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Raghav Agrawal (impactology@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Sep-2024 16:27:44 JST Raghav Agrawal

Academic job politics in a nutshell
"You can turn an entire academic discipline into a self-referential and incestuous network of mutual citations, hirings, sinecures, and other kinds of back-scratching by just one highly organized minority faction"
From an essay that profiles an economic historian and heterodox economist — Frederic Lee. It talks about his journey and also how heterodox economists were suppressed by neoclassical ones
https://archive.is/20230619023931/https://strangematters.coop/frederic-s-lee-profile-part-one/#selection-2423.244-2423.524
In conversation about 9 months ago from mastodon.social permalink
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1. From an economic point of view, all academic politics reduces to a struggle over the control of funding, the creation of graduate students, the composition of tenure and hiring committees, the editorship of top journals, the quantitative rankings of journals and departments, and the leadership positions of professional associations. These forms of power are all mutually reinforcing. After all, an academic discipline socially reproduces itself generation to generation when professors train grad students who then become professors, all sharing the appropriate methodology. The committees decide who gets hired and who gets the full-time, well-paying, permanent jobs. And the committees” key metric (besides an assessment of the dissertation) is the ranking of the candidate’s home department and of the journals they’ve been published in or cited by. Rankings are most often the creation of influential individual professors, professional groups like the American Economics Association, or trade publications like US News & World Report influenced by the former. And finally, individual departments’ rankings in particular are (along with enrollments) key to securing their long-term funding—particularly as a way of preventing getting axed when their university faces a budget crunch.
  https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/690/331/742/873/697/original/21cbe74e9938cf04.png
2. At bottom universities are not about academic freedom, they’re not about open inquiry, they’re not about public service, they’re not about educating the masses—they embody or accomplish none of these except as an accident to their primary function. And that function, when all is said and done, is to draw upon a chunk of society’s surplus and funnel it into various colleges and departments, who then use it to pay scholars so they can research and teach full- time within the parameters of method and quality set by those distributing the cash. Universities medieval and modern, whether under the control of religious clerics or communist parties or capitalist trustees, are united across time and space by this fundamental pattern of organization. From this perspective, it follows rather obviously that the point of establishing such institutions in the first place was to generate particular kinds of people producing certain sorts of approved knowledge, sustaining them so they could do it as a permanent living. To the extent universities remain useful to modern democracies (and it seems to me Lee, for all his ruthless critique, remains rather fond of them), it’s because we too need permanent and reliable funding streams by which to nurture and sustain knowledge- producing communities, for the good of society and perhaps even as a good in itself.
  https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/690/332/042/372/258/original/1d6225650a46da88.png

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