The Academics We Love — Or Not

There is a special kind of innocence in the academic world. Not the innocence of the child, who does not yet know how the world works, but the innocence of the tenured adult who has spent so much time explaining the world that he has slowly stopped touching it.

That sentence is unfair, of course. Deliciously unfair, but unfair. Because “the academics” do not exist. A molecular biologist, a medieval historian, a climate modeller, a legal scholar, a medical researcher, a sociologist, an adjunct language teacher and a PhD student on a two-year contract do not live the same life. They do not have the same security, politics, income, status or influence. Some academics are protected, polished and pensioned. Others are exhausted, underpaid, precarious and still expected to publish, teach, apply for grants, supervise students, sit on committees and remain intellectually original before Thursday.

So let us not start with caricature. Or at least not only with caricature.

Academics matter. Good academics even more. They preserve knowledge, ask questions nobody else has time for, teach young people, and sometimes discover things that genuinely move civilisation forward. Without them we would be poorer, dumber, noisier and probably still treating fever with vinegar and theological suspicion.

So yes, we love academics. Or at least we try.

But then they make it difficult.

Because parts of academia do seem to live in a peculiar little province. Not a geographical province, but a mental one. A place with its own customs, taboos, dialects, rituals, saints and demons. A place where the worst possible fate is not being wrong, unread or socially irrelevant. The worst possible fate is being thought insufficiently aligned with the moral weather of the faculty lounge.

In that world, reality often arrives as text. Papers, seminars, op-eds, policy notes, grant applications, position statements, HR documents and open letters signed by 317 colleagues from departments whose names now require subtitles. The carpenter has wood. The farmer has weather. The nurse has patients. The entrepreneur has invoices. The academic has discourse.

And discourse, unlike a leaking roof, can be endlessly repaired without ever becoming dry.

The strange thing is not that academics have opinions. Everyone has opinions. Taxi drivers have opinions. Hairdressers have opinions. My boiler probably has opinions, judging by its behaviour in February. The strange thing is that academics often present their opinions as if they were the natural endpoint of intelligence itself. Their political and moral instincts become “evidence-based”, “critical”, “inclusive”, “socially aware”, “historically informed”. The views of others become “reactionary”, “populist”, “uninformed”, “problematic” or, when language has fully lost patience, “harmful”.

This is convenient. Very convenient. Because once disagreement becomes evidence of moral deficiency, one no longer has to win the argument. One only has to diagnose the opponent.

Still, academics would object here, and rightly so. The real world is not only plumbing, farming and invoices. Ideas are real. Institutions are real. Law is real. Public health is real. Climate is real. Education is real. Historical memory is real. Social exclusion is real. Language is real because it shapes what institutions see and what they ignore.

The plumber’s pipe is real, but so are the building codes. The nurse’s understaffed ward is real, but so are the financing systems, labour markets and training pipelines behind it. The farmer’s weather is real, but so is climate modelling. The entrepreneur’s invoice is real, but so are tax law, consumer confidence, interest rates, supply chains and geopolitical shocks.

A society cannot live only from people who repair things. It also needs people who understand systems. That is the best defence of academia. And it is a strong one.

The problem begins when system-thinking floats away from consequence. When the explanation becomes more important than the thing explained. When the framework becomes a shelter from reality rather than a bridge to it.

That is where the academic world becomes narrow. Not because academics are stupid. Quite the opposite. It is often a high-IQ provincialism. They know a lot, sometimes too much, but from within a protected ecosystem. They are surrounded by people who read the same newspapers, fear the same reputational risks, use the same vocabulary, and mistake the same assumptions for courage.

Their reality is real. It is just not very representative.

Academics will also defend their love of language. And again, they have a point. Language is not merely decoration. Language creates categories. Categories determine data. Data determines policy. Policy determines resources.

If domestic violence is described as a “private family matter”, one type of institution emerges. If it is described as a public safety issue, another emerges. If dyslexia is treated as laziness, children are punished. If it is treated as a learning disorder, children may get help. If disability is framed as individual failure, buildings stay inaccessible. If it is framed as a design issue, ramps appear.

So yes, conceptual reframing can matter. Sometimes society changes because someone first changes the words through which society sees a problem.

But academia has a genius for turning useful language into ceremonial language. A concept begins as a tool. It then becomes a badge. Then a password. Then a boundary marker. Then a small administrative empire. Finally, nobody dares ask whether it still explains anything, because by then careers have been built on its sacred fog.

This is the fate of many good ideas. They do not die. They are institutionalised.

This also explains the strange attraction of DEI and other progressive orthodoxies in academic and media circles. These ideas are not merely political positions. They are also status signals. They show that one belongs to the educated moral class.

To speak fluently about privilege, coloniality, intersectionality, systemic harm and inclusion is not only to make a claim about society. It is to show that one has been properly socialised. It is today’s version of knowing which fork to use at dinner, except the fork has been replaced by a land acknowledgement and a trigger warning.

Again, we should be fair. Discrimination exists. Exclusion exists. Old boys’ networks exist. Some people really do have fewer chances. Universities, newsrooms, courts, parliaments and cultural institutions were not historically neutral machines of pure merit. They were shaped by class, gender, ethnicity, accent, money, parental education, confidence, networks and invisible codes.

Merit is not as clean as merit likes to believe.

So DEI is not merely theatre. At its best, it tries to make visible the filters that used to work silently. It asks who feels at home in an institution, who understands its codes, who gets recommended, who is heard, who is assumed competent, who is treated as an exception.

That is serious.

But then academia does what academia too often does. It takes a real moral problem and grows administrative vegetation around it. A small plant becomes a shrub, then a hedge, then a forest of forms, offices, trainings, declarations, working groups and deputy vice-rectors for transformative belonging. Eventually nobody remembers what concrete problem was being solved, but everyone knows there will be a workshop.

This is how protected institutions rebel. They rebel in ways that create more institution.

The professor denounces power from a salaried chair. The university attacks privilege through credentialed gatekeeping. The administrator fights exclusion by creating procedures nobody outside the educated class can navigate. The journalist speaks for the voiceless in a voice the voiceless would never use.

This is not always hypocrisy. Often it is sincerity performing inside a cushioned room. And cushioned rooms produce cushioned radicalism.

The most revealing weakness of the academic world is not that it leans left. It is that it is so often weakly accountable.

Here again, academics will protest. They face peer review, publication pressure, grant competition, teaching evaluations, citation scrutiny, replication attempts, ethics boards, funding reviews, external audits and international rankings. In the sciences and medicine especially, reality can be unforgiving. A failed experiment fails. A bad clinical method can hurt patients. A weak grant proposal gets rejected. A poor publication record can end a career before it begins.

That is true.

And let us not pretend the so-called real world is a paradise of accountability. Businesses fail, yes, but executives often leave with bonuses. Banks explode and get rescued. Consultants sell fog in PowerPoint. Politicians survive incompetence. Contractors deliver poor work. Public administrations bury responsibility in procedure. Markets punish some errors, but not all, and not always the people who made them.

The real world also has bullshit. It merely uses fewer footnotes.

Still, academic accountability has a peculiar softness. Papers can be unread. Theories can be fashionable and empty. Departments can reproduce themselves for decades. Research fields can become self-referential jungles. Students can leave with debt, confusion and refined vocabulary. And still the system continues, because its failure is hard to measure and its language is excellent at explaining why measurement itself is suspicious.

The grand example is the decades-long struggle over academic publishing.

For as long as anyone can remember, academics have complained about the tyranny of quantity over quality. Publish or perish. Salami-sliced papers. Citation games. Predatory journals. Metrics replacing judgement. Grant chasing replacing thinking. Research careers reduced to spreadsheet performance. Everyone agrees it is terrible. Everyone knows it distorts incentives. Everyone has read the declarations, attended the panels, applauded the keynote, nodded gravely at the wine reception.

And yet, decade after decade, the machine continues.

This is supposedly existential for them. It affects their own work, their own careers, their own intellectual dignity. It is not an abstract injustice in a faraway place. It is their daily bread, or perhaps their daily gluten-free institutional sandwich. If ever academics had the motive, intelligence and insider knowledge to reform something, surely this was it.

But what happens? They produce critiques. They produce conferences. They produce frameworks. They produce declarations. They produce papers about why too many papers are being produced.

One almost has to admire the circular elegance.

They are trapped in a system that rewards quantity over quality, and their response is to generate more quantity about the need for quality. The snake does not eat its tail. It peer-reviews it.

Academics would answer that this is unfair. And again, they would not be entirely wrong. Publish-or-perish is not controlled by individual academics alone. It is shaped by universities, governments, funders, rankings, hiring committees, promotion criteria, publishers, citation databases, international competition and budget allocation systems. An individual scholar who refuses to play the game may not reform the game. He may simply become unemployed.

Many academics are not the authors of metric culture. They are its victims.

But that only partly rescues them.

Because the academic world is not powerless. It can mobilise with remarkable speed around other causes. Palestine. Climate. Migration. Diversity. Colonial memory. Statutory reforms. Pension conditions. A change in university governance. A threat to autonomy. A symbolic injustice in the public square.

Then there are petitions, occupations, teach-ins, public statements, black squares, red triangles, banners, armbands, walkouts and urgent moral clarity before lunch.

But when the issue is the deep corruption of their own knowledge-production system, the heroic energy becomes strangely administrative. The revolution is referred to a committee.

Of course, political protest is easier than structural reform. A petition can be written in an afternoon. Reforming research incentives requires changing appointment committees, funding formulas, journal prestige, university rankings, national law and international habits. One is symbolic action. The other is institutional redesign.

But this is precisely the point.

Academia is very good at moral urgency when urgency costs little. It is less impressive when urgency requires rebuilding its own machinery.

There is another correction to make. The academic world is not only research, committees and political statements. It is also teaching.

And teaching is real.

A confused student is not an abstraction. A bad lecture fails immediately. A first-generation student who does not understand university codes is not a symbol in a DEI document. He or she is sitting there, in front of you, trying to survive the institution. Students arrive with talent, laziness, ambition, family problems, brilliance, anxiety, loneliness, entitlement and fragility, often all in the same week.

Any honest critique of academia must admit that many lecturers and professors meet reality every day in classrooms. They see young people trying to enter worlds whose rules were never explained to them. They see how class reproduces itself quietly through language, confidence and expectation. They see why inclusion is not always ideological theatre.

This is the better side of academic sensitivity. It often begins not in theory, but in contact with students.

But even here the institution has a gift for ruining its own insight. A human problem becomes a policy document. A classroom difficulty becomes a compliance module. A teacher’s practical wisdom becomes an administrative dashboard. What began as care becomes procedure.

And procedure, as every citizen knows, is where good intentions go to lose their shoes.

The academic bubble survives because it is not experienced as a bubble. It is experienced as enlightenment. That is the most dangerous kind.

The banker knows he is in finance. The farmer knows he is in agriculture. The civil servant knows he is in administration. But the academic often believes he is in truth. Not merely near it. Not occasionally serving it. In it.

This gives academic culture its peculiar confidence. Its members can be socially narrow while feeling universal, politically conformist while feeling critical, institutionally protected while feeling rebellious, and professionally self-interested while feeling morally pure.

It is a remarkable achievement.

And before academics object again: yes, every class has ideology. Business people often believe the market is wiser than it is. Entrepreneurs mistake their success for pure merit. Journalists mistake visibility for importance. Engineers sometimes think social problems are badly designed machines. Farmers can romanticise land and subsidy at the same time. Civil servants believe procedure is civilisation. Politicians believe speeches are action. Retirees believe the world went wrong just after their own generation left the stage.

Nobody speaks from nowhere.

The anti-woke world also has its rituals, taboos, celebrities, lazy explanations and comfortable resentments. It too can become a bubble that thinks it has escaped bubbles.

So the charge against academia should not be that academics are uniquely ideological. They are not. The charge is that academia should know better.

Its whole purpose is disciplined doubt. Its craft is supposed to be self-correction. Its pride is critical thinking. Its promise is that knowledge can rise above tribe, fashion and interest.

That is why its conformisms are so disappointing.

There is also a public hypocrisy about academia. We ask experts for help when reality becomes frightening. During a pandemic, we ask scientists. During climate change, we ask climate researchers. During legal crises, we ask constitutional scholars. During economic shocks, we ask economists. During technological disruption, we ask AI researchers and ethicists.

Then, when the answers become inconvenient, we complain that experts are arrogant, detached and elitist.

That is too easy.

Expertise is not anti-democratic. Experts should not rule, but complex societies cannot function by treating every specialised claim as just another opinion shouted in the marketplace. The fact that academics can be pompous does not mean knowledge is fake. The fact that jargon exists does not mean complexity is a scam. The fact that some professors are political does not mean all expertise is propaganda.

The right answer is not anti-intellectual populism.

The right answer is better intellectualism.

More humility. More clarity. More contact with consequences. More willingness to distinguish evidence from fashion, teaching from therapy, scholarship from activism, and moral seriousness from institutional theatre.

So where does that leave us?

Not with contempt. Contempt is too easy, and usually lazy.

We need academics. We need patient researchers, serious historians, mathematicians, physicians, physicists, engineers, economists, philosophers, linguists and sociologists who do their work with discipline and humility. We need people who can think beyond the market, beyond the election cycle, beyond the daily panic of media. We need people who ask why the city was built that way, who owns the water, how the system fails, what history produced it, and what consequences may arrive when nobody thinks beyond the next invoice.

But we need fewer academic priests.

We need less sermon and more doubt, less moral choreography and more intellectual honesty, less symbolic rebellion and more institutional self-repair. We need less quantity about quality, and simply more quality. Less “speaking truth to power” when power is conveniently elsewhere, and more speaking truth to one’s own faculty board.

Academia is valuable precisely because thinking matters.

That is why its evasions matter too. Its rituals matter. Its jargon matters. Its lack of self-reform matters. Its habit of diagnosing everyone else’s privilege while leaving its own status systems intact matters.

The academic world should rediscover a very old virtue: humility before reality.

Reality is not a seminar. It does not care about your framework. It does not become better because you have renamed its parts. It does not reward good intentions forever. It waits, patiently, until the consequences arrive.

The academics we love are the ones who know this.

The others?

Well, we may still love them.

But perhaps from a safe methodological distance.