2022-05-25
I've reflected only recently on my student days, but now I find myself posting another article that evokes another memory from those times.
What is academia for? Does it fulfil the function?
Uni was always sold as a place to go between finishing school and starting a career, a place where the clever and inquisitive should go to question the established knowledge, to push their understanding beyond the current boundaries, and to have fun doing it.
Potentially difficult terrain though, especially when the answers to your questions on the established knowledge turn out to be inadequate. That would mean that a certain amount of established knowledge must be demolished before one's understanding could be pushed beyond the (revised!) boundaries, within an establishment notoriously averse to admitting any error.
Anyway, upon graduating with a decent degree in 1971, I accepted a position as a "research assistant" at the same college, wondering what academic life would turn out to be like on the other side of the student-lecturer divide. It was an abrupt change. My supervisor took no interest whatever in anything I did and after a year I discovered that he had published a "joint paper" naming me as a co-author!
I concluded that the whole arrangement was set up merely to boost either his ego or his career standing or both, and left to find gainful employment in industry, where what I did mattered.
That was merely my experience as one student, and I assumed that it was probably not widespread within academia as a whole, but looking back now ... perhaps I was too generous.
Certainly others have cause to think similarly, and today I share another posting by Martin Geddes who had experience of higher levels of academia than I, and has kindly written a review, from a distance that enables a degree of detachment, for our benefit.
"Who would pay to be taught by a historian, professor of politics, or philosopher who didn’t anticipate and track the Great Awakening?"
