Class in Academia

[wild_irises]

I thought people might be interested in this.

Hegemony is based on naturalizing inequality to the point where we no longer recognize it and/or engage in it without the intent to do so. As students and junior scholars your success in academe is often based on networking with Senior scholars who have the power to radically impact your funding, advancement, tenure, and overall career. As you pass through each stage of academe the power they have over you diminishes. However, in order to pass through those stages you will likely have to swallow your pride, dilute your morals, and except things that in any other field of work you would be empowered to change. Those little compromises make you more and more immune to the vast array of inequalities and oppressions that fester in the academic world. This happens to everyone regardless of identity but is exacerbated by membership in a marginalized group and multiplied outward by the number of groups to which one belongs. This is something that we all know, that is written about in anthologies, and the subject of endless panels, and yet it is something that most would deny when reading it so starkly written out on a page as I have done here.

There's lots more.

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

A vast amount of academic culture is proving one's willingness to put up with any amount of bullshit and hoop-jumping in order to get the prize. I think that by the time people get high up in that hierarchy, it inclines them to make compromises that shouldn't be made and encourages them to accept abuses of power and privilege.

A better idea: establish a school that actually does not suck and is based on something other than whoring ideals for tenure.

Re: Well...

[wordsatourbacks]

A vast amount of academic culture is proving one's willingness to put up with any amount of bullshit and hoop-jumping in order to get the prize. I think that by the time people get high up in that hierarchy, it inclines them to make compromises that shouldn't be made and encourages them to accept abuses of power and privilege.

Yeah.

[wordsatourbacks]

Thanks for the link! I find it hard to believe that those of us who are working-class academics or folks in general whose marginalized identities others have used in the workplace to try to humiliate us actually seek out humiliation, though - at least not most of us who fall into that (admittedly broad) set of categories. (Not that Susurro is saying that in any way... just my response to one of the questions she poses at the end of her post.)