Academic careerism

Academic careerism is the tendency of academics (professors specifically and intellectuals generally) to pursue their own enrichment and self-advancement at the expense of honest inquiry, unbiased research and dissemination of truth to their students and society. Such careerism has been criticized by thinkers from Socrates in Ancient Athens to Russell Jacoby in the present.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates draws a comparison between the proper and honorable way to bestow beauty and the proper and honorable way to bestow wisdom. Those who offer beauty for sale on the market are called prostitutes, and are held in disrepute by the Athenians. Those who offer wisdom for sale, on the other hand, are highly respected. Socrates believes this is an error. The Sophists should be seen for what they are, prostitutors of wisdom.

In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates draws an analogy between peddlers of unhealthy food and peddlers of false and deceptive wisdom. Food peddlers advertise their wares as healthy without offering solid evidence to back up their claims, leading those who trust them to succumb to an unhealthy diet. Peddlers of knowledge try to persuade impressionable young minds that what they teach is salutary and true, again without offering solid arguments to back up their claims. They mislead young minds on paths not conducive to intellectual flourishing.

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer contrasts the genuine philosopher, who earnestly pursues truth and offers its fruits to all who will listen, to the "businessmen of the chair", the academics of his day who have debased the pursuit of knowledge into a means of livelihood no more dignified than the practice of business or law. The motto of the academic opportunists is "primum vivere, deinde philosophari"—first live, afterwards philosophize. The bourgeois sentiment that someone who earns his living by a profession must know something about it makes those who hold the academic chairs immune from criticism. They make their living from philosophy, the public reasons, so they must know philosophy. The philosophy taught in the universities, Schopenhauer claims, is really no more than a superficial rationalization for the institutionalized religion, the intentions of the government, and the prevailing views of the times.

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