You Don't Have to Go Extinct
The author of a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education went to the 2019 MLA and had a bad time. Several additional articles were written in response but this isn’t one of those.
For the last few months I haven’t been able to shake this thought:
You don’t have to go extinct.
I’m not sure whether it’s true (it’s not, at least on a long enough timeline) but it’s tempting to believe it. More than that, I think it’s necessary for me to believe it. It’s become a little mantra or prayer in reaction to the twin existential threats of the end of my time as a “professional philosopher” as I prepare to enter the job market and the end of human civilization as the globe begins to heat up uncontrollably.
I still don’t know what building alternative institutions looks like in practice. I don’t know what kinds of projects will help preserve the things that are good about doing philosophy and which will have no effect. I don’t know how to grow my own food. But what I do know is that I need to start doing these things if I’m going to keep saying this for as long as possible.
I also know that not going extinct isn’t the same as things going the way I expect. Maybe academic institutions will be radically different. Maybe my participation in them will be radically different. That’s alright.
The thing I want to work through here is to start to imagine an alternative to academic institutions that are built for resilience. What are the institutions that can preserve the kinds of knowledge production that universities are built for but can do so in the face of increasing catastrophic climate change and capital encroachment? At least two aspects of this are (1) what kinds of social relations can survive climate change and (2) what kinds of activities can uncouple knowledge production from the relations of capitalism?
The first thing to say is that while academia doesn’t exist without students, research can. There’s enormous value in keeping these things together, but we can address them as distinct problems. On the one hand, students are our main source of income. On the other hand, every other relation we have to students is massively complicated by the transactional one. It would be better for academics to live and work in small, cooperative, self-sustaining communities (effectively making the need for a livelihood irrelevant) and to teach as an addition rather than to be employed to teach.
The production, reviewing, recording and distribution of research is a network problem. We need to be able to communicate and share data with other academics within our own local communities and between other communities. It’s generally better to keep the local communities on the small side (<1000 people) and then scale up the way we communicate and share between these. The internet effectively solves the practical aspect of this problem, so our question is how we ought to organize these networks. Peer-review was invented 100 years after the concept of an academic journal was and in the roughly 270 years since we’ve seen a massive crisis in this method of producing knowledge at a large scale. Meanwhile, journals have been hierarchically ranked and purchased by private corporations in just the last 50 years. This is not to even mention the whether the essay ought to be regarded as the best product of academic work.
I think the future of academic institutions will look like a cooperative, but the details of that cooperative are still massively underdeveloped. In the mean time, trying to build dual power will require a level of cooperation within existing institutions that we still lack.
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Photo by Emily Ziegelmeyer on Unsplash