In my first year, I arrived at school, pumped on knowledge and the promise of finally being a part of the great liberally intellectual morass of "The Academy." It was a good year, to be sure, but not what I had anticipated. For so long, the university has been painted as an island of intellectual salvation in an ocean of inanity, a fortress against the judgmental, against the exclusive, against the less pleasant vicissitudes of every day life. I pretty much bought it. I came expecting a universalized, liberal education stressing the dismantling of boundaries between knowledge and the people, and was kinda disappointed. What I have discovered is that the university establishes an internal hierarchy which is just as rigid, if not more so, than the social structure of real life which is so thoroughly ripped apart in lectures. It's just sneakier. Rather than badges on a lapel, or some type of uniform (which I would argue actually exist in Universities, but maybe I'll get to that in a bit), rank is clearly deliniated through discourse, articulated through diction. Syke! I'm super guilty of it, too.
What I mean: When I sit down to read an academic article, an essay, or anything "peer reviewed," I do so in the spirit of the university. That is to say, in the pursuit of breaking down boundaries of knowledge, of enlightening myself. Too bad this isn't what happens. I sit in front of that damn article for hours sometimes, struggling just to find where the sentences break, never mind figuring out what it actually means. The knowledge that is supposed to free us from our socially restrictive shackles is bound and chained to the sinking brick of an inflated ego. Any knowledge that could be gleaned gets lost underneath the heavy gloss of academia, of discourse, of "validity." The dialogue between the student and the text becomes irreparably frustrated and we end up reading for its own sake, or perhaps because the syllabus tells us we're supposed to. In either case, the lofty goals of the university crumble under the weight of academic non-sense. Basically, in my experience, the majority of students read something they can't grasp, for reasons they don't understand. Score one for academia!
This frustration of communication between text and student sort of segues into the next problem I've found. The people writing these articles that we can't understand in any event are mostly old white men. Why is this a problem? Well, basically it means that any knowledge that we hope to gain from a university which celebrates pluralism, diversity and equality is encoded and structured and formatted by the hands of the dominant majority. This problem, at first just seems statistically accurate. In Canada in particular, there just simply happens to be a whole lot of old white men, and accordingly, there is a larger proportion of them writing academic articles. It gets sticky, though, when we link the first problem to the second- no one can understand what these guys are writing, and thus very few are capable of challenging them. So we have a "liberal" system in which a dominant majority (and its accompanying ideology) becomes irrefutable and inaccessible. Help? A boundary, then, is clearly placed between the university student, and "the academy." We are kept at an intellectual distance, just struggling to get through another definition of culture or communication, and the old, white, male figureheads of the academic world remain firmly where they are.
But what about grad students? What about new, young professors? Good point. I have had some wonderful professors who do much to demystify the academic world for me. However, it is still an unfortunate reality that to become that professor, or to become a PhD candidate, you have to be willing to accept the ground rules of academia which have been laid down with some serious conviction by (you guessed it) the old white men. The hegemony of academia, then, isn't just entrenched, it's bacterial. It breeds further domination through forcing new students to simply accept that this is the way it's supposed to be. Want to be a successful PhD? You'd better write like one. Too bad the person you're modeling your writing after has probably written himself so deep into a logical tailspin that to try and fish him out would be fucking impossible.
And so is the university: An oasis of liberal, pluralistic knowledge, buried under the egos and complications of confused students, WASPy-as-fuck professors, and hopped-up-on-caffeine-pills PhD candidates. What an oasis it is.
(PS: Not all academics are like those WASPy Chaps. I know some amazing profs and TAs)
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