Nothing dismays me more in academia than my colleagues excusing themselves from the world because they have internalized their job as their identity, and exist in a separate domain from everyone else. every time I knock on doors with my union I get someone, sometimes angrily, wondering what any of this has to do with them - they're here to just do science.
@jonny
But how certain are you that they truly have internalised this mantra as opposed to simply using it as a defence against entanglement in the overt struggle? Have you only heard it from people with tenure, or is it rather that people at every level will use the phrase, even those who then quickly leave academia altogether?
Are you really expecting those who want to quietly stay on the good side of the ruling power to say so openly?
It doesn't look very loyal to loudly say "I side with them because they have the power", simply being quiet is better and the "aloof scientists" is a well worn trope to hide behind.
@tobychev
Ya I am aware there is a certain cynicism that surrounds "I want to keep mine." Thats why I call them protective myths, because myths dont take on the ontological status of truth but are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I would bet very few people explicitly think "ah yes I love the status quo because it benefits me at the expense of others," but instead construct stories that amount to the same thing. I am aware of how many researchers just say nothing and thats basically exactly what im talking about here.
This is especially true when we are organizing for bargaining or for a grievance - this directly affects you because we are talking about the conditions in which you are doing science. Every part of how science works is determined by working conditions. Its a tautology. Who gets to do it, the daily barriers to work, which work gets done, what resources you have, the pace of work, the constant precarity, being drowned in grantwriting and bureaucracy, the cutthroat nature of publication. Those are all working conditions, and the only way to improve any of them is collective action. And the only way colletive action works is when you show up for problems that aren't directly applicable to you - otherwise why would anyone show up for your problems?
That is to say nothing of organizing for solidarity actions that are outside our workplace. The academy is an employer like any other, and even public universities operate like any other boss. Your low wages arent because your work is a rare calling. There isnt any intrinsic reason why training requires living on poverty wages. We are subject to the systems of power and repression everyone else is, but we have created protective myths that explain the continual degradation of our work so we can remain the heroes of the story as zealously singleminded geniuses.
Just because you have convinced yourself that you dont need to ask for more doesnt mean the cops wouldnt show up if you did.
So when people do agitate for more, for their work to not make them complicit in genocide, the cops show up and hospitalize and arrest them, and your response is that it isnt your problem because youre merely a scientist - not only is that an extraordinarily fucked up way to react to anyone facing repression, but it is a direct reflection of naiveté of how your work is conditioned by the state prevailing power.
To the inculcated, the academy is a place of pure knowledge work, uncomplicated by the problems of "normal" workers. From another view, the academy is a means of rapacious industries outsourcing the costs of training to the government, where the myth of exceptionalism prevents meaningful labor organization to prevent the abysmal working conditions from eventually forcing you to take a job at a weapons manufacturer or ad company because that's the only option left.
If you cling to that first view, it should horrify you that your institution is a gigantic investment fund with a side hustle in lab real estate. It should perplex you why you have no power over any of how it works, that students would have to resort to escalating protest to affect how it operates, because surely reason will prevail.
Even to the unconcerned moderate, no matter how you feel about what theyre saying, divestment encampments should be part of your cause, because no enlightened place of learning should be brutalizing its students.
Our working conditions directly affect the maintenance of genocidal industries. Our failure to coordinate meaningful political action to fund the commons of public research forces our colleagues to take their years of training to Raytheon. Our institutions being overrun by billionaire boardmembers from Blackrock are a bedrock of the military industrial complex. Science both as an epistemological mode and a labor system IS political whether we like it or not, so as a scientist it absolutely IS your responsibility to agitate for a better world - for every ounce of belief you have that your role is somehow special, that becomes even more true.
Done venting for now. As always solidarity w my colleagues who are in precarious positions and cant make it out, esp. with the many colleagues here on visas - organizing against the systems that make that so is the whole point
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