Elon Musk noted on X a little while ago that citizen journalism from actual domain experts and people actually on the ground is much faster, more accurate, and has less bias than the legacy media. This is also true with public scholarship with respect to academic publishing, as well, a system of contrived authority for what has become something of a cloistered monastery. Yes, I am likening the university to a secluded religious community, where scholars, like clerics, are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, engaging with tacitly approved ideas in a controlled, introspective environment, often detached from the practical concerns of the outside world.
Just as monks focus on spiritual contemplation and esoteric ritual away from society, the institutional expectation in higher ed is that academics engage in specialized, abstract research, sometimes without direct engagement with broader societal issues. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy noted this in their 1966 Monopoly Capitalism, critiquing how knowledge, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, has become increasingly compartmentalized and specialized. This process of specialization, they argue, has fragmented knowledge; scholars have become experts in narrow fields which has caused them to lose sight of the broader cultural, economic, and social that matter to the world.
In Baran and Sweezy’s view, this cloistering of knowledge into specialized disciplines serves the interests of monopoly capitalism by preventing a comprehensive understanding of how the system operates as a whole. By isolating intellectual inquiry into discrete areas, the critical, systemic analysis necessary to challenge the status quo is undermined. This compartmentalization mirrors the broader division of labor under capitalism, where different aspects of production are separated, making it harder for workers (or, in this case, professionals and scholars) to see the larger picture of how their work fits into the totality of the capitalist system. They argue that this fragmentation not only limits the potential for interdisciplinary understanding and collaboration, but also reinforces the power structures within capitalism by constraining critical thought within safe, manageable boundaries.
This was the purpose of my 2015 white paper “Notes on Problem-Focused Interdisciplinary Education,” , which was published on the UW-Green Bay chancellor’s News and Notes blog, wherein I cited Baran and Sweezy’s work. Arguing that knowledge had become fragmented in late capitalism, I urged the university community to stay true to the university’s select mission: “The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay provides an interdisciplinary, problem-focused educational experience that prepares students to think critically and address complex issues in a multicultural and evolving world.”
I concluded with this: “Therefore, as we prepare to celebrate our golden anniversary, let us remember that UW-Green Bay was founded upon a unique institutional arrangement that compels faculty and students to sustain a commitment to problem-focused research, teaching, and service. By fostering cross-fertilization of ideas, encouraging and facilitating collaboration, shaping research agendas and curriculum, and linking scholarly production to human needs, problem-focused practice integrates the work of faculty and students with the larger community. The intricate problems of the day demand a mission that dedicates the academy to problem-focused interdisciplinary endeavors. We should not doubt the value of what we do at UW-Green Bay. Instead, we should be bold and inspire other institutions with our example.”
(In the end, my intervention was for naught. Powerful forces saw to it that the unique institutional arrangement I described was disorganized. And in the intervening years, faculty witnessed a return to the siloing that the founding of the institution was meant to overcome.)
C. Wright Mills made a similar argument in The Sociological Imagination, published in 1959. Mills criticized the trend of increasing specialization within the social sciences, arguing that it led to what he called “abstracted empiricism.” Like Baran and Sweezy, Mills was concerned that the increasing specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge served to reinforce existing power structures by limiting the scope of critical inquiry. He saw this trend as detrimental to the potential for social science to contribute to meaningful social change. He believed that this narrow focus on specialized research methods and isolated topics diverted attention from the broader, more important questions about society and its structure.
Mills emphasized the need for a “sociological imagination,” which he defined as the ability to connect individual experiences with larger social and historical forces. He argued that scholars should move beyond specialized research to consider how their work fits into a broader understanding of society. This, Mills believed, would enable a more critical and comprehensive analysis of social issues, rather than the piecemeal and fragmented approach that was becoming more common in academic circles. More than any other scholar, it is Mills who inspired the establishment of Freedom and Reason. (See Public Sociology at Freedom and Reason).
So I mean the comparison of modern academia and the monastery to be taken very seriously; it has only gotten much worse since the days of Mills and Baran and Sweezy. Map over the top of this the force of postmodernist thought and you can see the problem (see What is Delegitimizing Science?). Thus there is in higher education a very real devotion to quasi religious purity, where the pursuit of a manufactured knowledge is held above more worldly concerns, divorced from concrete reality, estranged from scientific materialism. While the academic monastery is supposed to provides a space for deep reflection and scholarly advancement, it has in the context of administrative force and corporate power created a disconnect between academic work and the everyday experiences of society, making academia remote and, frankly, irrelevant to those living outside its walls—the very people and their interests to which this work should be devoted in a free and democratic society.
As Musk observes with the problems of traditional media, one cannot get fast and unbiased information from a review process where ideologically and corporate-captured editors and referees act as gatekeepers who, if they choose to send manuscripts out for review, don’t turn them around for revisions for months, and if the papers survive review, don’t get published for many more months. After that, if published, the result lies behind paywalls that, even if the average citizen is prepared to cough up the money necessary to get past (the price is exorbitant and public libraries choose which databases licenses to purchase), uses jargon inaccessible to the public. What is more, the audience of academic scholarship in this publishing model is small and exclusive, which is why most journal articles and university press books are read by very few people, if at all, even when scholars cite them in literature review sections (often reading only abstracts).
Then there is the labor compensation piece. I have published many articles and review essays in professional academic journals over the years and haven’t seen a dime from that work. Academic journals are controlled by large publishing houses that not only have significant influence over the dissemination of scholarly research but generate mega profits from tapping superexploited labor. These companies manage a vast number of journals across various disciplines, making them central players in academic publishing globally, the ownership structures that sharply limits accessibility and affordability of academic knowledge. Because of their effective monopoly over academic publishing, with their vast resources and control over networks, they dominate the market and shape the landscape of academic research and publication to match the needs of elites and filter out those voices who challenge established power. The corporate state and its social logic have thus monopolized knowledge production and use this monopoly to control the public mind see Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning).
This is why there’s a growing and democratic movement towards open access, where research is freely available to the public. This is what I am doing here. Visit my platform Freedom and Reason for free social studies content (read my welcome message here). The influence of corporations extends far beyond mere publication; their power and influence affects visibility of research, as well as the academic careers of scholars who institutions fetishize the model of peer-review and all the other fig leaves of neutrality demand that they publish in the high-impact journals owned by these companies (see The Science™ and its Devotees).
freedom and reason 