Rethinking Academia

A weekly reading group in Venice, California just completed a twenty-eight year cycle discussing Finnegans Wake (Finnegans Wake Discussion Group) , a span longer than the seventeen years it took James Joyce to write the novel in the first place . . . but, wait, there’s more – given that the last line of the novel loops back to the very first, the group just decided to embark on a brand new cycle starting on page three. Such an inspiration for Member Monday but, more to the point, a way to introduce our next topic, a critical look at academia through our focus piece The Ends Of Knowledge.

What came to mind while reading the piece were the lives of certain grad student friends of mine “back in the day” in their pursuit of academic specialization as they studied more and more about less and less, leading to that holy grail: knowing everything about nothing. One five-year post-grad ended up working for the post office.

Our discussion topic is the question that was served up: what could learning look like “if it were reoriented around emergent ends rather than inherited structures?” More pointedly, were we to accept that needs evolve with new areas of study opening up with others diminishing, at what point do we start closing departments?

While you may choose to skip over the article's historic accounting for those “inherent structures” – served up in that somewhat annoying self-important academic style – the underlying question remains quite relevant today i.e. how does one optimize those four (or more) years in academia and that $100k student tab. How would you advise others?

After all, you probably now have the best seat to assess your own real-world life experience and the way college helped to prepare you for it. Many, of course, will rightly point to their credentialed existence. Then there are those non-academic factors like making connections, professional and otherwise. But the question is meant to be broad-based and honest, not just cynical (knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing). For many, college just seems to represent the price tag for deferred adulthood.

The point is there may be many forms of “knowledge production” (the term applied by the article) outside the hallowed halls of a university setting. The article seems to sniff at one such extra-academic effort in the form of The Thiel Fellowship, providing a two-year $100k grant on the condition grantees devote their efforts to “build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

That aside, ever-widening opportunities seem to be springing up in abundance for the motivated individual to develop a stack of talents. Amazon just announced the launch of free AI classes to train two million people in the fight for skilled workers WSJ Amazon Free AI Classes. Perhaps the fairer question is to compare what would be gained in that four-year institutional environment versus like-augmented experiences in the real world.

The point of the article is that “academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end.” The piece was written by two academics in the humanities (English professors) as they made the case that the old paradigms of strict (sclerotic?) divisional curricula need to be justified in terms of defined endings and now be seen more in terms of a shared sense of purpose.

For clarification of what that exactly means we’ll turn to Finnegans Wake.