The professionalisation of scholarship marked a decisive shift—from inquiry as a vocation to academia as an industry. Once the university became a business, its priorities recalibrated around continuity, funding, and image management. The scholar ceased to be a boundary explorer and became instead a reputational asset, a metric, a compliant node in a bureaucratic feedback loop. The pursuit of knowledge was subordinated to the pursuit of legitimacy within the institution’s self-reinforcing ecology. This is not incidental. It is structural. Professionalisation demands formalisation, and formalisation breeds hierarchy, compliance, and the deferral of risk. That which cannot be measured cannot be funded; that which cannot be cited cannot be published; that which cannot be published cannot survive. And so the system trims itself, carefully, predictably, with a mechanical elegance that rewards safety and punishes conceptual insurgency. The frontier closes, and its guardians begin to mistake the border for the centre.
Universities still produce remarkable work, but they do so despite their architecture, not because of it. Organisational politics—whose gravitational pull shapes careers, disciplines, and even vocabularies—operates most powerfully where it is least acknowledged. Silence is its medium. Discomfort is its camouflage. The very idea of “collegiality” becomes a method of suppression, rewarding not intelligence but navigation. And because no one talks about it directly, it persists like mould beneath institutional plasterwork, thriving in damp corners of unspoken compromise. If scholarship is to recover its function—not just as critique, but as reconnaissance of intellectual possibility—then the unspoken must be spoken. The structure must be seen. Otherwise, the university will continue to train functionaries of a system that cannot tolerate its own disassembly, even when that disassembly is the only thing that could return it to relevance.
Daedelus Kite 