Why do we need the university? Episode 12: The Campus as Social Infrastructure

Here are more thoughts on academic life! Episode 12 is at your service: What the university has that cannot be delivered Two episodes ago I argued that the university’s peculiar gift is slow time — the licence to sit with a question for fifteen years. In the last one I argued that its other gift … Read more

What do we need academia for? Episode 10: The Gift of Slow Time 

In nine episodes (you can find them here), I have focused on some characteristics of the current academic life that is killing the university system -not any more- slowly: Nine episodes of administrative bloat, ranking obsessions, funding regimes that reward the wrong things, accreditation rituals nobody quite believes in, a journal hierarchy that has turned … Read more

Episode 9: The new arenas of academic self‑promotion

Here comes the new episode for Thoughts on academic life There has always been self‑promotion in academia. People mailed offprints, boasted about books, dropped famous names at dinner. But the contemporary landscape is qualitatively different: platformized, metricized, gamified.[6][8] Academics now operate across multiple, interconnected arenas: Citation and profile platforms: Google Scholar, Scopus IDs, ORCID, ResearchGate, … Read more

Thoughts on academic life (4)- The Administrator Problem

Episode 4: The Administrator Problem—More Royalist Than the King Episode 1- The Performance of Transparency Episode 2 – The Theater of Scholarly Collegiality Episode 3- The Q1 Journal Fetish Think of a curriculum reform meeting where the university administrator unveiled a new “strategic excellence framework.” The presentation featured organizational charts, key performance indicators, and deliverables. The word … Read more