March 2, 2008
New Formations has a digital archive of some of its articles. One that caught my is Phil Cohen's A Place To Think? Some Reflections on the Idea of the University in the Age of the Information Economy. It pressed the right buttons--placed, thinking, idea of university, information economy. Maybe this will break with the conservative idea of the university as a community of scholars.
Cohen starts by striking the right note:
One of the commonest refrains amongst academics is that we can never get any ‘work’ done when we go into work. In other words we are so busy and stressed out by our ever increasing teaching and admin loads that we literally have no time or place to think - let alone to do anything approximating sustained research. That s saved up for ‘the sabbatical’. The sabbatical has become the holy grail of Academic Life - the promised land where all the ideas that have laid dormant will come to fruition, all the scattered fragments of writing will be brought together into a coherent whole, and we will return to the academic treadmill
refreshed and with a renewed sense of intellectual purpose.
It's the right note because it is an honest description----we have a university research culture held together by the desire to get the hell out of the university into some kind of privatised sanctuary where there is, at last, time and space to think. Yet once people get there they often promptly collapse into lethargy or ill health, bodies and minds so addicted to the routine stress of academic life that they simply cannot cope with its sudden absence.
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