We are living through a point in the history of Western academia so momentous it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it – namely, the effectual end of universities as centres of humane critique, the effectual end of an enormously rich and diverse and valuable tradition, which has always had to struggle to carve out a task for itself that is often at odds with the priorities of society. Today, in almost every country in the world, academia is capitulating, almost without a struggle, to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism.
Thus Terry Eagleton in an interview published in Third Way, February 2015, who adds:
A couple of years ago, I was being shown around the biggest university in South Korea by its proud president and I made the unseemly blunder of saying: ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything critical going on here.’ He looked at me as though I had said, ‘How many PhDs in pole-dancing have you awarded?’ With the best will in the world, he had absolutely no idea what I meant.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 