Last night I finished Robert Grave’s classic [1] The White Goddess. For all its flaws, it’s enormously erudite - it’s the sort of book that makes you feel like you’ve enriched your life just by reading it. Very few scholars write information-thick books like this anymore.

One of the most depressing aspects of modern academic training is the treadmill of “professionalism”. Back in the 80s, academics began an internal dialogue over how to raise their perceived value (to tap into the compensation scale of “experts”), and the outcome of this conversation was two strategies: the promotion of specialized language that would serve to identify expert work and  the development of academic networks (demonstrated by the requirement that dissertations and associated grant applications place the work in the context of the current crop of professionials). As a result, young academics spend more time reading the work of their professional peers (much of exceedingly low quality) than they spend reading primary sources and learning languages.

The need to network also keeps young academics out of the archives and often out of the classroom, as they discover that they get more career mileage out of socializing with powerful professors. Conversely, if a young academic crosses the wrong professor (in dissenting from an academic argument or even failing to remember a crucial Thank You in the preface of a book), their career can easily be destroyed. That’s rankism at its rankist.

Academic rankism creates the same malaise among young academics as it does in corporate environments. Even worse, it has undermined scholarship to the point where graduate students end up toiling for years without making any major contribution to scholarship: it’s utterly demoralizing to realize that you’re spending all your time trying to keep up with professionalizing requirements and churning out what amounts to promotionals to boost the careers of other academics. The sense that true scholarship was no longer possible within the terms laid out by contemporary academia played a major role in my own decision to leave graduate school several years ago.

Still, when I read a book of profound depth such as The White Goddess, or even a more recent book that attempts erudition such as Christopher Woodward’s [2] In Ruins, I mourn the end of scholarship. Thanks to the politics of rankism, a sizable chunk of the bedrock of our civilization has been lost.