University teaching functions as retail distribution of ideas

Evidence

Yet since in America private middle-class consumption has increasingly been replaced by that of the university system, which seems destined to play as crucial a role in the culture of postindustrial capitalism as did the monastery for medieval times, it seems appropriate to quote as an example of such analysis one of the most characteristic pages of the late C. Wright Mills on the commodity structure of academic intellectual life … In so far as men teach, and only teach, they are retailers of ideas and materials, the better of them being serviced by original producers, the lesser, by wholesalers. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 753

Categorization

• XREF: The university-as-monastery analogy and C. Wright Mills’s commodity analysis of academic life prefigure later work on knowledge production — links to Jameson’s own 1980s-90s essays on postmodern academic culture. — connects to: Intellectual practice is reproduced through teaching, not only through writing — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 272; University administration messages mirror banking education in K-12 settings — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1186
• SHARE: Mills’s taxonomy casting tenure-track teaching as ‘retail’ of ideas would land well with an academic friend who reads sociology of knowledge.

Broader Connections

• Intellectual practice is reproduced through teaching, not only through writing #corroborates (0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 272