Paul Ricoeur: Empowering Education, Politics and Society. Alison Scott-Baumann. Springer. 2023.

Activism on campus: how can universities respond?  

More than a year has passed since Hamas’ horrific attack on 7 October 2023 and the beginning of Israel’s catastrophic assault on Gaza in response. As the conflict deepens and spreads throughout the region, so does the polarisation of debate around it, paradoxically both hampering and creating new openings for the discussion of the conflict. At this critical juncture, universities could play a crucial role – yet are fraught with incertitude and reluctance.

In student-organised rallies and encampments worldwide, the tone of voice remains fierce and uncompromising: “Demand cease fire! Enforce sanctions! Boycott Israeli institutions!”. Staff are polarised between student support and disgruntlement with student activism as an ideological incursion of allegedly “neutral” university spaces. Many university leaderships have responded by calling upon police to root out protesters. Others take a permissive if restrained stand, allowing student protests while remaining quiet on the issue itself, incurring harsh critique. Speaking out can jeopardise financing for private institutions; public universities, such as my home institution, consider themselves as bound by bureaucracy and state policies. And even if willing to engage, the complexities of the conflict and the polarisation of public debate have chilling effects on engagement, from leadership offices to coffee rooms.

Alison Scott-Baumann’s conveniently short study Paul Ricoeur: Empowering Education, Politics and Society provides an important and perceptive discussion of the dilemmas universities face today. Published in 2023, its relevance has only increased in the past year. Yet this is not a book about activism per se, nor Middle Eastern conflicts. Its relevance emerges through an erudite, sympathetic but critical, and self-reflective study of the educational and activist philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, relying on Scott-Baumann’s longstanding philosophical authorship, educational research, and outreach and mediation expertise. The book is published within SpringerBriefs in Education: “concise summaries of cutting-edge research and practical applications in education”, from Plato and Martin Luther to Hannah Arendt and Slavoj Žižek.

There are similarities between the incendiary questions besieging Ricoeur’s time and our own. Yet current populist binaries and fictitious ‘culture wars’ further inhibit solidarity across (culturally, ideologically, and/or religiously imagined) groups

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) developed a phenomenological and dialectical approach to hermeneutics, the philosophy of understanding, beyond a study of texts. Understanding one’s self emerges in dialectical relation to anything beyond the self, he maintained. His life-long participation in contentious debates and student activism makes him particularly pertinent, Scott-Baumann argues, for reflecting on university education in a framework of polarisation. Ricoeur’s aspired to create a “permeable membrane between university and society” (21), sadly non-existent in our contemporary circumstance. The study contextualises Ricoeur’s philosophy with events contemporary to his writing – French colonialism and independence struggles, the 1968 student revolt, and the American civil rights movement – and applies it within the context of polarisation, populism, and discrimination of today. Ricoeur hence provides a philosophical foundation as well as a pedagogical paradigm for “using language constructively” (2) and “identifying and moderating the antagonistic effects of false binaries” (3).

There are similarities between the incendiary questions besieging Ricoeur’s time and our own. Yet current populist binaries and fictitious “culture wars” further inhibit solidarity across (culturally, ideologically, and/or religiously imagined) groups. Campus should either be defined by unrestricted free speech (libertarianism) denying the realities of discrimination, or by censorship (no-platforming). Squeezed in this “pincer grip” of populism (9), universities recede into silence. Activism against racism, colonial mindsets, and/or sexism are discarded as disruptive rather than cohesive aspirations. In Britain, denial is commonly mustered in “defence” of an imperial afterglow. We see similar ideas, I believe, in the idealisation of French laïcité or the Swedish “welfare state”. Hence Scott-Baumann provides more than an advanced introduction to Ricoeur, his contributions and limitations. By putting his thinking to work today, the author provides a sharp analysis of the current shortcomings of educational institutions in an appeal to universities to recommit to dialogue and engagement with crises.

Scott-Baumann does so by chiselling out an applied pedagogical response. In dialogue with pragmatist thinkers Jane Addams and Danielle Allen, she suggests a tripartite model geared at improving communication, empowering learners, and ultimately altering political praxis. These aspirations encapsulate one another like “Russian dolls”. At their core, forums of “Communities of Inquiry” are created, founded on Ricoeur’s dialectical philosophy and pragmatist procedural ethics: communicative mediation based on clear, morally grounded, and mutually agreed conversational conduct. On the next level, a “Politics of pedagogy” takes learning out of the classroom, bringing (and creating) knowledge into the corridors of power. On the outermost level, such efforts may alter “Polity praxis”: better-informed decision-making based on insights beyond party-political and lobbyist entrenchment. In sum, the model seeks to reduce communicative, democratic, and agentive deficiencies, by improving political literacy among university students and staff “in the intersection of education, politics, culture and nationalism” (4).

This book will serve not only as an advanced handbook on Ricoeur, but as an indispensable guide for identifying, discussing, and improving how universities understand themselves today

The study comprises 121 pages, organised in seven chapters, which can be read as stand-alone essays. Chapter One outlines how Ricoeur’s dialectical approach may challenge false binaries and populism. Chapter Two revisits the very idea of the university, and how it is threatened by commodification and the quest for funding, ranking, and recruitment, while extra-curricular exchange is limited to “quality assuring” assessment surveys. This is a far cry from the incisive interactions defining Communities of Practice (Chapter Three). The following chapters reflect on contemporary university practice through the prism of Ricoeur’s developing philosophy. We follow his successful engagement in activism against colonial violence in Algeria (Chapter Four), ensued by his frustrated attempts at building a de-hierarchised university in Nanterre (Chapter Five). In the American context (Chapter Six), the author critically discusses Ricoeur’s limited understanding of racism and his suspicion of identity-based politics, also underlying his gender-blindness. Chapter Seven summarises the argument and suggests a list of policy recommendations.

Despite its modest format, the study is rich and dense. Apart from pedagogically elucidating philosophical thought (phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, rhetorics), it engages with several complex societal issues and theoretical debates: populism, securitisation, racism and white privilege, gender, secularism, the denigration of non-European thought, and the decolonisation of curricula. When engaging with such fiercely contested issues, the author avoids facile position-taking, while remaining committed to principled humanitarianism, justice, and dialogue. Also noteworthy is how Scott-Baumann grapples with her own white privilege, acknowledging how it obstructs seeing and knowing the realities of racial discrimination. Racism occurs not only through ideology, institutional practice, and hegemony. It works on the level of cognition. References are generous (yet contain some glitches of missing posts in the bibliographies). Some diversions could have been excluded or better integrated. Among them, certain digressions on Islamic thought strike me as somewhat laboured and/or undeveloped. And while the samples of Communities of Inquiry at the end of Chapters Four, Five and Six are intriguing, they are too summative to provide entirely clarifying illustrations.

Yet such issues are allowable given the limitations of the book’s short form. This book will serve not only as an advanced handbook on Ricoeur, but as an indispensable guide for identifying, discussing, and improving how universities understand themselves today: How to regain enthusiasm for (and competence in) open and productive interactions among students, staff, and leaderships; how to find the courage of disagreeing well on topics fraught with controversy; and how to muster the confidence to speak truth to power, in a context of both lingering and acute emergencies. 

Listen to a podcast interview between Alison Scott-Baumann and Torsten Janson discussing academic freedom in today’s climate.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: lev radin on Shutterstock.

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Elite Universities and The Making of Privilege: Exploring Race and Class in Global Educational Economies. Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers. Routledge. 2023. 

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In Elite Universities and The Making of Privilege, Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers highlight the extensive role that elite universities play in maintaining the status quo. At a time where society seem to value and work toward social equality (with the upsurge in intake of students from non-traditional backgrounds such as first-generation students or students of colour), “racism”, “classism”, “elitism” and “white privilege” are terms that one might think are growing less relevant. However, the authors unveil a different picture of the realities faced by students and show how elite universities serve as a catalyst for pre-existing inequalities.

Racism, classism, elitism and white privilege are terms that one might think are growing less relevant. However, the authors unveil a different picture of the realities faced by students

The chapters are divided into seven different themes including eliteness, belonging, race, and global brands. Throughout the book, Bhopal and Myers draw on current debates surrounding class, race and eliteness, and the first-hand accounts of post-graduate students from various class and racial backgrounds studying at ‘elite’ universities in both the US and UK. In an environment that promotes the simple meritocratic notion of flourishing through hard work and ambition, the authors argue that elite universities serve their own interests which “tend to align with white, middle-class elites” (17).

In an environment that promotes the simple meritocratic notion of flourishing through hard work and ambition, the authors argue that elite universities serve their own interests

They begin by defining “elite” or “elitism” in the context of universities as a “readily identified institution whose prominence and status often appear … unassailable” (1). They break down the term by detailing the history of the institutions that we consider elite and how they obtained and maintain the label. The authors do emphasise the complexities attached to the term; however, power and wealth are identified as distinct features.

Cultural, social and economic capitals are contextualised within the field of education and are evidenced to have created clear pathways to success for those who possess them.

Elite Universities introduces classic theories from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology in an attempt to understand the reproduction of status and privilege. Cultural, social and economic capitals are contextualised within the field of education and are evidenced to have created clear pathways to success for those who possess them. Students who retain these capitals have exclusive access to elite institutions and are positioned favourably on the systematic “hierarchies of privilege” (60), thus, are effortlessly able to assimilate into the elite environment. Students unaccustomed to these capitals are conscious of this. “You can see their privilege – it bleeds down – it never stops for them, they use it in every way and it starts way back from school, it just continues here”, student Kiera describes (41). The authors argue that the pathway to elite institutions is exclusive and is simply another stepping stone for elite groups to retain their power and status.

White capital is identified as a form of power within elite institutions in which ‘cultural capital finds its materialisation in practices that devalue students of colour’

Bhopal and Myers also utilise Critical Race Theory (CRT) to understand the role that race and racism play in reproducing inequalities at university level. Coupled with a Bourdiesian framework, Chapter Six,  “Race, Privilege and Inequality” focuses on how race and class impact student experiences. The chapter heavily relies upon interview extracts from student narratives which detail the unique perceptions of how racism operates within their respective universities. White capital is identified as a form of power within elite institutions in which “cultural capital finds its materialisation in practices that devalue students of colour” (107). The authors identified a “hierarchy of oppression” where the “disadvantage of race intersects with class identity” (81). The exclusive social and cultural capitals are used to adapt to the environment and thus view their environment from a racially colourblind lens, where racism is not as prevalent in their experience. On the other hand, students of colour who are less privileged shared a common experience of racism as they do not share this cultural capital, and thus feel the need to change their behaviour to either blend in or exclude themselves from social spaces altogether. The contrast in experiences detailed within the responses amongst students of colour highlights the importance of intersectionality and the inequalities and privileges that come with it.

The ‘brand’ and global reputation of elite universities are significant in legitimising authority and prove to be compelling factors for students in the decision to attend such university.

Another of the book’s main themes is global brands. The “brand” and global reputation of elite universities are significant in legitimising authority and prove to be compelling factors for students in the decision to attend such university. Bhopal and Myers evidence an apparent link between elite universities and elite groups particularly within politics and the media. The authors argue that the brand gives a means to extend their power through knowledge production which is shared exclusively with its students. Inherent inequalities of race and class are “regulated and transmitted generationally within the brand” (121) and this is significant in maintaining the status quo. Ultimately, Bhopal and Myers argue that inequalities are an overt and distinct feature of elite universities that are not coincidental or a by-product of the university’s history. Rather, it is an imperative feature to maintain the interests of both academic and non-academic elites. Bhopal and Myers argue that the global identities that these institutions form are used as a way to legitimise their authority on a global scale.

As a scholar centring my research on students’ racial experiences in higher education, Elite Universities and The Making of Privilege provides an intellectual foundation for understanding the formation, maintenance and impact of elite universities. Although there are chapters that may be difficult to interpret for first-time readers of particular topics, such as those on global brands and educational economy, Bhopal and Myers use modern examples such as Nike to articulate their argument, a tangible comparison that makes these ideas easier to comprehend. The empirical evidence integrated throughout the book produces a solid grounding for further research into mitigating inequalities in education and emphasises how race is fixed within the essence of eliteness.

Bhopal and Myers make great use of student voices to bring insight into the true experiences of applying to and attending elite institutions.

Bhopal and Myers make great use of student voices to bring insight into the true experiences of applying to and attending elite institutions. Albeit a controversial topic given that universities claim to operate as meritocracies, the experiences of students cannot be denied or ignored and are suitably used as evidence to corroborate the authors’ conclusions. Elite Universities does a brilliant job of highlighting the mirrored issues between elite UK and US universities that are deeply ingrained in these institutions, and showcases how the different intersections of one’s identity can yield multiple types of experiences. It is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to gain not only a greater understanding of the inner workings of elite universities and the role they play in reproducing inequalities, but also of how race and class affect students studying at elite universities.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Read an excerpt from Elite Universities and The Making of Privilege by Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers on the LSE Higher Education Blog.

Image Credit: James Jiao on Shutterstock.

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Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism. Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly. Manchester University Press. 2021.

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Is it possible to be an academic and an activist at the same time? One could engage in both spheres of action, for example, through writing and highlighting research on a particular community or subject matter in academic spaces. There is not always a clear boundary between the two, though scholars can be accused of sitting at a remove from the causes they write about and the direct action employed by grassroots activists. 

Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism by Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly considers the distinctions and overlap between these categories in relation to anti-racist practices. Anti-racism is defined as radical, self-organising and emancipatory initiatives, connected with other resistance movements. The authors “understand anti-racism to be most powerful when it is cross-community – when solidarity cuts across race and class divides, and is local, national, and international in nature” (10-11).

Although Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly have published on this topic before, they wrote this book in the context of increased discussion around racism and anti-racism sparked by high-profile incidents including the murder of George Floyd in the US in 2020. Floyd’s death exemplified the systematic racist practices carried out by the State, in this case the police, and the various types of violence suffered by non-white populations in their daily lives. While the US was grappling with the issue of police brutality, the same violence raged through Brazil’s favelas, refuting the famous phrase “não existe racismo no Brasil” (racism does not exist in Brazil).

The authors do not set out to create an anti-racist scholar-activism manual […] but a starting point for reflection.

The authors do not set out to create an anti-racist scholar-activism manual – though they do share a manifesto on the subject – but a starting point for reflection on the use of the compound expression. The book contains a wealth of empirical data that contributes to an understanding of how academics operate within the institutional apparatus when acting in favour of causes outside it. In addition, there are contemporary discussions about anti-racist practices in Higher Education Institutions.

The book’s discussions are divided into six chapters, in addition to the introduction and the manifesto. Each chapter focuses on concepts connected with anti-racist scholar-activism, compiling secondary research on the subject and primary research through interviews with scholars and activists. The establishes a theoretical framework utilising three critical categories of analysis: anti-racism, scholar-activism, and the neoliberal-imperial-institutionally-racist university. Regarding this last category, it is worth highlighting the role of the university as an apparatus for legitimising colonial ideals, historically rendering research and knowledge “a colonial commodity” (21). The authors thus question the role of universities in the anti-racist fight.

The introduction does an excellent job of situating the reader within the history and reach of the relationship between scholarship and activism, bringing in a diverse range of authors including bell hooks, Angela Davis, Lélia Gonzalez and Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminisms); Paulo Freire (Pedagogy); Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney (Anti-colonialism). In doing so, Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly present an analytical framework that goes beyond European scientific limitations to spotlight ex-centric and anti-establishment perspectives, enriching this book’s value as a tool for the anti-racist struggle inside and outside academia.

Chapter 1, “Problematising the ‘scholar-activist’ label: Uneasy identifications”, addresses the complexity of defining and identifying the “scholar-activist” label, analysing the testimonies of contemporary scholar-activists on the subject. It seeks to understand whether a scholar-activist identity exists, and which terms or concepts are used by people who identify as exercising anti-racist practices. Throughout the testimonies, it is interesting to note different perceptions around the meaning and use of the words in anti-racism scholar-activism. The interviewees recognise some of their peers as scholar-activists but when asked about themselves, they prefer not to be considered as such. They perceive “scholar-activism as something that one does, rather than scholar-activist as something that one is.” (51), building upon the difference between “walking the walk” and “talking the talk” (52). From this, the authors take account of “the shift from being a scholar-activist to doing scholar-activism situated scholar-activism as a process” (52).

How scholar-activists go about serving communities and establishing anti-racist practices that overcome the institutional barriers of the university.

Chapter 2, “Working in Service: Accountability, usefulness, and accessibility”, illustrates how scholar-activists go about serving communities and establishing anti-racist practices that overcome the institutional barriers of the university, like taking advantage of institutional spaces to organise community groups and constructing research projects that are socially useful. Such work for the benefit of the community leads to greater accountability, usefulness and accessibility.

Provided that a substantial portion of academic debate is exclusively in English, limitations regarding which knowledge is viewed as legitimate and which audiences are reached are an issue, as the authors elucidate, “this has implications for which voices, and which forms of knowledge, are valued. It creates disadvantages for those academics for whom English is not a first language and feeds into unequal (academic) power relations (77).”

Which voices, and which forms of knowledge, are valued.

Therefore, it is crucial to think about whom we are writing for (target audience), how we are transmitting knowledge (using academic jargon?) and what tools we are using to disseminate knowledge (only scientific papers behind paywalls?). In areas of the Global South, for example, it can be difficult to access foreign bibliographies, because of the language barrier and the cost of books, which may end up being more expensive than in developed countries and above most students’ purchasing power.

The fact that the authors present theoretical contributions that go beyond European and North American parameters is of great value; they question claims of neutrality in research and the dilemmas faced by non-dominant groups in academia. No matter how much space they occupy, they are still not part of the dominant group, hence the term “Outsider Within” coined by Patricia Hill Collins.

The authors consider different aspects of identity or culture that affect scholar-activists’ lives and practices, such as ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class.

Throughout the chapters, readers can identify an intersectional approach to analysis, as the authors consider different aspects of identity or culture that affect scholar-activists’ lives and practices, such as ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class. As the authors point out:

Staff and students of colour are forced to contend with a range of issues, including: underrepresentation and stifled progression, an awarding gap, ethnocentric curricula, and everyday racism. Many HE [High Education] institutions are direct – financial and material – beneficiaries of the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of African people. (180)

Chapter 6, “Uncomfortable truths, reflexivity, and a constructive complicity”, is an important moment to recognise the complicity with institution:

[…] although we might champion the principle of free education and organise against economic inequality, our university employment means that we play a role in maintaining and legitimising a neoliberal system that extorts huge fees from students and saddles them with staggering debt. We are implicated too in the commodification of knowledge, the construction of the university as the site of knowledge production, and the reproduction of inequalities through the privileging of accreditation. (179)

So, what can we do to counteract this? According to several interviewees, “[…] disengaging is not an option” (187). We need to acknowledge the complicity but not allow it to immobilise us, accepting that the position of the scholar-activist within the academy is an uncomfortable one.

We need to acknowledge the complicity but not allow it to immobilise us, accepting that the position of the scholar-activist within the academy is an uncomfortable one.

Despite a seemingly academic target market, Anti-Racist Scholar Activism is for everyone who is interested in the history of intersectional struggles and their legacy in contemporary anti-racist movements. Providing a rich overview of the ideas and challenges around scholar-activism, this book shines a light on the difficult wok of those agitating for change within the systems and institutions that uphold racism.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Main Image Credit: A flyer advertising a rally for Angela Davis Day, 1971 via the Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities. D.N. Rodowick. University of Chicago Press. 2021.

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What do people studying in the humanities (including languages, philosophy, arts and more) actually learn? This is the question underlying David Norman Rodowick’s new book, An Education in Judgment, where he continues his project of formulating a ‘philosophy of the humanities’.

So, what do they learn? For Rodowick ­– artist, curator and Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the College and the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago – the crucial thing students in departments such as his receive is ‘an education in judgment’. Given the range of different disciplines gathered under the broad roof of the humanities, an education in judgment can take many forms. The example Rodowick offers from his own work context has the merit of being especially plastic and vivid.

At the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, students and staff regularly meet for a whole day to discuss works of art by students. All participants in such critique sessions will, for instance, stand around a three-dimensional object. They take some time to look at it from various sites, take in the material, its texture, the colouring, the shapes, etc, to finally form an initial opinion. Crucially, what they see is determined not only by the object as such but also by what they make of it, ‘the physical process of seeing is inseparable from imaginative processes of understanding’ (152).

How each viewer processes the incoming sense data and, quite literally, makes sense of an object will depend on a variety of socio-cultural factors. For instance, people’s upbringing, past aesthetic experiences or their knowledge of art history all play their role in the sense-making process. However, since those factors shape each individual’s imaginative process of understanding, it will change once they are altered. This happens regularly when we reflect on our own judgments and when we expose ourselves to the judgments of others.

Thus, while the piece of art as a physical object will remain the same during a critique session, ‘artful conversation with others encourages me to frame it in different contexts or to see it from different perspectives, its possibilities of sense and value shift – for me it becomes a new work; I see it differently, and accordingly I revise my opinion’ (152). This raises interesting philosophical questions, such as whether my view of an object at the end of such a critique session is more accurate than my initial impression. Is there, in other words, an objective standard that would allow us to compare the quality of judgments? And if not, what would be the point of conducting critique sessions or – looking at a different branch of the humanities – discussing philosophical texts? If we cannot measure the quality of judgments, what’s the point of an education in judgment?

Image Credit: Crop of Barbara Niggl Radloff, Hannah Arendt at the 1st Cultural Critics Congress, 1958, gelatine developing paper (PE), 30.3 cm x 23.8 cm, Munich City Museum, Photographic Collection, Barbara Niggl Radloff Archive. https://sammlungonline.muenchner-stadtmuseum.de /object/hannah-arendt-at-the-1-culture-critic-congress-10218949. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.

Rodowick approaches these and related questions by undertaking ‘close philosophical readings’ (xiv) of Hannah Arendt’s writings of the last decade of her life (1965-75), where she was increasingly concerned with the human faculty of judgment. As Immanuel Kant and later Arendt have shown, aesthetic and political judgments (the two types Rodowick is concerned with) are both of the ‘reflective’ type. While ‘determinant judgments’ result from subsuming a particular case (for example, a deed) under an agreed-upon rule (for example, judicial law), there is no such rule available in the case of ‘reflective judgments’.

Of course, it is easy to think of particular arguments supporting a singular judgment. And to the degree that a given audience finds these arguments persuasive, it will think of a given judgment as sound. However, even in the (somewhat unlikely) case of unanimous agreement on the most persuasive take on a piece of art or text, such a judgment and its supporting arguments will be challenged from another perspective once time has passed or the composition of the discourse community has altered. Thus, there is no way to determine the objective quality of judgments ­– at least on a content level.

This is bad news if we are determined to find the accurate interpretation of a painting or identify the correct reading of a text. It does not render the exercise of reflective judgment pointless though. If we shift the focus, we can see that the exchange of judgments is serving a vital purpose.

Even though there are no objective standards at our disposal when it comes to reflective judgments, we paradoxically utter such judgments in the hope (or expectation) that others will agree. At the level of the individual, this human impulse to share one’s view of the world with others and the hope for approval leads people to consider others’ perspectives and incorporate them in their judgments: ‘the less idiosyncratic and the more impartial one’s judgment, the better it can be represented to others’ (92).

On a social level, the effect is that the public utterance of opinion (the act of judgment) allows people to create and maintain what Arendt calls a ‘common world’. Why this should be so can be seen in the example above. What a piece of art is is not predetermined by its physical features alone but is the result of ongoing negotiations about meaning and value. And this is true not only of pieces of art but all culture, understood in the broad Weberian sense of all parts of the world that humans have endowed with meaning. What is at stake, then, in the exchange of opinion is not only negotiation about the meaning of a given object but also our ways of understanding and seeing the world. ‘The contributions of each participant [of a critique session] subtly shift the descriptive language of the community and, therefore, our ways of seeing and understanding’ (153).

This explains why even people who are aware that the practice of exchanging judgments will not get them closer to the truth nonetheless have good reasons to continue that practice. However, we are still left with the original question. What does an ‘education in judgment’ aim at, if not improving people’s ability to make sound judgments?

Rodowick seems to suggest that the humanities teach hermeneutic skills that are useful in the open-ended project of determining our mutual world. Thus, although Rodowick cites Arendt and Kant as his two key reference points, Socrates turns out to be the book’s real hero. While Socrates famously had no positive doctrine to teach, he is the best teacher for the dialogue we need to engage in to understand better our own opinions, including their yet unexamined premises and how others came to the beliefs they hold.

While there are no standards to determine the quality of a judgment as such, it does seem possible to identify procedural standards and criticise judgments with reference to how they have (presumably) been reached. Rodowick appears hesitant to take this step, however. He holds that there is nothing graspable that can be taught and that students and teachers stand essentially on one level while exchanging their judgments:

Perhaps I have rehearsed my powers of judgment for longer than my students; this gives me experience, and perhaps I can pass that experience along by example, but my experience does not make my judgments or opinions necessarily better than those of my students. (155)

However, on various occasions in the book, Rodowick does direct us to procedural standards. For example, he refers at one point to ‘the qualities of right judgment’, which for him include ‘discernment, insight, impartiality, representative thinking, critical self-consciousness or self-awareness, openness to revisability, and generosity or fellow feeling’ (139). Those and other criteria (which all centre around the need to take multiple views into account) surely need interpretation. They are not sufficient to reach an agreement in all cases where two contrasting judgments compete for approval. However, they might help to weed out the most severe cases of poor judgment. If so, awareness of and adherence to such standards would be a critical hallmark for an education in judgment.

Anyone seeking orientation in the scholarly debates about judgment will be ill-served by this book, which Rodowick intended to write in the tradition of the French essay, with no attempt to connect thoughts systematically to existing works in the field. At the same time, his innovative and plausible thesis of an education in judgment as the unifying element of the humanities will likely trigger fruitful debate and – as is to be expected – with an open end.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

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Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t. Marc F. Bellemare. MIT Press. 2022.

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In a world hit by COVID-19, precarity has become the norm of the job market. More and more people in academia have started talking about precariousness within the sector. With the continuous pressure to present and publish research papers, win research grants and awards and contribute to academic public goods like peer review, the minimum qualifications required for a non-tenure track job have become milestones in themselves. However, nobody really tells a grad student about what working in academia actually comprises. As I am approaching the final year of my own PhD, the importance of being able to write well as a researcher has never been felt more.

Marc F. Bellemare’s Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t is an excellent starting point for anyone looking to pursue research, those who have started research but are feeling lost or anyone who has been doing research for some years but needs motivation. The book is especially important for young students of economics who are thinking of pursuing a career in academia but have nobody to tell them about the harsh realities of the profession.

As economics and many adjacent social science disciplines have become more empirical in nature, there are very few guides to tell researchers how to narrate their findings in words. Bellemare writes that it is almost as if there is a ‘substantial hidden curriculum’ when it comes to doing economics (2). This can be extended to academia as a whole. Research has found that along with your publication record and the prestige of your graduate programme, academic networks have an overriding influence on the selection of faculty members (Val Burris 2004; Michael Hadani et al 2012).

Image Credit: Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Like most other professions, academia has its own set of rules: it almost seems like everybody knows them yet nobody really tells them. With the presence of extensive networks and imperfect information, the process of working in academia becomes layered and unequal, and this is particularly the case for people of marginalised caste, class, gender, ethnicity, region and religion. How do you write a good paper? What does it take for your research to be published in a good journal? What should a response letter to peer review look like? How do you present your research? How do you approach funders or get grants? And, finally, how do you make sure your paper is read by the audience that you want?

Doing Economics is divided into eight chapters, each telling researchers and economists how to handle the various steps that one needs to take to be successful in academia, which researchers are otherwise ‘expected to learn on their own’ (39).

The second chapter, ‘Writing Papers’, makes it clear to the reader that every opportunity to write is an opportunity to practise writing well. Bellemare introduces the concept of ‘inspectional reading’. Most of the time graduate students apply this idea to get a summary of the papers needed to complete the required syllabus. Inspectional reading involves reading the introduction, the methodology, the results and the conclusion. Bellemare warns that while inspectional reading is a good way to develop one’s knowledge of the literature, it is no way to write good papers (6).

Bellemare adds in a footnote that the greatest sin an academic writer can commit is the sin of omission, followed by the sin of commission. Leaving important information out of a paper and forcing the reader to rifle through the piece hunting for a specific bit of information are both dangerous writing habits. This chapter lays out the standard structure of a good economics paper, outlining what works and what does not.

The third chapter, ‘Giving Talks’, provides the reader with an idea of the various kinds of talks an academic department can invite you to give. Bellemare focuses on the importance of precisely understanding the norms of the department in which you are presenting your work, including the time allotted and the ground rules for questions asked by the audience. My colleagues from other departments have always talked about keeping the audience focused with good slides that have less text, just including pointers on what you will be discussing. This ‘less is more’ strategy does not always hold in economics, and Bellemare reiterates what I often tell my colleagues in response: that ‘economists tend to be more comfortable with more text on slides as well as with fewer images’ (40). This helps in making the audience understand what is done in the paper and the author spends less time memorising the content! Bellemare emphasises that a talk should be structured just like a paper and that it is important to keep in mind who the audience will be.

The fourth chapter, ‘Navigating Peer Review’, is my favourite chapter from the book. As an early career researcher, publishing is the real quest – the route to all other aspirations. Bellemare makes this clear by emphasising how in economics, articles in peer-reviewed journals are the ‘coin of the realm’ rather than books or chapters in edited volumes (61). The peer review process may not be a perfect system as it can take a long time – reviewers may not have read one’s work properly and editors might not read the reviews closely either. But Bellemare argues that it is the best system available compared to the alternatives and it leads to better scholarship. Peer review as a form of ‘gatekeeping’ is indeed a necessity (62).

Chapter Four then tries to help the reader understand when you are ready to submit your work. Bellemare gives a solution to this – ‘Your paper is ready to be submitted for publication when you keep hearing the same comments about it when presenting, or in conversations with colleagues about it, and those comments are about things you cannot do anything about except acknowledge them in the paper’ (63). The chapter also gives readers an idea about the seasons when researchers should apply and how to decide where to submit. Bellemare includes some great journal submission strategies: for example, when submitting to a field journal, he advises citing articles in that journal and its competitors published in the last five years. This suggests to the editors that your article belongs in that journal and further helps them in finding reviewers.

The fifth chapter ‘Finding Funds’, the sixth chapter ‘Doing Service’ and the seventh chapter ‘Advising Students’ all give another view of what academic life entails, if one is not already familiar with this. It is true that success in academia means different things to different people. There are many pathways to achievement in academia and the book gives readers an understanding of what these various paths could be and how to navigate them.

Doing Economics has been heralded by many on social media as the book that should have been published when they were in grad school. Life in academia is hard in itself; the imperfect information given to young and aspiring entrants to the profession further complicates matters. Doing Economics is an introductory gateway to a world which is highly gated and uncertain.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

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The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley. Jimmy Soni. Simon and Schuster. 2022.

The online payments giant PayPal, which now has a market capitalisation of over 100 billion US dollars, is important in two ways. One, because of the formative role it played in the late 1990s of establishing the infrastructure for how we make payments on the internet, particularly in the US. Second, because its founders and investors – the so-called ‘PayPal mafia’ – have gone on to found and invest in some of the largest technology businesses that underpin much of life today (including LinkedIn, Tesla and YouTube).

Jimmy Soni’s The Founders gives an account of the founders – and early employees – of PayPal. The book is told as a story of this incredible cast of characters, their big personalities, their epic battles (including the merger of Confinity and X.com, which together formed PayPal) and their intense work culture. The writing is compelling, a sort of real-life version of HBO’s Silicon Valley, based upon Soni’s interviews with the founders and his forensic analysis of 20 years of interviews and speeches they’ve delivered.

The key characters (who you have a love-hate relationship with across the book!) include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. You meet them in their formative years. For this researcher, the book offers wonderfully rich insight into how universities act as fertile ground for high-performing tech firms. The story is framed around how the founders met while studying at university together, especially at Stanford University (in the case of Thiel and Ken Howery) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (in the case of Marc Andreesen, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek and Scott Banister).

Image Credit: ‘PayPal Booth. Photo by @francois for LeWeb12 Conference, Paris’ by OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS licensed under CC BY 2.0

We often hear about certain schools adorning the paths of the founders of top performing technology firms. Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev, and his Venture Capital Initiative, found that Harvard, Stanford and Wharton are the top three unicorn-producing business schools. Such findings validate our impression that certain places have some sort of magic in their ability to produce world-leading firms.

But what happens at those universities? Is it the classroom interactions and curriculum that sprinkle unicorn dust? Or is it the mingling at parties and clubs that fosters the ability to found and build high-growth companies? Do universities serve an entrepreneurship-infused Kool-Aid, boosting entrepreneurial intentions?

The Founders details the university education and training – which social scientists call ‘human capital’ – that fosters the abilities of such performers. Gary S. Becker’s Human Capital, for instance, delineates the resource as comprising ‘general’ and ‘specific’ human capital. General capital refers to transferrable skills, applicable to a number of industrial settings. Specific human capital, in contrast, is sector-specific.

In the case of the ‘PayPal mafia’, there is a remarkable concentration of specific human capital, particularly training in computer science. The Founders is adorned with the life stories of long-time computer programmers (for example, Levchin), complemented by a smaller number of those with social science backgrounds (notably Thiel who studied philosophy and then completed law school).

The human capital that the PayPal founders crafted through their formal university education is certainly part of their story. But the book effectively chronicles how it is social capital – distinct from human capital – that played the central role. This aligns with seminal sociology scholarship (see Pierre Bourdieu (1986) and James S. Coleman (1988)) that similarly argues that human and social capital are distinct sets of resources, albeit very much interrelated.

Social capital is understood to be a fundamentally relational resource, one that comprises social networks that help people access financing, jobs and other opportunities. Key work on social capital includes that of Mark Granovetter on the ‘strength of weak ties’. He argues that it is ‘weak ties’, rather than the ‘strong ties’ of close family or friends, that can help produce job opportunities. These connections foster social trust, which acts as a ‘sociological super glue’ for transactions and relationships.

The story of The Founders is one of social interactions. It is these, rather than what they were learning in the classroom, that led to key hires that helped drive PayPal’s performance. Clubs and labs – such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in the ‘Digital Computer Lab’ at UIUC (9) and the co-founding of the Stanford Review – fostered long-lasting relationships. For instance, Nosek, Levchin and Banister met at the ACM office at UIUC. Banister and Nosek would later set out to Silicon Valley together and co-founded a start-up. Levin later recruited Simmons, who he had also met ‘working on ACM projects’ (66). Spending long hours at university clubs and labs fostered the forming of ‘strong ties’ – they knew each other’s aptitude and work ethic.

These deep relationships informed in-network hiring practices for years. Soni remarks that ‘Nosek, Pan, and Simmons were friends from Illinois; other early employees came through that network and Thiel’s Stanford contacts’ (72). The ‘PayPal mafia’ relied on these trusted relationships when hiring for their growing business both at Confinity and at X.com, the predecessor firms that ultimately merged to form PayPal. The book replays a conversation between Thiel and Levchin, where Thiel pushes Levchin to recruit from his network saying: ‘You just graduated from one of the better computer science programs in the country. You don’t know anyone?’ (65)

This prompt led to Levchin hiring two of his former UIUC classmates, Yu Pan and Simmons. This aligned with Thiel’s view that ‘trust among teams was hard to build, and that friends-turned-employees came preinstalled with trust’ (72). However, PayPal’s COO David Sacks was quoted as saying that this school network-based hiring wasn’t necessarily everyone’s ambition. Rather, he stated that because of the ultra-competitive environment in Silicon Valley around the millennium, ‘we had to recruit our friends because no one else would work for us’ (74).

Second, school networks offered access to investment capital. Thiel’s initial involvement with the predecessor to PayPal was through his investment. His fund, Thiel Capital, invested in Nosek and Banister’s start-up after they were introduced through Thiel’s roommate at Stanford. Future investors also came from their social network. Confinity, for example, raised money from ‘friends, family, and fools’ (as is typical). The friends and family included Thiel’s parents as well as Norman Book, Thiel’s classmate at Stanford and co-founder of the Stanford Review (70). Stanford professors, like Dan Boneh and Martin Hellman, vouched for Levchin when asked by prospective investors (82).

For Soni, the notion of the ‘PayPal mafia’ is essential to understanding Silicon Valley today. Lead venture capitalists, like Andreesen, and high-profile entrepreneurs, such as Musk, continue to feature in headlines. Andreesen’s blue-chip venture capital fund, Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), just came under fire for its $350 million investment in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new start-up Flow. For many, this epitomises the tendency of Silicon Valley venture capitalists to back the founders they know.

As the huge fundraise by Flow suggests, there can be a downside to start-ups relying on social capital to hire and raise money. For the PayPal setting, as Soni notes, ‘hiring friends risks a cloistered, exclusionary monoculture and made it exceptionally hard to let people go’ (72). Hiring those like you – called ‘homophily’ – has been widely documented for fostering singular cultures that do not accept or value outsiders, or even outside perspectives. Network-based growth can also accentuate exclusions based on gender, ethnicity, age and disability. Policies work to reverse this exclusion to foster more ‘inclusive innovation’ environments.

The Founders shows how social capital – not necessarily human capital – fuels start-up growth. It reveals why and how such insider networks work, and how they backfire. For entrepreneurship researchers, it offers phenomenally detailed and candid accounts of how certain campuses engender unicorn birth. With this insight, industry and policy efforts can better design alternatives to university lab-fuelled trust and monocultures to mitigate the exclusionary tendencies of tech bastions like Silicon Valley.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

The post Book Review: The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship. Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard (eds). Bristol University Press. 2022.

Over the past few years in academia, I have been invited to countless diversity, inclusion and decolonisation seminars. Panels, talks, fireside chats, film screenings, training, book clubs, paper presentations. When these invites pop up in my inbox, they spark a sense of hope in me that academia is at the precipice of change. It affirms that there are people within the academy who care about these issues and are willing to go above their job requirements to create meaningful transformation. At the same time, once I attend, I can feel discouraged. While coming from a genuine place and driven by intelligent and caring colleagues, these seminars often remain fluffy. They lack any real substantive actions for long-term change. This is why Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization is so needed, and why I personally craved a book like this. The title drew me in, but the actual practical tools provided throughout kept me reading; they kept me hopeful.

The collection is divided into four main parts, each focusing on a different aspect of transforming the ivory tower: changing universities themselves; diversifying curricula; diversifying research and scholarship; and overcoming intellectual colonialism. The format highlights how universities, if they are going to be transformed, need to be addressed at every intersecting layer of their complex and longstanding structure.

Each section is threaded together by a few underlying themes. First, academia is part of the wider phenomena of neoliberalism and postcolonialism. Second, universities are sites of knowledge (re)production. Lastly, if academics are ever going to truly decolonise the academy themselves, if this is even plausible, the operation will be a gruelling, grief-filled process of mass deconstruction.

Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash

To begin, at the heart of this book’s argument is how education is an American and European product, bought by student-consumers: ‘Eight of the top ten countries sending most international students to UK universities are former colonies’ (Lin Ma, 49). This shows how the Global North has a chokehold on knowledge production, even as consumers increasingly come from the Global South. In our neoliberal capitalist society, universities sell education as an elite product. Most academics at UK universities will be familiar with the idea of ‘cash cow’ students, whereby incomprehensibly high international student fees are seen as the bread and butter of university funding.

This elite educational product is even more limited by the oligopolistic grip of academic publishing. In fact, ‘by 2013, just five publishers were responsible for half of all journals, papers, and citations’ (Paige Mann, 187). As consumers of elite education become more global and diverse, the disconnect from the few who are producing, hoarding and legitimising knowledge only grows. It prompts the question of whether universities can ever be liberated from the neoliberal capitalist and postcolonial systems that keep them alive.

The book’s second theme focuses on the violence of knowledge (re)production: the lack of pluralistic knowledge structures, overreliance on the canon and the perpetuation of oppression. On the one hand, academia, especially in introductory courses in the Global North, must teach the traditional canon of a particular field. Yet, in doing so, academia is engaging in ‘epistemicide’ by declaring who the authorities in a field are. ‘Epistemicide’ was coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2005) and involves the destruction or delegitimising of non-dominant forms of knowledge production (Karen Bennett, 2007).

Thus, set curricula kill knowledge systems by positioning them as outside the normative. They paint them as falling beyond the neutral, trustworthy grounds of the academic literature. The works of those who are not deemed an authority, especially those who engage with ‘image, poetry, sound and symbol’ (Danny Braverman, 77), are often ‘recast as merely superstition, ‘‘magic’’, tradition, or pre-modern’ (Ali Meghji, Seetha Tan and Laura Wain, 39). While this epistemicide does not include acts like genocide or the dramatic burning of literature, it is nonetheless violent. This violence grows in the academy as ‘classrooms are a space of knowledge (re)production’ (Denise Buiten, Ellen Finlay and Rosemary Hancock, 141).

To counteract this, Euro-American academics must ‘value Southern thought regardless of its Northern applicability’ (Meghji, Tan and Wain, 44). We must redefine what the canon is, address the biased limitations of the academic literature and foster plural knowledge structures beyond the traditions of the scientific method through ‘communities of practice’ (Sara Ewing, 136).

If decolonising the university means completely renovating its neoliberal, capitalist and postcolonial foundations while redefining what knowledge is, it is clear why this book does not include an easy ten-step guide for academics. Simply put, there is no straightforward to-do list to follow.

If there was, perhaps one starting point would be clarifying what exactly is meant by diversifying and promoting inclusion in a decolonised academy. The book never defines these terms, but mentions that they may overlap and intertwine. Interestingly, academia as a whole lacks an agreed definition of inclusion, with some defining it as participation and contribution (Quinetta Roberson, 2006), and others as feelings of uniqueness and belongingness (Lynn Shore et al, 2011). At times, it feels as though the collaborators also have varying definitions in this book, posing the question of how can we collaboratively work towards that which we may be understanding differently? This lack of clarity is seen in such statements as ‘diversity and inclusion work needs to be diverse and inclusive’ (Samantha Brennan, Gwen Chapman, Belinda Leach and Alexandra Rodney, 92).

In reading through the collection, it nonetheless emerges that diversity and inclusion, however they are interpreted, are inevitable in striving for long-term, sustainable decolonisation. The book provides ample examples of how universities can lead in diversity and inclusion. For instance, they can recruit students and staff across diverse dimensions (race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, class, nationality, etc). They can ensure these students and staff are enrolled, supported and succeed at university. Curricula can be revised to be more inclusive too. However, even when universities are promoting diversity and inclusion, they are not achieving complete decolonisation of their colonial structures.

In this way, the plausibility of ever really decolonising the university itself transpires as a question. Some collaborators in the collection feel adamant that decolonisation is possible. Even so, I most align with the few who hint at their distrust of this call for decolonisation. I struggle, even after reading this book, with answering the question of how do we, as academics, devote 40+ hours a week simultaneously to our university’s growth and its deconstruction? We are, hypothetically, aiming to destroy that in which we have found our lifelong passions and careers. There is a glaring dissonance, not to mention a big ask, there.

In decolonising the academy, smaller actions like curricula expansions are feasible. Long-term structural changes to the academy itself require massive collaborative reform. We must keep in mind that not all academics will want to destroy their institution. With that in mind, can academics (the very people who have kept the academy alive and well) even be the ones to drive this reform? This paradox appears when we coerce students into marking systems that call for assimilation into the academy. It also appears when we propose diversity and inclusion policies without changing the very exclusive and bureaucratic foundations on which all universities are built. Although this book advertises practical tools for addressing decolonisation of the academy, perhaps the complete decolonisation of universities by academics is, unfortunately, implausible.

If my pessimistic viewpoint is true, then perhaps academics cannot be the ones to reform universities for this very reason; we are too close to the institution itself to make structural changes that would lead to its destruction. After all, as the editors argue, drawing on the work of Andrew Seal (2018) and David Harvey (2015), ‘this neoliberal university […] favours diversity initiatives to the extent that they train graduates to work with whatever kind of people best serve the neoliberal system’ (252). Real change is going to mean real loss, and grief, for academics. Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization successfully shows how we can improve universities. Its limitation, though, is that academics may not be the ones to come together to successfully decolonise and rebuild the institutions to which we belong.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

The post Book Review: Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship edited by Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard first appeared on LSE Review of Books.