‘Lame’ celebrity academics feed ‘psychopathic careerism’

Modern academia’s “rather lame celebrity culture” condemns rank-and-file researchers to becoming either “wannabes” or failures, a professor claims.

Peter Fleming, professor of organisation studies at the University of Technology Sydney, said there was a “kind of pathetic quality” to the academic star system, in which a handful of top scholars attained fame, influence and wealth.

In his book Dark Academia: How Universities Die, he argues that expensive big-name professors end up as walking advertisements who are seen as “the standard by which everyone else is measured and seen to fail”. The result was, he said, “a culture of striving, where the majority don’t quite make it” and a form of “psychopathic careerism”.

“Most academic stars are quite lame if you are comparing them to proper stars like Jimi Hendrix. I was interested in what it did to the professional community to have this rather lame celebrity culture as one of the motifs which defines academia today,” Professor Fleming told Times Higher Education.

The few academics who become genuine “stars”, as Professor Fleming sees it, were surrounded by “wannabe starlets” and “failed starlets”. The former were characterised by “a blind ambition and extreme instrumental self-promotion” that were totally at odds with “basic academic values such as knowledge sharing” and which “we should all be trying to challenge and question”. The failures, meanwhile, tended to become embittered. Some then shifted into managerial roles and, according to How Universities Die, “often seek revenge and can easily become Hitler-like taskmasters in the process…Avoiding these angry bureaucrats is an unwritten rule in the neoliberal university today.”

“Universities are deeply conservative spaces and have become increasingly more so,” Professor Fleming added, from which “it would be impossible for people like Noam Chomsky or Edward Said to emerge now”. Though we urgently needed to “turn the tools of academic critique on the labour process and politics of academia themselves”, the high-profile academics in “the star complex” enjoyed privileges that made them reluctant to speak out.

“That must inevitably curb one’s radicality about the university and certain issues the university might be sensitive about,” Professor Fleming reflected. “There is an old idea of the public intellectual as the conscience of society, but you don’t get that as much within the academic star culture because they just have too much stake in the university as it is set up today. That is why proper public intellectuals are leaving as soon as they can. They can’t do what they want to do within it.”

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com