In Dark Academia: How Universities Die, Peter Fleming explores the destructive impact of the bureaucratic and neoliberal structures of academia, which have turned universities into toxic workplaces. The book powerfully evokes despair and despondency at the loss of the intellectual environment promised of academics.
Throughout the book, Fleming, a seasoned academic himself, recounts the stories of such victims of ‘Dark Academia’. These include Gregory Eells, Director of Counselling and Psychological Services at the University of Pennsylvania, who killed himself in downtown Philadelphia and others.
Fleming argues that in the past half-century, university administrators have, for various political and financial reasons that he largely glosses over, systemically adopted the doctrines of New Public Management, Human Capital Theory and Public Choice Theory. Under such doctrines, academics are reduced to self-interested, utility-maximising, economic beings who’ll shirk their duties if given the opportunity and therefore can’t be trusted with the kind of collegial self-governance that once dominated university departments. Hence the introduction of corporate accountability measures and overbearing managers to keep academics in line and universities profitable.
Fleming is primarily concerned with so-called ‘key performance indicators’, or metrics designed to capture an individual’s contribution to the university’s ‘bottom line’, like H-index scores, journal rankings, impact factors and grant income totals. As captured by the well-known phrase ‘publish or perish’, academics must meet these benchmarks to keep their jobs – becoming either hyper-competitive, backstabbing, publication-chasing careerists or meek ‘production-line knowledge workers’ in the process – or perish. No wonder, as Fleming notes in Chapter One, 90 per cent of UK academics surveyed reported feeling ‘very unsatisfied’ with university management.
It’s undeniable that business practices like frequent performance reviews, time tracking software, email monitoring and arbitrary performance metrics encourage competition, turn universities into toxic work environments, create power imbalances between academics and university management and kill the love academics once had for their work. Yet, at this point in the book, a non-academic reader might ask: don’t all professionals feel this way? After all, who hasn’t dealt with sadistic managers, gossipy co-workers, cut-throat competition and a sense that all your time is being wasted on pointless meetings and endless emails?
Those all are some statements of writer. So, when it comes to the modern university, we must ask whether it’s ever been, as Fleming describes it, a ‘collegium of peers’, devoted to Truth and open to all. Whether it’s even possible to have such a space in a capitalist system built upon class, race and gender hierarchies. And whether academia lives up to its own principles if it’s only a sanctuary for a select few. Perhaps in our rush to decry the death of the traditional academic institution, we forgot to examine whether it was worth saving in the first place.
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