Feyerabend has criticised the university and its academics in several places and his critiques are coherent with his general views on method, on abstract traditions, on the tyranny of experts, and on the necessity for an open exchange. Here is a brief overview of themes taken mainly from his autobiography KILLING TIME.

1) Language: Feyerabend argues that academic language often acts as a transparent medium guiding our thought while itself remaining outside explicit consciousness. He affirms that when we focus on this language, when we really pay attention to the words much of what seems obvious or profound ceases to make sense (p142). This is a lesson he learned from attending J.L. Austin’s lectures in Berkeley. Academic philosophical language is a grotesque deformation and simplification of ordinary language, replacing its complexity and ambiguity with a stultified clarity that imprisons thought.The danger is the clarity of the abstract stereotype that replaces the « messiness » of real life. The academy produces people whose thinking consists in « confounding ideas with frozen memories of professional slogans » (142).

This stereotypy of language hinders thought, disguises nonsense as self-evident truth or profundity. Further, according to Feyerabend it can serve as a civilised mask for inhumanity. This is an even more damning critique as Feyerabend places the creation of kind, loving, human relations that further our happiness and our individuation far above the creation of systems of thought. Here on the question of the inhumanity of academia Feyerabend’s educator was no longer Austin but Nestroy who « uses extremely simple means…to reveal pretense, deception, and, maybe, a basic crookedness of the entire world » (143). Feyerabend considers that this lesson « might also be applied to scientific jargon » and, we can add, to academic jargon in general.

This accusation of inhumanity goes beyond pretense, deception, and crookedness that can be seen in academic life as elsewhere – the familiar carnival of subservience and hypocrisy, of boot-licking and back-stabbing, that the competitive nature of the milieu elicits in many of its denizens. There is an even more sinister aspect that Feyerabend calls « bestiality » behind this level of superficial conformism to the false appearances of the collective phantasm, a level of subhuman automatism, of subservience to the pulsions underlying the unsuccessful sublimations. At this level, diagnosed by Karl Kraus and by the Dadaists, language merges into « brute inarticulation » and the perpetrators of such language become « hardly distinguishable from a pack of grunting pigs » (144, here Feyerabend is quoting himself from SCIENCE IN A FREE SOCIETY). The language of propaganda and of political and commercial manipulations can actually hinder or even block access to the « complex process of growth » (SFS, 120) that is essential for our full development as human beings.

Thus the « deterioration of language » as Feyerabend calls it in SCIENCE IN A FREE SOCIETY corresponds to a degradation of « living order » (SFS,120) into mechanical routine. This consideration led Feyerabend to avoid scholarly language and to use « common locutions and the language of show business and pulp instead » (KILLING TIME, 144). Feyerabend prefers « common locutions and « ordinary ways of talking » as they are « more flexible and more subtle than their philosophical replacements » (142). He prefers the « language of show business and pulp » because it permits one to entertain and instruct at the same time, to appeal to emotion as well as to thought, and to follow the dictates of the « living order » and the « complex process of growth » that Bernard Stiegler calls (with Simondon) the process of psychic and collective individuation, and that Feyerabend calls the full development of individuals and of their traditions.

Finally, I would like to emphasise that the criterion is in the last instance not that of the presence or the absence of jargon. Jargon can be one way of expressing and facilitating conceptual creation and singular research, ordinary language can easily become an instrument of propaganda. The criterion is individuation. There is no absolutely good or absolutely bad language, but different uses. So what if Laruelle’s prose style (to take one example) is the exact opposite of Feyerabend’s, if it serves to take us out of the propaganda, the slogans and the stereotypes, if it dissolves the the obstacles to thought and unmasks the pulsional plays, if it frees us to be more ourselves in thought and action? This was Feyerabend’s goal in writing, and he explained that he did not want to strengthen the consensus but to « upset people ».