Academic Inequality?

I want to point you to an article in Salon about how academic recruitment is horribly skewed. It confirms what most of you know: academic America suffers from the same stultifying class system as the nation at large.

The academic economics profession, of course, is well known for the iron grip a few universities have around its throat. The authors of the Salon article wonder out loud why ‘lesser’ universities even bother offering PhD degrees. After all if few to none of your newly minted PhD’s can progress up the food chain, no matter how good, smart, or wonderful they are, then why not focus your resources elsewhere?

And what of society at large?

Are we getting the benefit of our best and brightest?

What worries me the most with this state of affairs is that, for all the protestations otherwise, academic America seems to be content to mirror the trends within society as a whole rather than to act as some sort of inspiration for a novel or better future.

This confirms another concern I have: academia has been very effectively absorbed into the ruling elite. Its increasingly business oriented management style, its growing network of inter-relationships with — and dependency upon — private enterprise, and now its apparent acceptance of the loss of upward mobility of its own high end product, makes it very difficult to distinguish the academy from the slew of other generators of ideas that provide the intellectual justification for our plutocracy.

Where will the disruption of our elite come from if our universities have been co-opted by that elite?