Hansen Insight

Academiology is the study of academia, its inhabitants and its associated structures. The claim is that prior analyses, such as those by Weber, Veblen, Bourdieu, Readings, et al., can be significantly extended, potentially opening new forms of world access. Academiology hence seeks to penetrate and unconceal the inner logic of the academy as well as the scope of its effects on our world. In the broader knowledge economy, just such an investigation may be crucial for any greater inquiry into the status of knowledge today.

While some academics and independent thinkers have attempted to resist neoliberal capture and commercialization via Critical University Studies (CUS), Academiology radically deviates in terms of its aims, deference and venue. Academiology seeks to hold a mirror to the “academic gaze,” exposing manifold epistemic vulnerabilities and contributing to a more theoretically robust discourse. Curating ideas from across the political spectrum, the idea is to aggressively and unrelentingly wield them against corruption—i.e., putting academia “in the dock.” To achieve the fulfillment of critical theory, raised within manicured ivy walls, we now seek its culmination outside of crumbling ivory towers and into the emergent digital intellectual semiosphere.

Placing the academic subject under a critical lens, Academiology seeks to interrogate the whole of the academic enterprise including the legitimacy of academic authority itself. After initiating the ideological unmasking and disclosure of the figure of the academia, the legacy of 20th century nihilism is then reloaded into a nascent movement entitled “Total Deconstruction,” which seeks the theoretical liquidation of the contemporary university, and the legislative destructuring and dismantlement of academia in toto.

Academiology offers many potential trajectories for analysis: the military-industrial complex, the nexus between research and global technocapital, government complicity with high finance, student loan indenture, the emerging underclass of academic adjuncts, and so on. Such an interrogation stands to teach us how academia went from the scenic groves of Hekademos to a commercial network of vocational training centers dominated by corporations and managed by professional bureaucrats.