Tenure-track conformity to power precedes and explains academic quietism
Evidence
For this reason, the question of academic freedom is something of a red herring. The more fundamental question is intellectual freedom, which is a public concern not limited to the private sphere of the university. Those very few academic intellectuals who venture out of their classrooms and speak openly and courageously on public issues are, in fact, the exceptions that prove the rule that academic privatization has made them not so much complacent as indifferent to power—because by the time they receive their tenure, bending backward to accommodate power has become second nature to them. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 325
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between academic and intellectual freedom, and the mechanism of tenured accommodation to power, is a compressed, layered claim worth sitting with.
- XREF: connects to: Personal career calculus, not just evidence, shaped academics’ abandonment of Levy distributions — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 511; Business school institutional structure determines whether theoretical finance thrives — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1095; University restructuring locked in economists’ institutional shelter from accountability — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 589 (+5 more)