For the record, Jakob de Roover is Belgian. I had the pleasure of meeting him in New Jersey a few years ago.
Jakob wrote this in 2010:
Jakob wrote this in 2010:
To someone who has no first-hand experience of the academic study of India in the US, it must be difficult to imagine the number of young scholars who say things like ‘this is what I really think, but I will not say it in public, because I’m up for tenure’. By the time they receive tenure, they have usually conformed to the orthodoxy.
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Wellwisher · 577 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 577 weeks ago
dwc · 577 weeks ago
1. Once upon a time a PhD from Chicago could get a tenure gig at top 20 schools. Today, one needs a Chicago PhD to get a teaching job in Tennessee or even a place like Montclair State or Cal State Long beach. What will happen to those who got their PhD's from 2nd tier schools? Becoming Adjuncts, of course! How much do adjuncts make? Around $3000 per course. Now these adjunts have to juggle between different schools even to make $30K a year. That's better than a starbucks Barista or a security guard.
2. If this is the situation, why people go for PhDs in humanities? Just after their BA in humanities, they go out looking for a job, only to find that they have to work in retail, which pays $20K a year. Sure, some of these students are curious and wanna learn; so, they just go back to school, that pays you $30K per year fellowship plus free healthcare.
3. Add another ingredient to this mix: people are attached to their ideas they sell. Critiicizing ideas tantamounts to criticizing people: that's how these intellectuals look at. The other issue is: networking and citing each other in journals. Balu talked about this as well. So, that's the nature of American Academy of Religion and its conferences. Same with RISA list: here, people ask for references and post articles that reflect the dominant paradig; if someone challenged that narrative on that list, people like Zydenbos starts his dirty work (ad hominem attacks) to STOP any conversation. RISA-L rules don't permit extented back and forth between a set of people: however, they are fine, as long as the idea that majority subscribes to
4. Given the lack of jobs, etc, who want to loose that adjunct gig or that grant or tenure? So, they are suck up to each other. So, this requires the academy to support intellectuals from competing research program/paradigm. Look at Economics itself: people from stock-flow consistent paradigm are working at U of Ottawa, U of Missouri, Kansas city, UMass, Amherest. You dont see them at MIT, Princeton. Even defending some form of welfare, job guarantee puts you at a non name school: sure, Paul Krugman is a dove, and fits right in the mainstream paradigm. Imagine someone defending some or another point of Hindus? What's gonna happen to his career?
5. Going against the mainstream requires decades of hardwork. Most of the hardwork has been wasted by Hindus in these domains: sanskrit; grazing at the West (the type of work by RM), AIT-AMT debates, learning scriptures so that they can fight with a Wendy, etc. Yes, scholars can be sympathetic to teh concerns of Hindus, but they don't have the intellectual backing--intellectual backing in terms of alternative theories. History-centrism, U-Turn theory, Difference Anxiety, etc--are no theories at all: at best, they are labels for a set of phenomena presented as evidence. So, which scholar gonna stake his career on such stupid theories? Even RM sympathizers in academy like Jeffrey Long don't sell them.
5.