In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia:

I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that human geography is a relatively low-status discipline, and so thought it would get more respect if it became a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism. When I was an assistant professor, I once lunched with two very young women professors in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Science, and they were on fire to make PRTS a hotbed of transgressive Foulcaldian post-structuralism. Professors want status, just like everyone else, so low-class fields ape high-class fields, and low-class academics ape high-class academics. Of course there are a few cranks, some of whom practice a high-status crankiness, and few of whom practice a low-status crankiness, but academia greatly prefers conformists over cranks. Not only do professors want status, they acquire status through the peer-review process. This may sometimes select for truth, but mostly selects for conformity. After all, peer-review is just peer-pressure for professors. I’d like to think there are some hard sciences where a maverick professor can have reality on his side, but through most of academia, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is other professors.

Professor Smith makes an important point:

If I ran a restaurant and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of diners. If I were an actor and the reviewers hated me, I could succeed by appealing to the market of movie-goers. If I am a professor and the reviewers hate me, I am a failed tenure case because all my manuscripts were rejected and student evaluations don’t matter.

This is a vulnerability that is, perhaps, unique to academia. One would imagine — naively, as it turns out — that academia ought to be the place, above all, where “truth is great and will prevail”. That the academy is, instead (with the exception of mathematics and the hard sciences), the place where truth is in fact subordinate to ideological faddishness says a great deal about how little of the modern curriculum actually touches upon topics about which there even is objective truth, or at least an objectively correct interpretation of facts.

I realize that I haven’t explained how something like transgressive Foulcaldian poststructuralism becomes high-status…

Most likely it is because it is entropic; it flattens and equalizes and breaks order (structure) into rubble. In doing so, it multiplies opportunities for the exercise of power — and by obliterating all discriminations of quality and merit, it enables the success of resentful mediocrities. This is always at the heart of egalitarian activism: finding a way to get your hand on the collar of your superiors — and if that’s your aim, it helps if you can pretend that there is no basis to consider them your superiors in the first place. It has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

The universal acid of post-Enlightenment skepsis, which casts such corrosive doubt on everything that no cultural vessel can successfully contain it, has brought us at last to the futile and paradoxical triumph of a doctrine whose central truth is the nonexistence of truth, and which seizes the apex of cultural status by attacking status itself.