Ivory Towers?

In this week’s THE — which, by the way, should be required reading for all academics, everywhere; the fact that it’s published by a subsidiary of Nasties International, yet remains a source of compelling, ethically and politically important news on the subject of higher education, is a sad paradox — there’s a short piece on a scheme set up last year by the AHRC, called ‘New Generation Thinkers’. Launched, not un-coincidentally, in the weeks following the Browne Report last year, ’NGT 2010′ was a collaboration between unlikely political bedfellows the AHRC and the BBC, as an ‘attempt to develop a new wave of public intellectuals’ (THE).

This story took me back 8 months or so: I remember reading an advertisement for the programme last October. I considered applying, mainly to satisfy the (fairly small) part of me that still has aspirations in a dramatic direction, but decided pretty quickly not to: I have difficulty making my work interesting to those close to me, let alone to an inquisitive, highbrow Radio 3 audience…

But that’s not for here. (Remember when Little Britain was good? You know, for the first 15 minutes of the first series?) What I really want to talk about is the second half of the THE article, which it’s probably worth quoting in full:

In The Daily Telegraph on 29 June, Rowan Pelling writes that it has shown academia to be so rife with ‘rivalry and backbiting’ that it ‘makes politicians look like fawning puppies’. ‘I emailed one lecturer to gauge his reaction and he fired back: “Note the complete absence of mathematicians, chemists, physicists. It trivialises research and, I suppose, is the logical conclusion of allowing cultural studies to be an academic subject”,’ she writes.

Now I can take those outside academia suggesting that the work of those who practise ‘cultural studies’ — and I’d probably put myself in that bracket — is not really valuable; to be honest, I basically expect it. And I have enough friends in the sciences to know that those in the arts and humanities are sometimes seen as slightly less than ‘proper’ academics.

But the soundbite from this nameless science academic worries me: there’s a vindictive element to the suggestion that the output of non-scientists is ‘trivial’. If those within academia think like this, doesn’t this mean that everyone’s free to? This, I think, is the damaging side to the Browne Report: there’s a ‘divide and rule’ aspect to the distinctions it makes between subjects that make a measurable, immediate contribution to the economy, and those — like cultural studies, literary criticism, art history, or whatever — that don’t.

I’ve always been fiercely against the idea of ‘ivory tower’ academia, with all its innate privileges. But what this article shows is that, even where there is still such a thing, there isn’t just a single ivory tower — there’s an increasing number of them. And if these ivory spires now see each other as ‘trivialising’, what chance do we have for true interdisciplinarity? Or, perish the thought, ‘impact’?

Tinseltown Racism?

We saw the latest X-Men film last night. Now is neither the time nor place for me to comment on the quality of what we saw; one thing I do want to talk about, though — and the motivation behind setting up this blog — was the film’s peculiarly reductive view of race. And it starts with the fact that only two members of the ensemble cast (it’s an X-Men film: you know the drill) were non-white. [Minor spoiler coming up, so I'll give you time to stop reading if big-budget superhero blockbusters with little in the way of characterisation or dialogue are your thing.............] The first, an African-American man, was (from memory) the first death of a named character in the narrative; the second, a mixed-race woman — quite apart from the fact that she was first seen strolling around on the bar in a lap-dancing joint — is the first mutant to switch allegiances to (for want of a better term, in a film with multiple ‘sides’ and numerous questions of nationality/species loyalty) ‘the bad guys’.

And sticking with the superhero genre, in which there’s been an upsurge in interest recently (Rob’s your man for more on the relationship between comics and movies), one film that we saw a trailer for last night — Green Lantern – has a character called ‘Kilowog’. How d’you like them racisms?

Now I know what the purists among you are going to be saying/screaming: these examples are from comic books, and the original characters (‘Darwin’ and ‘Angel’ in X-Men: First Class; ‘Kilowog’ in Green Lantern) were created at a time when such lazy racial stereotyping was the norm. Ok. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Why should we — for the sake of artistic verisimilitude — stick with the racial types or names provided by Ed Brubaker, Grant Morrison and Ethan van Sciver, and Bill Finger?

To put a more general, and worrying, question: why are we seeing a return to racial stereotyping?

Maybe it’s a post-9/11 thing, or post-7/7, or whatever; hell, maybe people just think we live in a post-racist world.

Ummm…no.

Racial violence is still a commonplace, maltreatment of public intellectuals on the grounds of race is not unknown, and a high-profile LSE academic can make comments about the objective attractiveness of women of different races and stay in his job. (And don’t get all smug about the Britishness of this last point, America: you’re the ones who countenance the presence of an outspoken Holocaust denier at a major university, on the grounds that ‘at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum’.)

So racism is alive and…well…putting the (steel-capped) boot in. And though examples like the superhero ones with which I started aren’t exactly the most newsworthy examples — after all, they’re comic book adaptations, right? — they are cultural manifestations of a tacit social acceptance that belongs firmly in the past.

…was the word

This site is for all musings about stuff that doesn’t really fall under the purview of my sports blog. I’m not promising it’ll get updated much, what with the pressures of academia and all, but I’ll try! (Maybe.)