This week, resident blogger Ebba wonders if there is a divide between senior and junior academics, what that divide consists of, and whether the universalised value of subverting and challenging the old is always the most fruitful in academia.
A while back, a senior academic at one of my institutions died of natural causes. Along with others, I was invited by staff members to take home some books for free from their extensive library. While I was picking out the books that I wanted, I listened to the other students that had come to do the same. They were speculating, from the titles of the books in the academic’s office, about the views of the deceased professor, and somewhat scornfully drew conclusions about their political stance. I found it inappropriate, coming into someone’s office to take books for free while not respecting the academic integrity of that person. Is it necessarily the case that someone’s library is a straightforward reflection of the views that they hold? It seemed unfair, like the students weren’t speaking about a person, but an untouchable symbol.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the deaths of senior academics. In 2023, Natalie Zemon Davis died. I attended a screening of The return of Martin Guerre in Davis’ memory a week or so after her death, organised by a former student of hers. I was overcome by the thought that a mind I admire so much no longer exists in this world. What I felt during that screening was something existing in an unchartered space between respect and melancholy.
The deceased Scottish academic whose books I now have on my shelf deserves the same sentiment. There is often great emphasis placed, in academia and elsewhere, on subverting, challenging, or overthrowing what has come before, in order to produce new forms of knowledge. Everyone wants to be able to see through established truths and dominant academic voices. During my master’s degree especially, I often felt that there was a tone of condescension when students spoke about senior academics’ work, a desire to say, I’ve seen through you, I know there are holes in your line of reasoning. Ironically, this tends to reinforce the importance of those senior academics; if their work is subpar, why engage with it at all?
It’s not strange, however, that students feel the need to demonstrate that they have critical and inquisitional minds. I always did better in undergraduate essays if I pointed out flaws in senior academics’ arguments, as this was the easiest way to show the marker that I had thought deeply about the topic within the space of a 2,500 word essay. Additionally, senior academics hold positions in academia that most of us in this new generation of thinkers will never achieve. Of course there is animosity. Of course there is frustration. And of course it’s satisfying to be able to point out when those in senior positions don’t measure up.
This disconnect between generations of thinkers can go both ways. Senior academics don’t always like what they see and hear when they encounter PGRs and early career researchers.1 I was once told in a conference by a senior professor, who thought she’d offer me some advice, that I needed to do something about my voice, which was ‘too soft and frail’. This was not my first time hearing this and it won’t be my last, as I do sometimes have quite a soft voice. Regardless of gender identity, almost everyone in that conference wore dark pantsuits and spoke in a deep, clear voice, and my inability to conform to these forms of intellectual authority were perceived by the senior professor as unprofessional, something to work on, while many from my own generation would perceive of pressure to dress or speak in a certain way as authoritarian and problematic. Another disagreement I came across recently involved a professor arguing that a PGR needed to think more carefully about how they represent themselves on social media, while the PGR perceived of this monitoring of their social media presence as a form of infringement on their personal space and self-expression. There’s a lack of consensus when it comes to what constitutes professional behaviour, and this clash of perspectives can play out along generational lines.
In a section of Julia May Jonas’s novel Vladimir, a senior English professor reflects on her own generation of female academics’ distain, and covert jealousy, towards 21st century undergraduates:
‘People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong — so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings — the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that we hadn’t been able to, and our defense was to call them soft.’2
This fictional perspective captures some of the division that I see, though the issues within academia go beyond what I’m able to cover here. On a more general note, I’m not convinced earlier generations will ever fully understand Gen Y (Millennials) and Gen Z, whose mental and physical health is clearly marked by experiences of recession, student debt, political conflict, and the rise of an addictive internet culture that has many chronically distracted. ‘You’re just being lazy, ‘ a professor said to my tutorial group in 2015, musing that most of us had watched TV instead of doing the assignment. And say that was true, why might it be that many prefer Game of Thrones to facing reality?
Perhaps things that look like failure, disconnect, and conflict are ultimately productive. Or maybe I’m wrong in taking the limited view that conflict within academia can be understood in terms of different generations colliding (after all, I have met many a visionary professor, and some academics in senior positions are themselves Gen Ys). Arguably, a bigger issue is junior academics’ tendency to mimic the speech, writing, dress and intellectual arguments of their supervisors and mentors, hoping that this will be the trick that gets them an academic job.
The only thing I know for sure is that if you’re sitting on a giant’s shoulders, chances are you have the better view – but you can’t pretend it’s your own legs you’re standing on.
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