Academia left the “real world”. How?
I left the practical world, or as my Stockholm Business School director referred to it in my master’s degree graduation ceremony, “the real world”, to go back to answer some of my itching questions, in what I assume “the fantasy world”, Academia. list of 73 questions, I couldn’t find answers to in the “real world”. I am from a social class who value knowledge as a mean to gain an understanding of the world around us and climb up the social ladder, I admit, many of my family members are well educated, medical and engineers are considered to be at the top of the pyramid when it comes to social class. Yet, I couldn’t see myself after my engineering graduation as a person who answers questions for machines or technology efficiency purposes. My questions were human-centered. However, fighting hard to start my master’s degree at Stockholm University was not an easy road but a story to be told later.
I came to education with a higher value to the process of education. For starters, I didn’t need another education to earn a good income. I used to earn a comfortable compensation, too comfortable, to make a decision where I decide to leave all this behind was hard. Still, the answers void for such questions were not complete until I started my masters degree at Stockholm University. I knew before my start the lower reputation the university had among the students as well as the practitioner, employers, since I was one of them, but I didn’t care, I wanted to join, learn, tutored in how to pursue answers to my questions, just give me a library and put me in the room with like-minded people and professors who are passionate about what they do and experts in their fields. As soon as I started the course, I knew this was the place I wanted to be, Academia, and my practical side started to kick in, my problem-solving skills, gaps of efficacy eye gazed the system, but sooner or later I started to see a tumor in the body of the university and its knowledge production. I immediately started to wonder how can I fix it, but when I asked my teachers to research this aspect, I was confronted by more shocking answers: “remember, this is just a master thesis, no one will read your paper”; “ I suggest you go to the real world, don’t waste your time here in academia, it is rotten”; “ why would you ask such big questions, take a paper from the past, extend it and publish and that’s a good way to keep a good research”. Immediately I was struck by this question in my head number 74): do we need more published research papers if we are not using the research we already produced?
The world is growing immensely skeptical of academics, partly because they feel academia serves the funds raisers and not the society, how would you serve the society when you write in a language academic students don’t fully grasp? How would you serve society when no decision-making agency adopts academic papers, seriously, in their policy-making, nor their decision making? We are lucky if we as academics get one of our papers “curated” by a journalist and reappropriate it in another format. How can we serve the public, when the public is on multimodal forms of media, while we are still writing in one-dimensional mode since the start of the Fordian Education System. I am not sure what we will do later on with all this research. The number of people believing the earth is flat is growing more while our production of academic papers around the topic is even more extensive. The coronavirus is not easily understood even Nature’s journal published so many articles. And vaccines are still questioned. Those are debates are on natural science topics, which is, as far as I know, a society that diverts embraces scientific ideology and view over the world. The issue gets even more complicated when you see the discussion comes into social science matters, a place where discussion is baseless, subjective and postmodernism and traces of colonialism reside in the ditches and growing like fire in dry weed. How can this happen when academics are knowledge producers, gap finders in knowledge, and expanding every day the knowledge sphere with a new paper? This took me back to the point: maybe the gap here is not knowledge expansion but knowledge usage.
As a writer, I struggled with my English, since my language is Arabic, even though I have a good command of the language, still, I lacked certain tips and tricks for writing a well-structured document, so I found what is called, “academic writing” and “publishing for academic writing”. I wrote a strong paper about a complicated topic related to the politics of brands in the age of digital society and how movement works, and the feedback I got was, “ you forgot a semicolon”. Is this what a peer review is about? Forms of the medium to fit the scholars publishing guidelines? Did I just see academics pick form over content? Are academians keen on finding gaps in the knowledge sphere, as to advance knowledge, or gaps that are in the society we produce knowledge for? Keener on my peers reading my paper rather than the public who funded my education? Many researchers write their papers without a clear beneficiary in mind; at times, they don’t know who will use their paper, but they are more certain about who will read it. After watching a documentary about flat earth, and after hearing many of the responses refer to youtube, thanking youtube, for showing us the truth; I was reminded of the evolvement of the medium. Why are there no academic films?
The point is, academics is the real world as much as the trade industry with its branches of technology and policies. Yet in an industry where a product such as a watch or a mobile phone has value, we spend more money to encourage consumers to need these products in their daily life, while in academia we fail to make the product, knowledge, desirable enough for consumption.
So how do we go from here? Well, there are a few hurdles. First of all, academia became a cartel, an elite society with the selection made from within to who should be part of this elite society. A place where the hegemony of language (I am using English after all), culture, philosophy, epistemology, and class dictate if not steer the selection process of who should be part of this special group. The first step is how to overcome this hurdle but before doing that we need to ask ourselves the hard question. For the precarious graduates who buy a branded product, an educational certificate, without any clear feedback system or return policy, is the university as an academic institution still useful for the customers, students of knowledge? If the real-world perception is fading away further by the day from what we learn in that educational institute, would we go after it? Or will it become something of a fancy degree to get married to? one of my professors put it.
These questions are not easy to answer but during my education I came across Edward Glissant and his book, Poetics Of Relations, and how he brought a new perspective on the way decolonization of history and the world surrounding us. A philosopher who is suited for an emancipatory project like this one, a meta-project from the bottom up, that requires both students and professors to work around it, using the knowledge from consumer culture, branding, and disrupting industries to break through this old mindset and moves towards a new one that fits the next generation of knowledge consumers.
I take, for example, a crazy example, the journey museums are taking, an institution where history is narrated is now getting a new narrator, the digital capitalist corporation who are taking over the archiving, selection, curation, and organizing of our history. A museum is after all a knowledge producer, a place that emerged from what was used to be a wonder cabinet, where elite society members collect rare books, experiments, belongings, and artifacts from different civilizations. How can the university system learn from them? Right now museums are not a place as they used to be before nor it functions the same. Yet Google’s recent project, Arts and Culture, is changing the way museums are experienced.
Finally, I am a Muslim, and today Muslims are considered the public enemy Number 1, the parasite that plagues the world with cancerous ideologies, a group of people who must be expelled, and if we are in our own countries we must be vanquished, what and how those groups in a country like Sweden, within an elite class, they can’t get in, would affect the knowledge production-consumption? If they are excluded from society and the questions raised by the academic institutions are waived, where would they get their knowledge? How would this affect the consumption and the production of knowledge, including extreme ideologies? How can we connect with them and address their social problems? How can we integrate them if we don’t include them? With that said, there are layers of the onion to peel back, from who we truly produce knowledge for, to how we produce it, and why we should continue producing if we are expelled from the real world table as academics. What steps must be taken to return to the real world? Tyranny is not the answer, and clearly, mandatory education is not, so a closer look at the reason for knowledge and its usefulness may be a step in the right direction, but who performs it and what questions are asked are more important than simply identifying a knowledge gap to write about…
