A Dark Side of Academia

Martina: I guess our subject today is academic overheating. The dark side of working in the academic world is emerging increasingly clearly. Think of all the debate around the importance of becoming a Slow Academic. I refer specifically to the book The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, and the Slow Academic debate led by Agnes Bosanquet in Adelaide. I think we can interpret the acceleration in academia as an overheating phenomenon, can’t we?

Thomas: Yes, it is one of the best examples we have, certainly for people who work in the academic world. It’s one of those overheating effects that really affect our everyday rhythm, that shape our lives in some very unproductive ways. I’ve been an academic for four decades now. I started my studies 40 years ago, so I’ve been part of this world since the early 1980s. And since then, there have been some very important changes, which have followed the same pattern as the other forms of overheating that we are seeing in other domains. So we see the bloated, accelerated overcrowding in academia flourishing at the same time as world trade has quadrupled, from 1980 to 2019, and the size of container ships trebled just from 2002 to 2020, and now they’re three times as big. One of the most memorable press photos from recent times, one that made it into newspapers across the world, depicted the container ship Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez Canal during Easter (2021), you saw it, right? Footnote 1 Its size was beyond the wildest imagination to those of us who had never seen one of those monsters close up before. Contemporary container ships are three times as big as they were just 20 years ago. The tendency to scale up has been massive in most of the topics we’ve spoken about – air traffic, the number of emails you send, the number of gadgets people have, the number of social media users, energy consumption and pollution, species extinction and the loss of biodiversity. Surrounded by all these overheating syndromes, we see academic overheating fitting in snugly and comfortably. There are more academics, more specializations, more journals, conferences and courses, more competition and, I’m afraid, more neoliberalism in academia. The question we may eventually ask is how to make sense of all this. What is the common denominator, the pattern that connects?

Beyond the Ideal Types of Speed and Slowness

Martina: Well, I have a lot of questions. For example, the first one is, are we sure that speed is a bad thing? Because sometimes I think academics see speed in a positive way: speed of publication is a sign of high performativity. The faster you publish, the more positively you are judged by the system. But, the overheating approach seems - in a way - to see speed as a negative element.

Thomas: It’s a great question but I think we have to be a bit more specific. We cannot just criticize speed as such. Sometimes it’s a good thing to get things done quickly. When you go to a conference, you enjoy listening to the presentations where people get to the point and do so in a structured way. They may only take 15 to 20 min of your time, and they don’t go on and on, and on and on, before getting to the point, which is usually a good thing. And it’s probably something that we have picked up from the Americans who are very professional when it comes to conference presentations because efficiency is the lifeblood of the American way of life. Young people at good schools learn to make convincing presentations, though they may not learn how to read poetry in the same way as we did. We read a lot of poetry, analyzed classic poems in a lingering way, and that can only be done slowly. Today, this may be less widespread. They may not even learn a lot of European and imperial history, not as much as we did, although they may to some extent compensate with YouTube and Google searches. In my experience, smart Norwegian adolescents know little about the First World War. But they’re really professional when it comes to presentations, which sometimes they start doing as quite young children. They start to learn to use PowerPoint or something similar and to make presentations in class, to perform in public. Fine, as long as you have something to say.

Moreover, couldn’t academic life in the recent past be a bit too slow? People had just too much time and too little pressure, outside the proper elite institutions. At my university, on a Wednesday in February with penetrating sunshine and lots of crisp, white snow, quite a few of the professors would not even be in their offices, since they would be out skiing. That, in my world, is a form of unproductive academic slowness, and it has nothing to do with skiing as such. There is a more constructive slowness movement brewing in academia now, that you alluded to, which is similar to the città slow and slow food movement started by Carlo Petrini. The motivation is identical. Slow science is not about laziness, but revolting against a production regime that makes us more competitive than profound and our publications superficial. Just as cooking a juicy and tender ossobuco can take half the day, understanding Bourdieu or analysing ethnic relations in Mauritius is not something you can do quickly without losing the substance.

So I do not think that everything slow is good. There is no intrinsic reason why being slow is better than being fast. On the other hand, the law of diminishing returns tends to apply when activities accelerate. The more you get of something, the less the last unit is worth. I mentioned a thirsty person arriving at a cafe earlier; they would be unwilling to pay more than the shop price for the third and fourth bottle – and with academic production, you can also see the law of diminishing returns in the sense that the more conferences you go to, for example, the more workshops you are involved in, the less you’re able to invest in each of them, all other things being equal. So that when, in a particular past – say, in the 1970s – academics might typically go to one or two conferences a year, or maybe just one conference. Perhaps there were some smaller workshops, but they were local because travel was expensive and extensive travel was not expected. So you mighty go to one big gathering in a year, and this meant that you normally spent a few extra days. You got to know people and places quite well as a result. There was no fragmented flurry of faces fleeting by as is the norm at conferences in the North Atlantic world today. One of my old professors became a pen friend of an Australian anthropologist whom he met at a conference somewhere in England in the 1960s. They stayed in contact for many, many years afterwards, meeting physically a few times. Since these events were so rare, each of them was precious. So whether you go to ten conferences a year or 50, each consecutive conference will have less value, all other things being equal. We can talk about teaching along similar lines since something happened with teaching at the university level in the early 2000s with the Bologna reforms. They were intended to streamline study programmes and standardize teaching so that the courses and degrees should be compatible across Europe. So every country which had its own system had to adjust. We all had to produce bachelor’s and master’s degrees along pretty much the same lines across the continent; in reality, we were told to emulate the British system. This had its costs because most countries had their own, tailor-made study programmes which had evolved slowly on the basis of experience and learning. In my own country, before the Bologna reforms, the system enabled you, for example, to take 1 year of just sociology and then an exam at the end. Then you learned qualitative and quantitative methods, you got the classics, you learned Marx and Weber, you learned a bit on class and gender inequality, we had a rich curriculum of 4000 pages, plus plenty of time searching for gold in the university library, and then there was one big exam at the end. You could also take a full year of philosophy and a full year of social anthropology – as you’ve guessed, this is what I did – before deciding on what path to pursue. As a result of the Bologna reforms, these coherent one-year units were chopped up into smaller courses, so now students take six courses during a year. As a result, the subject and your knowledge of it get fragmented. You get a less holistic approach to what you’re doing. In anthropology it has become difficult to assign a 250 page monograph to the reading list because it takes up too much of the limited number of pages in a course, whereas when we had 4000 pages spread across 1 year, we could easily assign four or five or six ethnographic monographs, and students had a plenty of slow time because they had a full year before taking an exam. They could sit and look out of the window and read, take notes, whereas now you always have the pressure on you that there’s one or several exams coming up and you need to do well because otherwise you might be in trouble later on. This does not necessarily create a good learning environment, just an accelerated one. Teaching staff teach more; students take more exams; and scholars have to publish more this year than last year. It is neoliberal economic growth applied to a field which is essentially based on different values than efficiency and growth. Back in the 1980s, professors could still sit down and have a coffee with you, unless they were out skiing, that is, since there were fewer of us and less pressure on them. It doesn’t really happen anymore. As I said, if you go to 15, 12 or 10 conferences, each of them will, on the whole, mean less than if you only went to one or two. Similarly, if you publish 10 articles instead of five, you put less work into each of them. So you have this principle, which is now called the salami principle, which has nothing to do with the famous Milanese sausage, incidentally. What a salame di Milano and contemporary research have in common, is that they are being cut up into very thin slices, and in the latter case, you can use each of these slices for one publication.

Martina: Yes, by publishing using the whole salami method, but it’s another form of fragmentation. It’s not so easy to manage, to have time to reflect, to find new ideas. It’s quite hard to work in this way.

Thomas: That’s right and, in some branches of sociology, but probably to a greater extent in anthropology and subjects like history, the book length manuscript is considered the gold standard because you need space to let your argument evolve in dialogue with your empirical material, you need time to think through the totality, and you need to be able to provide sufficient context. And it has to be cumulative, so chapter five builds on chapter four, which builds on chapter three. When academics in the humanities and social sciences increasingly produce PhD dissertations which are article-based, this becomes more difficult to achieve because each article has to stand alone, so they’re not cumulative in the same way. A key development in anthropology since the early 1990s may in fact be that many of the books now published, unless they are revised dissertations, seem to be stitched together from articles which were initially published elsewhere. So the long thoughts, the idea that follows you like a shadow for more than half a page, is being threatened. Sometimes that’s fine, and often it’s a bad sign. If we consider some of the major works of philosophy from the 18th and 19th centuries, there was only one way in which they could be produced, and that was slowly – according to Nietzsche, philosophizing should be done while walking. Slow walking! They didn’t have much by way of diversions. They didn’t have many hobbies, correspondence was slow, as was travel, but the good philosopher went for a walk every morning and then sat down with their dusty books, thinking, writing, looking out of the window. So there is something that needs to be said about the harmful effects of acceleration in academia. The salami syndrome in publishing is just one symptom. One should also study, using reliable, that is qualitative, methods, the quality of the articles which are now being spewed out with such frightening frequency by journals – old as well as new. We also need to interrogate the fact that the English language has suddenly become the only game in town. This is good for quantity and metrics in the Anglophone world, but very negative for originality, eloquence, diversity and justice. So many of us are forced to publishing in our second or third language – if all your publications are in Italian, you simply don’t exist on the international stage. A growth in quantity, a loss of diversity, that’s the most palpable overheating effect of uncontrolled growth in academia.

Martina: Yes and sometimes I think that – even if a person seems to have a good curriculum vitae – sometimes it’s quite boring and I think I have a conversation with a little box of technical theory, so.., this is only my experience, you can never really have a conversation with a person and his or her scientist soul but only with his or her jargon…so I think acceleration in academia is a bad thing.

Thomas: Absolutely, yes, and there is more to be said about this too. It may be about time that the humanities and qualitative social sciences of the universities represent ourselves loudly and clearly as a counterculture. De facto, we represent an alternative set of values as opposed to the values of overheated neoliberalism and new public management. Increased efficiency and speed can be excellent, but there is a time and a place for everything, and an essay is not a pair of slippers, any more than a collection of conversations about overheated globalization is a pound of flesh to be measured, weighed, valued and compared with other commodities. It’s a good thing to have a more efficient production in waste recycling and postal deliveries, and there are lots of areas where speeding up would be good. There are also good arguments for doing things more efficiently for the sake of it; I have the boring, filthy and necessary work in mind. Let’s try to make it as painless as possible. But the kind of thing that we do in universities follows a different logic because knowledge is created out of nought, or rather, it is the product of time, knowledge, intelligence, engagement and fresh air. It can be tempting to compare university life to life in a monastery. Ideally, you’re on your own in your office and you have few interruptions except coffee and lunch breaks. You discuss with colleagues while breaking bread with them, reading, thinking and taking notes. This is often how new ideas come into the world, and it has to be done in that way. It’s the same with the students. I sometimes tell undergraduate students that they should be aware of having entered a countercultural place which represents the opposite of the smartphone and the shopping mall. It’s not snippets. It’s not fragments. It’s not fast food or fast fashion. In order to get anything out of your studies, you have to really sit down and concentrate and it’s hard work, and it can be incredibly boring, but it will be rewarding in the end.

We also need to question overheated academic publishing. It has become a crazy, demented treadmill churning out thousands of articles every day which nobody is meant to read, but which are indended for people’s CVs, enabling them to apply for work. Instead of prizing quantity, we should ask job applicants to submit their three best texts with the application and forget the rest.

Being a Production Worker in the Sausage Factory of Academia

Martina: It’s incredible that we keep going on writing and writing a lot. What is the point? It doesn’t make sense to write and write in this way.

Thomas: No, it doesn’t, and it’s like being production worker in the sausage factory. It’s like wow, look at him. He’s got so many publications. OK, I concede that I am in the glass house in this because I publish a lot myself, because writing is my way of moving ahead with my thinking. But I have very mixed feelings about it, and I’m not proud of the quantity, fully aware that most of what you do will have no impact. Perhaps many of my publications are mainly for internal use.

Allow another brief comparison with the 1960s and 1970s, before the computer revolution. I said that people might typically go to maybe one conference a year because it was expensive. Many of these professor types who were typically born in the 1920s and 1930s published very little. The odd book review, well, an article now and then, maybe a little article every 5 years. Even the famous anthropologist Fredrik Barth, whose biography I wrote just before he died in 2016, was not hugely prolific, and he described himself as lazy. He might publish three articles 1 year, perhaps two articles the next. Then a book eventually appeared, and that book would be thorough, smart, original, in short high-octane work. The ability to write slowly, but also to digest the things that other people had written, was taken for granted. There is something profoundly unhealthy about the current situation. Perhaps we should suggest a rule for academics. You have an upper limit of 200 pages a year. When you reach that threshold, you have to wait until next year before placing your next little missive out there.

Martina: Oh yes! It’s a good idea because growth is clearly not good for thinking, this kind of growth, because it also makes us read more superficially because you want to keep abreast of your field, right? You don’t read maybe even the important articles or books as thoroughly as you should because there are so many other things that you should do. So, instead of encouraging more growth, we should do the opposite. Encourage less. Less is more. So, for example, how many conferences do you attend every year now?

Thomas: Good question. During the pandemic, things have been a bit different but, that said, before the pandemic maybe three big conferences and seven or eight smaller international workshops or symposia, Perhaps 11 events altogether. And the thing is that, following each of these events, you usually have to produce something because the organizers want to make a special issue or maybe an edited volume. It’s a rule. This means that, in my case, quite often I produce 14, 15, 16 academic articles in a year which have been more or less commissioned. It should have been more like four or five.

Martina: Maybe this is because you are an academic rock star. I mean you are quite ‘famous’ in the anthropological world.

Thomas: Not so much. It’s really a part of a larger system with its inner logic.

Martina: But, my opinion - I don’t know your viewpoint about it - is that it’s structural. It’s a structural problem.

Thomas: That’s true. We’ve been co-opted by the same value system that leads to overheated growth in the economy – it is an example of what Habermas many years ago spoke of as the colonization of life-worlds. Perhaps, like some other social theorists, we could argue the need to distinguish between culture, politics and economy, which are based on distinct value systems. The economy – production, distribution, consumption – prioritises efficiency, while values guiding politics politics could be deliberative democracy in negotiations, compromises, that kind of thing, whereas in culture, there has to be a third way – a third set of values which are distinctive from those of politics and economy. So it should be autonomous and the scientific world, the academic world will be part of the cultural world, which should be based on different values. The sociologist Daniel Bell once described himself as socialist in economic matters, liberal politically, and culturally conservative. In accordance with complex systems thinking, inspired by people like Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann and Edgar Morin, each subsystem in society should be regulated by a distinct value system. Having a market-dominated university is quite damaging for the reasons we’ve been talking about. To a great extent, we may blame the expansionist growth ambitions inherent in capitalism. But there is another dimension as well, which also fits with globalization or overheating, namely homogenization and standardization. Nowadays, there’s really just one game in town, and it’s Anglophone. As mentioned, if you don’t publish in English, you become marginal, which is a serious problem, not least in a country like Italy, where you have a very big domestic intellectual public sphere. In a smaller country like Norway, it’s less of a problem because we’re so used to having to use foreign languages in order to communicate. But this all leads to a flattening standardization. The political theorist Benedict Anderson, famous for his book about nationalism, Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1983) later wrote a beautiful book called Under Three Flags (Anderson, 2005) which is really about what he calls early globalization in the late nineteenth century. It’s about anarchists and freedom fighters in the colonies. One of his main characters is José Rizal from the Philippines, a famous freedom fighter in the Philippines. He died very young, yet there are statues of him all around the Philippine cities. And Rizal communicated in at least four different languages, Spanish, English, French and German. He also learned some Russian in order to be able to correspond with Trotsky. So, as Anderson says, a little more than a hundred years ago, it was considered necessary for an intellectual to command several languages. At the same time, and since we’re talking about the processes of overheating, it’s a logic that we are seeing now in academia, that there’s less diversity, but there’s more in terms of quantity. It is demented, demoralizing and destructive.

Martina: It’s quite crazy here too, but it’s - I don’t know how to explain it, because maybe over the years you’ll know it’s the political system really embedded in the university system. So sometimes, yes, it’s crazy, but the most important thing is that you have the right political contractor, to have a good evaluation of your projects so that you can have the funding.

Thomas: Well, yes, in Italy, this would be an important factor. But when you apply for funding from Brussels, you just compete with everybody else, and that may be the most counterproductive aspect of academic overheating. Is this a sort of racket or the treadmill of the funding applications? Because, when you compare the amount of work that is put into each of these applications, including the evaluation committees and so on; and the number of applications that eventually get funded, you come to realize that it is a perverse and objectionable situation. We clearly spend more resources and time writing these applications and getting them evaluated, much more energy and time and money on this than on the actual research. A friend of mine who recently passed away was the sociolinguist Jan Blommaert. He was among the most prolific and original in his field, and told me that he was involved in one of those research applications some years ago. In the end, they didn’t get funded in spite of their best efforts and a huge expenditure of resources, both human and economic. Blommaert decided to look more closely at the results, and it turned out that 98.5% of the applications under that program were not funded. Confronted with such numbers, you may ask yourself: Do I really want to do this again? You see what I mean.

Martina: Oh, yes. I was thinking that, some years ago, you won an important project ERC about overheating. It’s the most famous funding for a foreign researcher.

Thomas: And it’s hugely competitive. It’s enormously competitive. So, I don’t know exactly how it works, but you’ve got to have a bit of luck to get it. I mean, you have to be good, but there are lots of good people who never get the Advanced Grant for various reasons. So that’s a typical example, but we see it locally as well. A few years ago, the Research Council of Norway a few years ago, they moved into new premises in a pretty large office block with room for hundreds of employees in a good location, and keep in mind that the only thing they do is manage research funding. For the record, I should add that of course, many excellent, devoted people work in such places. The problem is structural.

Martina: Hundreds of people, yes. It’s an important dimension about everything. Well, I think we lack a little piece of the puzzle. It’s the other side. What are the alternatives? For example, I would like to become a slow academic level scholars, but it’s not so simple because to become a slow academic is a privilege. Only if you are a 10 years old tenure track or if you have a tenure track position, you can slow. What do you think about it? It’s a privilege because at certain times, for example, now I have a postdoc fellowship and a girl that is working for me, and she works a lot for me. And it’s important because she thinks things better. I have no time to do so.

Thomas: Exactly, which is wonderful in a way, but - to begin with yourself - if we look at the sort of demographic development of the academic disciplines, it’s easy to see that there are far more of us now than there were three generations ago, but the number of jobs hasn’t really grown accordingly. Put simply, and using Thomas Malthus’s terminology, we may say that the number of jobs have grown arithmethically – 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.; while the number of really clever people with PhDs has grown geometrically – 1, 2, 4, 8 etc. In this kind of situation, what exactly should you do if you want to be a slow academic? I think, to be honest, that being a slow academic is probably a privilege reserved for those who already have a tenured job. I would not dare to recommend a struggling postdoctoral fellow, precariously employed, to join the Slow Science movement. Not yet. But we could also try to reform the system a bit from within, for example, by emphasizing public science, doing other things than strictly speaking research, I mean, given that much of this research has limited impact anyway. So why not instead give some points to people who have or do other things? I mean, they may have a podcast, or they have a blog or they do other things. And what about teaching? Isn’t that one of the most important things we do? It is becoming increasingly clear that some of my research hasn’t really taken off in the way I had been hoping, but at least I know that I have talked to several thousand students over the years, and they’re all over society, some of them in the private sector, some in the public sector, some in higher education and research. And they’ve all learned a bit of anthropology, and I sometimes meet some of them who have gone on to do other things, and it’s quite clear that they learned something that has been valuable in their lives. This is gratifying.

Slow vs Fast Academia

Martina: As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Agnes Bosanquat wrote an article about the emerging of Slow Academia. I don’t share everything about this approach, but in my opinion some rules are important who would live in a better way, for example, write fewer emails, your files or, for example, talk about and support a strategy. It’s important, I think, to speak with your DNA about how to organize in a better way the whole work of the department, teaching, students’ problems, and so on. I think we can take care (talk?) about a different culture, maybe a counterculture from the inside, and about reforming it from the inside with little steps.

Thomas: Yes, and then we could also take good breaks. In general, it is necessary to find the right balance between speed and slowness, working with and for others and delving into your own research – and working versus not working. That’s the point. Doing something for your colleagues is an important part of the academic gift economy, and we should try to avoid counting and measuring the amount of effort we put into refereeing and so on. Doing something for other people is a very important part of what we do and which makes it different from production, economic production in general. Yet another thing when you talk about it supports those strategies. What we could do is to find some exemplary persons from the past who have had a major impact on intellectual life and who didn’t produce very much. Take Albert Einstein. He produced three articles around 1907. They were the main sources of his fame. He did write more later on, but these were the source of the theory of relativity. Another example is the anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s aforementioned nephew, a great influence on our discipline, but he never published a book, only essays. You don’t always have to write a lot. That’s the point. There are other ways of going about things in research. Sometimes, we just have to do things slowly. Claude Lévi-Strauss took several years to rethink kinship relations towards the end of his wartime exile in the USA. He then came up, few years later, with a book that changed our thinking about kinship permanently.

Martina: It’s a really good idea, thank you, thank you. OK, last but not least, the question is about the future of the modern university. According to new and modern universities that are coming to an end or not, this starting point, OK, my research on accelerated biographies, and for this conversation, I found, for example, a lot of books about some colleagues of dark academia and toxic academia and so on. So I was thinking, maybe university is coming to an end. What is emerging, what? Well, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a magic in the form of university.

Thomas: There is a lot of pessimism. But perhaps that’s part of the job of being a social theorist, you have to be able to deal with pessimism in order to see alternatives. We cannot a priori assume that things are improving through some kind of magic. At the moment, there are two kinds of enormous structural changes that are shaping the world, which weren’t visible in the same way 15 to 20 years ago. The first is climate and the environment, and the other is digitalization in a broad sense, leading to unintended side-effects such as interruptions, distractions, concentration loss and so on, which is washing over our culture. Both are serious to the extent of having apocalyptic potentialities, but in different ways – they represent two extremes in the overheating paradigm. It’s hard not only to get students to read long texts any more, but it’s even hard to get yourself to read long texts. And this does something to the depth of learning. We benefit, we gain a lot regarding breadth because we get such a good overview of lots of little things, but we lose when it comes to depth and proper understanding of the long here and the big now, the processes that connect us. A younger colleague of mine has organized a reading group with some master’s students, where they are told just to leave their phones at the entrance on the shelf, and then to sit in the seminar room and read a book for 4 or 5 h. As one of them reported afterwards, this was incredibly difficult. She described the experience as having been painful, horrible and boring in the beginning. But then, after an hour or so, when you’ve forced yourself, you get into a different rhythm. This is what we have to aim at. It isn’t impossible, but we are up against major forces pulling us away from this particular way, from a simplistic knowledge regime according to which all knowledge should be immediately ‘useful’, to powerful economic interests that benefit from screen addiction. In order to resist this tendency efficiently, we need to recover ways of thinking collectively.

Martina: I totally agree with you, but it seems so impossible. Well, I’ll think about it. Thomas, even today, lots of food for my brain, for thought. Many, many thanks.