UCRITICAL: Academia for the Academics, Knowledge for All

By Lisa Deijl
UCR Class of 2014

I always thought that the purpose of science was to enlighten the whole of humanity. That we do research in order to share the results with as many people as possible, so that everyone can profit from this new knowledge and the society can make progress. However, the social sciences seem to have dropped this goal altogether. While fighting my way through paragraphs full of never-ending sentences constructed of difficult words, I just can’t escape the feeling that academics seem to write for academics only. More than a tool for spreading great ideas, academic writing seems to be a verbal tour de force for academics to show their colleagues: “Look, from my use of language you can see that I am very eloquent, can I join your club now?”

Academics tend to lock themselves up in their ivory tower to discuss the problems of society amongst themselves. For example, gender, race or class inequality are topics of much discussion and debate within the social sciences, but these discussions are never conducted in the “language of the street”, although they are of key importance to society. Sometimes, even the students who are supposed to learn from these theories have a hard time grasping them. For example, in my Advanced Cultural Studies class, my fellow-students and I were often unclear on what was exactly meant with the articles that we read. Only through intensive discussion were we able to understand the message.

It is a shame that by using inaccessible language, the academia place themselves so far outside of the daily reality of “the normal folk”. The average person does not feel invited to read social science articles, while the theories and ideas that they want to convey could be of great use to all people. Unfortunately, the average person never gets in touch with these ideas because of the enormous language barrier. I experience this often when I talk about my studies with my family or with friends that do not go to university. They think the social sciences are either vague, or “for smart people” (e.g. they deem themselves not intelligent enough to understand). But once I start breaking down the content of the books that I read and the courses that I take, they see that it is actually also about their lives, and they become interested. Because I am privileged to go to university, and to have taken courses in anthropology, sociology and urban geography, I have learnt to be open-minded, nuanced and trained in critical thinking. I see however, that a university teaches its students to perpetuate academic elitism by forcing them to “write in academic language”, thereby preventing that good ideas are spread outside of their particular scholarly discipline. And I can’t help but wonder, how are these skills in critical thinking useful for academics only?

I wish that the great ideas I’ve come across in academic texts would be available to everybody. When people are brought in contact with these ideas, they can start to think about them and thus things start to change. Academic elitism impoverishes the public debate, instead of enriching it, because it keeps information locked inside a certain circle. I do not see the point of writing a critical text about the consumer society, race and gender discourses if the people whose behavior is criticized cannot understand a word.

How can society learn, if the ones who are supposed to teach keep their ideas to themselves? I think that if the likes of Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler or Gayatri Spivak had written in understandable language, they would actually have had a chance to make the change they want to see in the world.

To turn my frustration with this problem into something more constructive, my classmates of Contemporary Latin American Social Theory and Debate and I have started a new platform called UCRITICAL. We will have a website up soon, on which we will publish our thoughts on interesting theories and concepts in an accessible way. We invite everyone to send in his or her own ideas. It will be a horizontal space, in which there is room for everyone. Next to the website we aim to have bi-weekly meetings during which we hope to have discussions with students from all disciplines.

We believe that true learning comes forth from conversation and the clash of opinions. Good ideas should be spread beyond the boundaries of their specific discipline and should therefore be made accessible to anyone who is interested in them. Only then can they have any consequence.

Lisa Deijl, class of 2014, is an Anthropology and Human Geography major from Rotterdam, The Netherlands.