Academia's false promises

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From the age of 4 or 5, curiosity animated me. I remember wondering what lay beyond the stars, why people spoke in different accents, and how caterpillars could turn into butterflies (which I alleged was a hoax, and stole a couple from the school yards to verify: an experiment that only led to their tragic demise).

As I grew older and better acquainted with the world, there settled an intuition that everything was 'figureoutable'. All it required was diligent study. Academia seemed like the natural vehicle, not just for acquiring knowledge but advancing it to 'create a positive impact' in the world. After four years of working in the domain, that idea sounds delusional.

When I applied to LUMS, I'd enrolled in the business school on the advice of my parents. They had explained that commerce made the world go round. I could see it. And the pragmatic reasoning couldn't be faulted. Within the first semester, however, it dawned on me that the vast majority of what was being taught was common sense. I didn't need to be sitting in Management-101 to know what 'contingency planning' entailed. It was insulting and frankly nauseating.

"I'm here to learn," I thought to myself. It was certainly convenient that the top liberal arts school in the country was a stone's throw away. The following semester, I picked up a couple of courses from it: Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Both blew my mind, and there was no turning back.

My 20-year-old self had decided to dedicate his life to the 'pursuit of knowledge' via The Academy. There was a certain romance to it, the idea of spending late nights buried in books at local libraries, sitting around campfires with peers discussing the latest findings in our respective disciplines, delivering fiery lectures to young, passionate seekers, publishing elaborate, 'hard hitting' papers in all the prestigious journals (yes, the ones that take months — years sometimes — to publish), and traveling the world to 'present my findings' to excited audiences that would build upon them. Science! And the movement of history. I couldn't wait to get my hands dirty. Armed with a BSc in Political Science two years later, I ventured out into the world — operating in the intersections of academia and international development. At the outset, it seemed like such an 'optimal' domain. I was gravely mistaken.

For one, all my most accomplished colleagues — with PhDs from top-ranked universities — seemed entirely unhinged from reality. Each had a specific area of expertise: invariably obscure, esoteric, and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. They were hyper-specialised. To be sure, this is never a negative in and of itself. What drove me crazy, however, was their sheer unwillingness to think about how their particular 'subject matter' was affected by forces and influences other than those they were trained to see.

Economists didn't consider politics. Political Scientists didn't consider psychology. Psychologists didn't consider history. Historians didn't consider sociology. Sociologists didn't consider economics. Each played their own game, within a silo. The world 'out there', in all its complexity, simply didn't match their analyses. Part of the reason was pure haughtiness, but at a more fundamental level it also had to do with the 'peer review' system — which compels scholars to have their work vetted by colleagues in the same domain i.e. trained in the same schools of thought and analytical lenses. Veering too far 'off track' from established viewpoints in the discipline, therefore, always ran the risk of poor reviews. Academics were forced to kneel at all the relevant ideological altars before unveiling their actual views. I always thought it ironic that an arena meant for 'thinkers' systematically suppressed original, innovative and subversive ideas in this manner.

Research outputs also read similar to theological texts, whereby predetermined conclusions were justified (sold?) Using various techniques. Some claimed to be 'empirical', deploying statistical analyses — regression models, randomised controlled trials, 'difference-in-differences' — to prove the validity of their claims. Others shunned all this, choosing instead to discover 'lived experiences' of survey participants by listening to their subjective perspectives and taking them seriously. Both groups were fraudulent. The former would fudge numbers to peddle an agenda, the latter would ignore inconvenient viewpoints to do the same.

At a structural level, this made sense. All research is funded at some level or another. In bygone eras, governments were actively involved - funneling resources at a domestic level into areas that may prove beneficial to society. With the rise of neoliberalism, the domain has come to be dominated by private entities (corporations, philanthropies), intergovernmental bodies (UN, World Bank, etc) and multilateral agencies (USAID, FCDO, GIZ, etc) with narrowly defined, non-negotiable end goals. Increasing numbers of academics are compelled to take on 'consulting' assignments with these actors to supplement their primary incomes — which have dwindled with time — and some get so caught up in the cycle that they soon morph into obedient missionaries manufacturing consent for imperial powers. With major funding cuts across the 'international development' sector under Trump, these opportunists are slowly beginning to realise they haven't used their own voices in years, decades in some cases.

It is little wonder why TikTokers, Instagram influencers, YouTube podcasters, and even conventional journalists all have incomparably more influence than academics in society today: they are able to draw linkages between seemingly disparate facts and present compelling narratives that don't require a Master's degree to understand. They might be inaccurate, they might prematurely jump to conclusions, and a certain proportion might operate in entirely bad faith, but they nevertheless command massive audiences. My hypothesis is that this is due to a fundamental sense of respect for viewers and listeners.

The rise of short-form (clips under three minutes, posts on X under 280 characters, etc) is testament to this. Academics that are well known today do not credit their 'research articles' for it but a lively presence on social media, regular appearances on television, op-eds in newspapers, or layman-friendly books! They are the ones that have descended from their ivory towers.

Dense, one-dimensional academic literature may perhaps have once held sway. Today, it is hardly read or engaged with by anyone other than professors or students trying to flatter them. Decision-makers in government — those actually formulating policy — simply do not care.

A bitter pill for my younger self.