But the truth is, I really believe that the biography, among people like us coming from a postcolonial world, is constitutive of intellectual discourse. This is so for the simple reason that we are making discoveries by placing the body in a place where discovery is really possible. One will not find in textbooks the experiences that one has undergone. This is so true—I would never have discovered what it means to be a Latin American solely from textbooks. Quite the contrary: It was sitting in European classrooms that made me feel like a barbarian from the Third World. And it is precisely when I put myself in the middle of the Palestinians and Arabs in Israel that I came to realize that the Middle East is very different from any place I had previously read about in any textbook. I needed the life experiences of all those coming from the peripheral or colonial worlds, or the so called Third World. Life and work cannot be separated. That is, we are constantly in an inventive living situation insofar as we have to think about many things for the first time. And this will be found not in the textbooks of our libraries but in the daily and historical experiences of our lives. The author’s biography is constitutive of his text. It is not pure context. It is, rather, the very meaning of its text.

Enrique Dussel

Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel (Translated by Fernando Gomez

(via gravalicious)

Reasons for quitting academia:

  • Consistently have to apologize to white men who are themselves assholes and in the wrong
  • White men are expected to do less service or teaching, and get rewarded when they jump the gun or behave inappropriately
  • Women must be twice as good to get the same opportunities as men, and this is particularly true of people of color
  • Women and people of color in positions of power buy into the system and do not do the work to protect people low on the hierarchy, pushing the burden of success and safety onto them
  • Faculty participate in diversity initiatives supposedly to improve diversity in the field, but then continue to behave in unjust ways
  • Endless push to get more underrepresented groups and women into the field, but without fixing the conditions that make them quit in the first place
  • Academia values productivity, measured as number of publications, at the expense of quality and depth
  • Faculty positions require teaching, administrative duties, student mentoring, and research for promotions and tenure, but the dearth of faculty positions and the dwindling amount of grant money means that junior faculty are pushed into overwork (60-80 hours per week) to meet the basic expectations of university administrations
  • Overproduction of PhDs means that getting a PhD only qualifies you for more training, requiring multiple moves and extended periods of instability
  • Overproduction of PhDs also means that extremely qualified academics end up going to ‘low-tier’ schools to teach, pushing research expectations up everywhere regardless of course-load or financial support
  • Academic work is undervalued so that both postdoctoral work and the majority of faculty positions are severely underpaid, especially as they require much more than 40 hours a week to fulfill all expectations
  • Postdoctoral trainees are often considered little more than indentured servants, and are treated neither as employees nor as students
  • Most academic positions are in geographical locations that are undesirable for most academics
  • Getting a job, getting tenure, and getting promotions depends as much on politics as on your quality as a researcher or teacher
  • Pervasive belief that academia, more than a job, is a vocation, to which you must sacrifice everything or be considered unworthy or undeserving, to the extent that looking for better opportunities is considered immoral or questionable

Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.

Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

Lately, however, the routine had begun to pall. Coprolites and Jurassic snails no longer held the fascination they once did, and the incessant backbiting and political manoeuvring endemic in upper echelon academia—which she had always known and accepted as part of the scholastic landscape—was proving more and more of an irksome distraction. The further she travelled into darkest PhD territory, the more the fossilised remains of extinct creatures dwindled in fascination; she was rapidly specialising herself beyond caring about her subject. Whether or not the world learned what the latest new megasaurus ate for lunch sixty million years ago, what difference did it make?

Stephen R. Lawhead, The Bright Empires Collection