Why Are Universities Becoming Politicised? Answer: Academic Specialisation

This is for anyone who is trying to work out what is wrong in contemporary society and for anyone who is trying to work out what to do about it. There are many problems. But most important is what we think. This affects everything. It affects the talking head of the body politic, the broadcasters and politicians and writers, since they make the noises we repeat. But, lower down, acting like a vast corset on the obese and bewildered nave of the body politic, it also affects bureaucracies and administrations and corporations, since they encode everything until it becomes institutionally inevitable through relentless incentive and nudge. Finally, at the root and nerve and womb of the body politic, where the future generations exist, it affects education.

In modern England, and modern Elsewhere, there are many obvious shadow problems (energy, equality, immigration, etc), but there are deeper problems of substance: or structural problems, as we sometimes call them. As the shadow of our surface problems has extended, it has bitten into the structure, and affected the substance. This is what the fear is, in the 21st Century: for some of us. That there was a surface rot, sometimes indistinguishable from the fragrance of cut flowers, that had eaten into the timber of the nation. It smelt like cannabis or love or freedom. But, now, every boat that comes over the water is one more straw on the camel’s back, preventing the body politic getting through that eye of the needle.

Education is schools. But schools are not generative of the ideas they impose on the young. Education is universities: and here, where we enter into systems of certification of entitlement to meddle with the canons of our civilisation, there is something generative, and highly influential. And education at a university level is rotten. Not entirely rotten, of course; but rotting: rotting from surface rot, but also from administrative incentive and nudge rot; and also rotting from wrong thought and wrong attitude. Many academics complain about universities, but they themselves exhibit forms of thought that are part of the problem.

The problem has four aspects. Three of them are related, the fourth is the ‘plus one’. These problems are specialisation, gatekeeping, a culture of non-criticism and politicisation. In an earlier piece I outlined eight problems faced by the university: unlike the other pieces I write for the Daily Sceptic I spent several months meditating on it (as if it were an academic article). I tried to say everything there. But here I am trying to be sharp, memorable and exact.

Hence specialisation, gatekeeping, a culture of non-criticism and politicisation.

1

Specialisation. We have divided academic labour. We have faculties, departments, fields and subfields. No one thinks about everything. Yes, indeed, the old habit which you’ll find in Aristotle, in medieval writers like Hugh of St Victor, in Francis Bacon, in Thomas Hobbes, in G.W.F. Hegel and even in the great figures of the early 20th Century, R.G. Collingwood (in Speculum Mentis) and Michael Oakeshott (Experience and Its Modes) – is gone. No one thinks about thought, all knowledge, and therefore attempts to think through the ranking of thought, which thought is good, which thought is misleading, which thought is flawed, which thought is simply rotten.

Notice I used the word ‘field’. First of all, there is Weber’s riposte to the question ‘What is your field?’: ‘Only donkeys have fields.’ But then there is the fact that even the medieval peasant understood the principles of letting fields go fallow and of crop rotation. But modern academics have no fallow and no rotation. They study the same thing, again and again: in fact they usually engage in repetition: writing the same thing they wrote in a PhD dissertation, adding occasional details, new controversies and political relevance. There are ten thousand literatures, ignorant of each other, repeating similar intuitions, and allowing politics in through the back door. Everyone writes; no one reads.

Also, we insist that undergraduates enter the university to study a systematic narrowness, and, what is more, to narrow themselves even within that frame. The ones who narrow themselves most successfully according to the already narrowed imperatives of their university teachers, go on to become the next generation of teachers. And thus we go on.

2

Gatekeeping. This is a corollary of specialisation. We have specialisations. Each subject is defined: externally to distinguish it from others, internally to identify its own character. This is history, that is sociology, the other is philosophy: and, within these, there are subfields: e.g. ethics, and then subinfeudated into that, virtue ethics, and after that, probably, variants of virtue ethics. Much academic literature is worthless: some of it by absolute content; but most of it because it is so enforcedly narrow, because it is written in order to satisfy gatekeeping protocols. One sends an article to a journal, and one has to satisfy the prejudices and protocols of scholars whose knowledge is enforcedly narrow.

All academics dislike peer review. Everyone has stories about it. In 2011 I wrote a piece called ‘The Fundamental Antinomy of Politics’, sent it to the American Political Science Review and was told it was unoriginal. Rejection came the same day. I wrote back, saying, “If it is unoriginal, let me know who has said this.” No answer. But most academics think that peer review is justified in principle, if irritating in practice. I disagree: I would rather have partial editors. I would rather have naked nepotism. The few times I managed to get something published without it being crippled by criticism was because I by chance came across a genuine freethinking editor: Anthony O’Hear at Philosophy or Frank Ankersmit at the Journal of the Philosophy of History. If we had naked nepotism we would have less sly politicisation and abuse of academic standards.

The point is, it is impossible to publish unless one satisfies the internal, that is established, protocols of a paradigmatic system, as monitored by the successful exponents of that paradigm. Originality is not important. And broad sensibilities are actively discouraged. Everything is in miniature.

3

A culture of non-criticism. This is another corollary of specialisation. It is one we don’t talk about. Unlike gatekeeping, which is inward facing, this is outward facing. There is a sort of omnilateral treaty whereby everyone in the academic world says, “I will be highly critical of my own subject, but will never, ever, venture even the slightest criticism of anyone else’s subject.” There is an academic convention whereby anyone from one specialisation does not criticise anyone from another specialisation. If I am a physicist, and you are a sociologist working on gender studies, I say, “Jolly good” and find something agreeable to talk about, and I never say, “What is the academic justification for what you are doing?” One is simply not meant to say, “What you are studying is rubbish.” In fact, criticism is out.

Specialisation is the problem. But the sub-problems are gatekeeping and non-criticism. Every academic is committed to defending a small field, and doing so highly energetically, even vengefully. But then, whenever a broader perspective could be possible, they switch off the critical mechanism and revert to polite tolerance and even liberal celebration of allies in other fields.

This problem – specialisation – and its two sub-problems – gatekeeping and non-criticism – leave a void in the consciousness of the academic: and hence in the mind of the nation. Since the national mind has nothing to think about, and has nothing to say about everything, this void can only be filled by a political surrogate. Hence, politicisation.

4

Politicisation is ubiquitous in the universities. By politicisation I do not mean “encouraging political debate”: I mean other things. I mean, at least: 1. “making everything seem political,” and 2. “asking everyone to have a policy about something.”

This is a two-stroke engine of politicisation.

First stroke. “This is political.”

Second stroke. “So we have to have a policy about it.”

If we think everything is political and that we must have a policy about everything then we are in a world of rampant politicisation. This is the academic world we have. And it is the sad unitary world that is leaking downwards into the schools, and infecting the sap and root of the nation.

Academics, for reasons of specialisation, gatekeeping and non-criticism, have nothing general to talk about. So they are entirely disqualified from saying anything about the world. So, since they want to be famous or at least important (influential), they have to restore themselves as important pundits and panjandrums, and do so, alas, by discovering political relevance and – new word – impact, pluralised into impacts: so that every little professor becomes a Spitfire Battle-of-Britainer, spitting out a gunfire of noisy policy all over the skies. Put-put-put goes the machinelike sound of policy recommendations.

This is why we have the toxic and unpleasant politics of Trans, BLM, Net Zero, Reparations, Decolonisation, Patriarchy, all the rubbish that bestrews and confounds the intellectual panopticon. All the abandonment of the traditions of our own civilisation.

Plus we get stupid literature. We get Ovid + racism. We get Shakespeare + decolonisation. We get Vikings + climate crisis. We get Joan of Atc + Trans. We get IR + gender. We get a thousand combinations of possibly genuine academic subjects and silly political relevance. I struggle to think up examples, but look at any academic journal and you’ll see. I looked at Shakespeare Quarterly recently and saw barely anything that would have satisfied a critic of the 1960s as serious: it all looked woefully trivial and political.

Lockdown was brilliant. It enforced conformity. It got into the mind. It asked experts to sanctify it. It seemed necessary. It achieved unity. That unity was political. (Not, again, in the sense of encouraging debate. But in the bad sense of making everything political and a matter of policy.) It showed the way. All the climate-grifters and grievance-grifters realised that Lockdown was the Key (ha ha, lockdown was the key) to How To Do It.

Let me summarise.

1. Specialisation dominates the university system, and damages our capacity to make sense of anything. It makes us, yes, stupid.
2. Specialisation is supported inwardly by gatekeeping.
3. It is supported outwardly by a culture which refuses to let anyone criticise anyone else outside of their disciplinary boundaries. The university system actively encourages a lack of criticism.
4. Politicisation fills the sense-making mechanism: replaces wisdom, fattens the face of stupidity. This explains the entire culture of administratively-enforced silliness and coercive conformity and policy recommendations and silly left-wing politics masquerading as science and truth.

In sum, we are unlikely to be able to deal with the politicisation of the university, and hence of our entire culture, until we reverse the specialisation of academic enquiry, and weaken the prestige and incentive system that encourages the clever to whittle down their intellects until they are mere shards and splinters.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.