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I keep thinking about the rot, and I keep coming back to the idea that the reason that academies were so good at descriptive inquiry is simply that up until academia was ideologically captured in the 1960s and 1970s the idea of being an activist while being an academic was frowned upon. In essence, you have to choose between having academies full of academics who live as cloistered communities with less interaction with the political class and activism, or activist academies full of ideologically motivated people using their skills to justify the agendas they want.
If you want my two cents about a fix, just make political activism forbidden by the institution. You protest, you teach kids an ideology and tell them to protest? You’re out.
Forbidden eh? Who will enforce it? Quid custodied ipsos custodes?
That horse has left the barn anyways, now that we have entire disciplines that are premised on teaching ideology. No such change is possible without a coup.
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