How the Neoliberalization of Academia Leads to Thoughtlessness by Justin Pack

Author:Justin Pack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Institutionalized Science

Before turning to academic games, I want to make it clear that my concern is institutionalized science. Institutionalized science is also rationalized science. My claim is not that science is thoughtless. Rather my claim is that the way science has been institutionalized, especially as it bows to the logic of production and the pressures that result, discourages thinking. It is quite possible, however, for the contemporary scientist to overcome the pressures of rationalized production that discourages thinking and to think. But the deck is, in a sense, stacked against her due to the intense demands of hypercompetitive academia. Science that functions outside of the logic of production is much more likely to encourage thinking. The Greek “scientist,” medieval monk “scientist” and the European aristocratic gentleman “scientist” all had time to think and they often did—often writing about all kinds of topics. Only in modern rationalized and institutionalized science do we find the intense pressure to be productive and heavy specialization that makes thinking a waste of time.

Thinking is also a central part of revolutionary science. By this I mean that, following Kuhn, in those moments when a particular scientific tradition has become radically questioned—say when the Aristotelian paradigm or the Newtonian paradigm can no longer adequately explain certain problems—science enters a revolutionary transition in which what is needed is precisely thinking to break apart old paradigms and open up new spaces and imagine alternatives.[3] As we saw in the last chapter, thinking is interested in alternatives (to the current game, to current paradigms, to current accepted ideas, etc.), in questioning why things are the way they are, and so forth. In revolutionary science, thinking is therefore needed to imagine new ways of framing problems to resolve contradictions that have become irresolvable under their current paradigm. In normal scientific practice, however, thinking is often counterproductive. Normal science functions within a settled paradigm and involves working through the immense minutiae of little problems that make up a discipline. As we can see, revolutionary science is a very different game from normal science. My analysis concerns the minutiae focused practice of normal science.

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