The less people have faith in their political system and the more politicians are ready to disregard decency in handling structural and cultural rules of the democratic game, the faster it will succumb. Within the consultative and commentative powers, we academics have a vital role to play in breeding awareness and trust among citizens and consumers about a wide range of topics. Some call it breeding civic virtues. To perform that job successfully, we should realise that as soon as those same citizens and consumers are no longer convinced of their relevance to them, they will eventually strike back at us as voters and tax-payers with disdain and shrinking willingness to contribute to scientific research. This is no less than a logical consequence of us having turned away from them. It is not too late to turn back. We are worth our money, are we not?
- Professor
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