Quote:
This poses the question. Assuming I’m roughly right, why might this be?
It could be a legacy issue. Back in the 80s, academia was demoralized and in decline. Several good judges told me that if I got a PhD I would be unemployable in the UK. I wouldn’t have been a great academic, but I’m confident that many people who might have been got the same advice and went into finance, the law or other jobs.
And those who did become academics have faced another problem. The effect of the Research Assessment Exercises (and I suspect the intention) was to force academics to publish unreadable and unreplicated papers rather than to think or to engage with the public. (I gather that their successor, the REF, is a little different but its long-term effect is yet to be evident).
The upshot of these developments has been a loss of public intellectuals. Just look at the people who appeared on Bryan Magee’s Men of Ideas: are there even equivalents today?
Perhaps, though, there’s something else – the rise of consumer culture.
Leave a Reply