The Age of Human Calculators

No, it’s not the title of a science fiction thriller, but rather a dystopian metaphor – and a warning -- of what has happened to academic life.

Dr. Omri Herzog of Sapir’s Department of Culture, Creativity and Production has published Compliance and Resistance within Neoliberal Academia, a series of very personal and unnerving reflections on the academic profession in an age of neoliberalism. One of them chillingly describes the dehumanizing race to accumulate an ever-growing resume of academic publications, the sin qua non of a successful career on the ledger sheet of today’s market-driven academia. “I visualized my colleagues . . . looking numbly at their computer screens . . . and counting endlessly. . . Did academia turn us into huge calculators?” The system takes an emotional toll on scholars, he argues. It discourages innovative work in favor of large quantities of routine publications, limits access to knowledge with paywalls, and encourages lecturers to avoid controversy in favor of a shallow consensus.  Above all, it threatens the humanistic vision of educating free, responsible thinkers.

Herzog’s new volume is not a book of lamentations, however, but a clarion call to defy the strictures of neoliberalism and reimagine academia as it should be: “an intellectual, just and safe haven for knowledge.” Co-authored with colleagues from James Cook University in Australia and Tel Hai College in Israel, the book is available to download, free of charge, at the following link.

Compliance and Resistance Within Neoliberal Academia | SpringerLink