It’s not easy making a living in the knowledge biz these days. Of late our heroine, the intrepid academic researcher Viridiana Jones, often feels trapped between the Scylla of Disneyfication of higher education and the Charybdis of Free EnronPrise in securing a patron to support her inquiries, and finds herself sometimes wistfully wondering what life might have been like if she had gone and gotten that law degree instead. Viridiana used to enjoy reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, but now she just tosses it out. For instance, she cannot believe that someone would actually voluntarily occupy the Ken Lay Chair for the Study of Markets at Rice; but in her sober moments she knows neither can she revel in her own moral superiority. And as for all those juvenile pipe dreams of serving mankind and speaking truth to power—well, the less said about them, the better.

Of late, Viridiana feels like a character trapped in a George Saunders short story. Our protagonist is all too familiar with the theme park character of the modern university campus: intellectual crowd control at the intake gates, carny barkers flogging customized “majors”, corporate concession stands, t-shirt and souvenir vendors, internship thrill rides promising accelerated plunges into employment, long queues for the most popular entertainers, sports extravaganzas, science lite served up in postmodern special effects pavilions for those jaded by video games, dormitory/hotel package deals, outsourcing backstage functions to low-wage contractors, with academic convocations as choreographed as any performance in Tomorrowland. Sometimes Viridiana wonders for whom or what the university really exists. But then she brings herself up short: maybe she’s beginning to sound too much like the whining Curmudgeon From Another Planet? She looks at herself in the mirror. So what if you have to coddle the customer a little? And anyway, who really cares about such superficial aspects of the university?

Viridiana broods: Perhaps it should be more important to worry about what has been happening to the organization and outcomes in the sciences and the humanities under the current regime of intellectual production? It has become commonplace in certain circles to bemoan the troubled relationship of science to the state, and by this, she does not mean merely the isolated hot-button issue of stem-cell research (not her field), but rather the demonstrated willingness by state organs to participate more directly in defining what would count as “high quality research.” Of course, when it comes time to gather up the fruits of the projects they have funded, the patron of research has always exercised the option to take it or leave it; but what seems different of late is that there seems to exist a whole parallel universe of think tanks and shadowy ‘experts’ that have little to do with the kind of academic science Viridiana was used to. The state has apparently been much more inclined to bypass supposedly internal peer quality controls, intervene in the early stages of dissemination of results, purchase their preferred party line neatly packaged from some think tank, suppress or otherwise discourage that which is inconvenient or strays off-message, and cherry-pick whatever seems expedient to define as proven knowledge. When the truth is inconvenient, patrons now seem inclined to shoot the messenger. Viridiana recalls reading a front page article in the New York Times about NASA trying to silence one of its own on global warming; but then there are a thousand smaller acts of overt censorship that never make it into the newspapers, including one she has witnessed herself at her home institution.

Viridiana has always known in her bones that the pursuit of knowledge is neither straightforward nor simple, but may suffer all kinds of deformations and biases because of the way it is prosecuted, framed, generated and conveyed; and of course that problem has long been the province of disciplinary scrutiny, from philosophy to psychology to sociology of knowledge. Certainly, sometimes epistemology has been taught as if it were merely a matter of isolated individuals hewing courageously to the rules of deductive and inductive inference; but a closer look always reveals that the “social” context has continually been situated at the core of supposedly abstract epistemological disputes. Indeed, for some philosophers, the proper relationship of science to the state was conceived to be the single most significant problem in coming to understand the conditions under which science could make progress. But Viridiana is loath to admit that she doesn’t know too much about all that, or indeed about politics in general. Of course she votes Democratic in American elections and considers herself a ‘liberal’ in the awkward American sense, calls herself a feminist, and sneers at George Bush the Lesser along with the rest of her colleagues, but the truth is she has never thought very hard about the implications of cultural, religious or economic conservative movements for her science, for her university, or for her future. Curiously enough for one so intelligent, she more or less subscribes to the soundbite notion that a conservative is a troglodyte who utters a simple four-word credo: government bad, market good. Yet, it must be admitted, the New York Times is hardly superior in that regard, in her experience.

Viridiana became acquainted with a couple of faculty at her university who consider themselves members of a field called ‘science studies’, which seemed to her like it ought to have some salient things to say about the regime change she feels she is living through. Out of curiosity, she went to hear some of their more famous representatives at a conference held at the university—people like Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Henry Etzkowitz, and Steve Shapin – but was distressed to find that when they weren’t indulging in opaque jargon about ‘actants,’ ‘performativity,’ ‘constructivism vs. essentialism,’ ‘triple helix,’ ‘Mode 1/ Mode 2’ and worse, they ended up sounding just like some of the more cynical deans she was forced to deal with in the course of her committee duties. These savants seemed to suggest that shamelessly flogging yourself and your ideas was the pinnacle of strategic wisdom in science, and tended to confuse ‘excellence’ (whatever that was) with the crudest sorts of proxy measures for scientific output. Viridiana could barely tell the difference between them and some of her business school colleagues at the university who keep praising the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to the skies. Viridiana, by now inured to disappointment, chalked it all up to the pernicious effects of postmodernism.

Consequently, Viridiana suspects that that scholars have had little useful to say about all these changes that irritate her at a subconscious level in her daily life. But her policy of benign neglect doesn’t stop there. She knows hardly anyone cares much about the trials and tribulations of college professors, generally considered a pampered and privileged bunch by hoi polloi (whatever the actual state of affairs). Nonetheless, there is a nagging suspicion that the changes that grate on Viridiana might also have consequences for the wider world: What happens to the average citizen when knowledge becomes re-engineered, appropriated and re-packaged under the new regime? And whom will they turn to when they want a dissenting analysis? Another think tank doppelganger wielding a cardboard ‘opposing’ position? Viridiana is sick to death of pundits sneering at academic tenure as the last refuge of lazy charlatans; she notes no one ever says that about lawyers or accountants when they make partner in their firms, or upper management with their golden parachutes. She knows her department has kept its costs down using PhD temp labor to an ever increasing degree; but her colleagues tend to avoid discussing the subject, they way they also won’t talk about their Salvadorian nannies.

There was a time when pundits claimed that we were living in a shiny new Network Society, and the Internet was going to democratize everything under the sun, because information wants to be free; but now Viridiana can hardly be bothered to glance at blogs she used to enjoy. Viridiana, as a natural scientist, harbors a soft spot for technological determinism as a force for progress; but in her gut she feels that the “information economy” has become another of the many faces of the regime that has Disneyfied her university and made it harder to initiate and conduct serious long-term fundamental research. After the Hwang Woo Suk debacle, it became common to question the quality of some of the most august science journals; Viridiana herself knows of a case of ghost authorship, but has no idea how prevalent it is. Every time she has to fill out a ten-page materials transfer agreement form just to get a reagent from a friend at MIT, her faith in progress flags a little bit more. If the Internet has been a force for liberation, Viridiana missed out on it; in her impression, most people have become much more vulnerable to information manipulation in the last decade—witness the Iraq war, or the decline of serious journalism in the areas she knows something about, or the bipolar swings of opinion about medical research and the pharmaceutical industry. Knowledge may be power; but the Enlightenment conviction that knowledge is emancipatory, so crucial to her own upbringing, has begun to leave a bad taste in Viridiana’s mouth. The worst part of all of this is that she can’t let her students catch a glimmer of her doubts.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Academic life, The Viridiana Jones chronicles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.