Among academics, I suspect I’m not alone in struggling to reconcile the moments of joy that university life affords — witnessing students come alive in seminar, savouring that exhilarating book that reshapes my thinking — with a sense of systemic brokenness. The signals are everywhere: Decades-long cuts in public funding. Rising costs (and eventually debt) for students, forcing many to take on jobs that limit study time. The steady replacement of tenure-track positions with low-wage, precarious ones. The gradual transfer of power over governance from faculty to a non-academic managerial class. The growing expectation that scholarship demonstrate its immediate “impact” for business, which short-sightedly scants the exploratory projects that often yield more lasting breakthroughs. The proliferation of metrics for research and teaching, along with the administrative burden they entail.
But the most fundamental marker of decline might be the increasingly pervasive...
Spencer Morrison is a literature professor at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.
Advertisement
Advertisement