A recent comment that I wrote on this blog has got me wondering about my own relationship to the academy/academic spaces. Just a few minutes ago, I wrote:
I’m currently struggling with my own relationship to the university. Having devoted so much of my life to formal education (as a student and teacher), I’m deeply invested in it. Yet, I feel that in the last few years, I’ve really pushed up against its limits and experienced a deep sense of alienation because of it. Is it fatally flawed? I really hope not, but sometimes I’m not so sure…especially when institutions are unwillingly to rethink elite models that serve the interests of so few at the expense of so many others.
As I think through my own (troubled) relationship to the academy and academic spaces, I thought I’d revisit some of my past reflections on the topic. Here are just few entries in which I write about my struggles of feeling alienated in the academy: