HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Avital Ronell and the End of the Academic Star.

Academe is not what it used to be. Once upon a time, the university was an efficient machine for converting a certain kind of cultural capital into financial capital. The most famous phenomenologist or the most famous Marxist theorist in the world might not be recognized in the wider public sphere, but the largess of the American university system could ensure that that scholar enjoyed a comfortable, even somewhat glamorous lifestyle. . . .

Shumway identified the rise of academic superstars with a larger shift in academic values: from “soundness,” represented by the generation of literary scholars who were most prominent before the 1970s, to “visibility,” represented by many of the same celebrity scholars who signed the letter in defense of Ronell (Butler, Žižek, Spivak). . . .

No new theoretical school has replaced High Theory, and the machinery of the academic star system has been forced to confront the uncomfortable reality of the shrinking job market. Long gone are the days when Ronell could deliver on her promises — and her threats — to make or destroy the career of a young scholar.

Plus: “What the signatories of the letter in Ronell’s defense most fear, I suspect, is that the university has less and less place for people like them.”

Their ideas are, for the most part, puerile and uninteresting, when they are intelligible at all. Their teaching is usually self-indulgent and irrelevant. They are the scholarly equivalent of the $180 wagyu steak sandwich, served to Wall Streeters when an economic bubble is at its height. Those excesses go away when the market falls, and the higher education market is in steep decline. And the sandwich is actually nourishing.

If only someone had warned them.

And what the academic world has in common with Harvey Weinstein’s world is a lack of objective standards, a huge reliance on overlapping back-scratching networks, and the consequent ability of powerful people to wreck careers. Or, for the right consideration, to advance them. It is probably not a coincidence that all this dirt — which has been around for a while — is coming out, now that the networks are dying.