Reading a thoughtful post on becoming a so-called ‘Independent’ scholar by R of A – he prefers ‘Collaborative’ – and perusing some of the posts by younger scholars on AUFS, I wonder whether we may be entering a time when real scholarship begins to happen outside the academy. Not that this is the first time: witness Spinoza, Marx and Engels, Negri …
16 January, 2011
A time for real scholarship outside the academy?
Posted by stalinsmoustache under academics, another world is possible, research, universities | Tags: independent scholar |[11] Comments
16 January, 2011 at 11:32 am
… and witness Wellhausen’s resignation from biblical studies… (didn’t really get outside the academy, but its a helluva role model).
16 January, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Nah, that doesn’t count, you Germanophile.
16 January, 2011 at 1:56 pm
To your list of scholars who worked outside the academy we can add Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, Kojeve (a bureaucrat in the European Commission!), Coleridge, J.S. Mill, Albert Schweitzer, Guattari,Bataille, Lacan, and Darwin.
16 January, 2011 at 2:10 pm
The academy isn’t looking very original …
16 January, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Yes !! I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing. I’m embarrassed to be involved in a discipline where scholars often forget how to tell the truth, a discipline flooded with statement of faith confessing amer*** seminarians, rampant anti religious amer***, scholars from that part of the world with very narrow (new testament, theology, divinity) degrees and no classics, history, or other arts and sciences (unlike europe uk and australasia where most at minimum have at least a classics first degree and more often than not very broad degrees and second doctorates. Conforming to social subgroups, not telling the truth – what happened to independent minds and academic freedom?
16 January, 2011 at 3:43 pm
check out http://www.ncis.org/, especially http://www.isaa.org.au/
16 January, 2011 at 4:53 pm
this looks interesting!! but the ISAA link is blank (Just the tree) – do you have to be a ‘member’ to see? are you affiliated with either of these?
19 January, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Steph,
You’re not really being fair to Americans here… on the whole, even in the UK, it is American postgrads who are getting shit done in terms of setting up conferences and pushing the departments to do anything. And our education is much broader than in the UK. For my philosophy BA I had to take courses in ancient religion, introduction to biology, a year of a foreign language (I did two, in French), and much much more. To get a BA in Theology from Nottingham you just take some random courses in Theology and that’s the end of that.
19 January, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Sorry, that should read “it is OFTEN American postgrads”. The excluionary tone was not intended.
16 January, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Steph, it works from here, so I don’t think you need to be a member to access their main page.
16 January, 2011 at 5:30 pm
well bugger. All I get is the header, tree and side bar. Click on all the links and still just blank white page. I like the sound of an australian one though – home yerno.