When it comes to a taboo, I think particularly about one of the most hidden phenomena, that is to say corruption in the academic environment. Thanks to academic fame and capital, the academicians have a very good reason to shut up about corruption in their kingdom. They have natural and traditional right to analyze, criticize, and solve all problems concerning ecosystem and human existence in this world (human rights, freedom, poverty, sexuality, religion, family, crime, and so on) as well as in other worlds (such as God, paradise, and hell), except their own crimes (nepotism, blackmail, fraud, bribery, discrimination, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and giving degrees to dictators and their clans, for example) in their fiefs (i.e. criminality in the universities). As a matter of fact, we know almost nothing either about the acceptance and the promotion in the universities or about the governance of the academic books, journals and reviews claiming to use fabulous “peer review”. The same goes for the seminars, conferences, and workshops organized and presented almost always by the same band of intellectuals who have perfectly monopolized the discussion topics. As a result, an undesirable intellectual must be excluded for the salvation of the members of that band. Any criticism of academic mafia is systematically forgotten or presented as “frustration”, “paranoia”, or “anti-intellectualism”.
Indeed, the life and ideology of the universities are too mythical and rosy that nobody likes to tell us the truth about scholar existence! If you wanted to study “young offenders” – a topic in which almost all criminologists are specialists –, you would find uncountable studies when you could find very few works regarding the criminality of professors in their majestic workplaces. The dictatorship of academia is actually awful because of the intelligence of academicians and of their symbiotic relations with the political and economic elites. As a hermetic and Freemasonical institution, the world of university is basically founded upon secrecy and invisible network: “No connection no honey!” As a consequence, if you were enough handsome or … to satisfy a big professor, you could hope to fine a position in that hermetic world. In this case, I know some male and female professors who are sexist insomuch as they treat their students or costumers according to their potential … desire, but who cares?
Scholastic silence vis-à-vis the criminality of academicians stems from not only material interest, but also from the ideological nature of universities: conservatism and misonéisme. In reality, the task of universities, as a corporation, is to fabricate the most conservative, narrow-minded, coward, and heartless people, as they can fabricate thanks to the complicity of religious, political, economic, and military powers. In short, they aim at making the people whose allergy is neology and rebellion together. For instance, there were the professors who were fervently defending the punishment of workers claiming union in the past, as they are crying for wage slavery today.
On the one hand, if corruption and discrimination are “systematic” in our society, it is the same in our universities. On the other hand, thanks to the intelligence (high IQ!) of academicians and their symbiotic relationship with the political and economic authorities, their crimes are both more sophisticated and more difficult to reveal, while we are greedily looking for punishing ordinary criminals for the sake of our impotence vis-à-vis white-collar crime in which the professors take honorably part. Onto these problems, I add the difficulty to prove discrimination or racism in academia insofar as the universities function secretly and keep their secrets fervently. Consequently, those who are victims of such a freemasonic function have neither courage nor power to fight against a band of professors who have perfectly monopolized the capital of academia and discredit any accusation as a simple paranoia or a false allegation. In a world bulging with the special courts (Family Courts, Youth Courts, Commercial Courts, and so on), our honorable legislators have apparently forgotten to establish any specific court for our highly educated criminals.
Besides, if you put into question professorship, they will usually say you: “I understand your frustration, but the academic positions are so competitive”! It means that there are many demands for few offers; this would be enough for you to not to continue to ask about the mafia and discriminative systems in the universities in which democracy is a topic to teach (i.e. marketing) and not to practice. In other words, democracy and transparency must stop behind the doors of universities that are managed by the invisible political and economic hands. It seems to me that the most undemocratic, hypocrite, and condescending people in the world exist in the university. Despite their secretaries, assistants, and acolytes, the professors are too busy to answer or to treat others with respect and dignity that they teach us in their classrooms and writings.
In the academic system, the students (mostly from the wealthy or middle class) are passive masses that are welcomed to consume certain topics and researches, which are chosen and sold by the professors, in the same way that they consume other products (eggs, TV, laptop, iPod, car, etc.). They have no power either in the context or in the form of courses that are left at the mercy of professors’ will. As a result, there is not any democratic process in which the students are able to participate in order to debate about what they think or want. Since, the academic system is scarcely anything better than “fast food” cooked by the professors regardless of their merits. And scholarly fast food requires “junkie students” whose intellectual fatness comes from academic brainwashing. Such an undemocratic or despotic process has already facilitated corruption and nepotism in the universities and colleges.
In reality, you can buy democracy or a legal topic (“Commercial Insurance Law and Coverage Disputes”, “Conducting Effective Corporate Due Diligence”, “Drafting Clearer Contracts”, and so on)[1] from the professors in the frame of a course, as you can buy coffee from Tim Hortons, since the former and the latter are per se identical: Corporation. As a … sells her body, a professor sells his mind; this is a deal or a contract in legal language! You can go to a university in the same way that you go to a whorehouse by a simple legal rule: “I pay and I buy!” Nevertheless, one principal difference between these places is that some organizations (such as the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP)) could rent you money to go to a university for the sake of your psychological orgasm, if you were poor!
On the contrary, if you could not pass ordalique admission process, you or your parent would donate money to a university in order to be admitted and also – if you pay very well – to see your name on the walls of that university or to see a department decorated with your honorable name. In this case, X Law School is a typical example insofar as its walls and rooms are decorated with the name of wealthy donators. In short, you can buy and sell knowledge in the university as long as you pay the price, as you buy the service of a … or you sell yourself in the same way that the job centres advocate their clients. A look at the scholastic photos in brochures, journals, and reviews may show certain similarities between “mercantilism” and “academia”.
Consequently, the analysis and the critique of academic environment are very important insofar as this environment has hitherto functioned as “justificator of all injustice” at worst, or “palliative” at best.
Finally, there are few studies that help to analyze certain types of crime at the heart of knowledge, which belongs, according to the Myth of Prometheus,[2] to the professors. In this case, as usual, there are American scholars who have studied academic criminality more than other people. May we think that one-day a popular personality would come to send all professors to the concentration camps, labour camps, experimental laboratories, or brothels because of their dirty mind and corruption? Is that an authoritarian and dangerous thought or only a “frustrated imagination” by an excluded intellectual? In this regard, let us only imagine as Saint Grégoire le Grand would have somehow put it: “L’on veut prendre scandale de la vérité, mais il est plus utile de laisser naître le scandale que de taire la vérité.”[3]
[1] See http://www.lawandstyle.ca/.
[2] Prometheus is nevertheless regarded as “the first anarchist”! BIENEK (Horst), Bakunin: An Invention, trans. from the German by Ralph R. Read, London: Gollancz, 1977, p. 37.
[3] Quoted in HAMON (Augustin Frédéric), Psychologie de l’anarchiste-sociatiste, Paris: Stock, 1895, p. 96.
AUTHOR
Dr Tamanna Khosla is distinguished scholar with Academy of ethics and member of Academy of Farsala, Greece. She is a PhD from JNU.
(The views expressed by the author are her personal views)