Links for Friday, May 10
Tales of our captured institutes of learning
Today’s links include tales from our so-called institutes of learning, a little Foucault, some sauce Bernays, and of course, a musical treat.
Links
• Butterflies and Batons: The Dog Star Rises Over American Campuses (Richard Eskow)
Alexander Pope asked, “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” That question has come to mean, who uses cold cruel machinery to crush the fragile and beautiful? We know the answer now: Politicians. Corporations and billionaires. Media institutions. And college administrators. They speak, and the wheel turns again. …
[U]niversity presidents aren’t leaders anymore. They’re lackeys. They serve the corporations, billionaires, and government leaders on whom they depend. It’s no surprise that, when it comes to the encampments, most administrators have been dutiful subalterns. They don’t lead, they obey.
Universities as arms of the blended corporate state is a concept that needs more exposure.
File under “Servire opulentos says the plaque in the hall.”
• My dream died, and now here I am (Sabine Hossenfelder)
This relates strongly to the previous link.
When I signed up for studying at the university, I thought being a physicist was my dream job.
But here I am, on YouTube. How did that happen?
You’ve seen Hossenfelder on these pages before. She’s quite good. Here, she goes beyond explaining interesting science to describing the modern state of academic science.
Bottom line: If a project doesn’t bring in money, it doesn’t get funded. Servire opulentos (to serve the rich) again. She makes a compelling case.
There are actually several scandals detailed here. This one is common:
It made me realize that this institute [where I was working] wasn’t about knowledge discovery. It was about money making. And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn’t just this particular institute and this particular professor. It was generally the case.
The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money making. Here’s how this works.
If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, then the institution gets part of that money. It’s called the “overhead”. Technically, that’s meant to pay for offices and equipment and admin, etc.
But academic institutions then pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming. Small scholarships don’t make much money, but research grants can be tens of millions of dollars. And the overhead can be anything between 15 and 50 percent. This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.
File under “You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.”
• Foucault – Surveillance and Crime Control (Revise Sociology)
Michel Foucault is one of the most influential sociological thinkers of the last half century. One of his key contributions to criminology is his focus on how the nature of crime control has shifted from using the threat of violence and the fear of being physically punished to control through surveillance – fear of being seen to be doing something wrong.
Punishment has changed from being a violent public spectacle (such as hanging) to being hidden away, behind closed doors. It has also changed from being swift and physical, done on the body, to being more drawn out and psychological – punishment today is typically about changing the mind and the soul.
This reflects a change in how power is exercised in society – we have moved away from what Foucault called ‘sovereign power’ – which is control through the threat of force, to ‘disciplinary power’ – which is control through the monitoring and surveillance of populations [emphasis mine].
Keep in mind, a “crime” is whatever the state declares it to be. Like protesting genocide when the state wants you quiet. I’ll be writing more about Foucault, surveillance and power in future pieces.
File under “The pendulum is swinging. Don’t get knocked down.”