Read on Twitter
So it’s a new year & I thought I would do a thread on how to be an ethical academic. I’ll add more points as I think of them
1. Stop relentlessly promoting yourself on social media (this is meant for those who have tenure, btw - I recognize that junior scholars don’t have a choice in the intensely competitive neoliberal world of contemporary academia)
2. Resist celebrity culture within academia in general - e.g., publicly fawning over big-name academics on social media. It’s icky. Or, you know, wearing a t-shirt with their names on it to a professional conference - tres, tres icky but apparently perfectly acceptable these days
3. Question/evaluate the use of the adjective ‘radical’ when used to describe an academic - yourself or anyone else. Especially if you/they happen to have tenured jobs at an elite university & have never said/done anything to rock any boat.
4. Practice good citational politics - this often means doing some extra work to make sure that your citations aren’t just reflexively reproducing the skewed politics of celebrity & ‘expertise’ in academia...
...Make sure you give due credit to scholars from under-represented social groups - too often academics use citations (consciously or unconsciously) as a way to suck up to the powerful. I’ve had to push back against this when reviewing papers & book manuscripts.
5. Pass the mic - especially when you’re not the expert on a subject & you know someone who actually is. Usually the reason those people are being passed over for you is because they have less structural power than you - are untenured and/or from an under-represented group.
In fact, if you have access to institutional monies & other forms of social/cultural capital within academia, expend it on creating opportunities for those who need it rather than on building/feeding patronage networks.
Resist the trap of ‘productivity’ yourself & don’t judge fellow academics on this basis. Among other things, those who work in research 1 institutions have far more resources at their disposal to write, research & publish than those in underfunded public universities.
