Academic publishing has become (but perhaps always was) a hall of self-congratulatory mirrors and narcissistic pomp. What passes for validation is too often citation upon citation, a chain of references with no ground beneath it. The rhetoric of fact-checking and peer review masks a system that rewards repetition (and compliance), not discovery, and hierarchy, not […]
University taught me, above all else, that its primary product is itself. It does not exist to transmit knowledge in any meaningful sense, but to perpetuate its own organizational continuity, to replicate the culture, metrics, and transactional hierarchies that sustain its brand. If you need a degree, you will receive one in exchange for compliance, […]
Universities long ago crossed the threshold into becoming vocational colleges. The old pretense of cultivating intellect has collapsed into bureaucratic ritual. Degrees, even doctorates, are now less a marker of insight than of endurance — square pegs forced into square holes, ticking rubrics until compliance is complete. What is rewarded is not originality but conformity, […]
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 […]
Academia abhors cleverness—but only the kinds that don’t reproduce its current coinage of acceptable thought. What gets protected is the signalling, not the insight. Language becomes currency; cleverness that fails to replicate the prevailing mintage of disciplinary and political vocabulary is filtered out. It’s not conscious—most of the time, it’s reflex. The institution doesn’t select […]
Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]
In the realm of artistic creation, the emergence of artificially intelligent generative technologies heralds a paradigm shift, one that both augments and, paradoxically, dilutes the essence of human creativity. As we stand on the cusp of this technological revolution, it becomes imperative to question the role and significance of authorial intent in the face of […]
Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological […]
Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]
I have been reflecting on the bias in academic institutions towards the accelerated production of research papers at a cost of their quality or consequence. It is a curiously irritating function of many but certainly not all of the autonomously self-propagating (as soliton-like) organisational systems that human beings inhabit that these entities are prone to […]
A view from the periphery on the tribal self-validation of academic cliques.
Conventional platitudes and “safe” research agendas actively inhibit the free flow of ideas that discovery and authentic intellectual creativity or intelligence require.
Daedelus Kite 