On Academic Celebrity Profiles (in the New Yorker)

The future of humanistic scholarship seems ever-more bleak, but a broad reading public—and those who write for it—remain, for some reason, interested in stories about scholars in our imperiled academic institutions. This is not necessarily good news for humanists. Most of us work in obscurity, worsening precarity, amid the din of shrill political polemics, while a few figures at prestigious institutions are granted, in addition to their other privileges, intervals of the celebrity treatment. An already, and increasingly, unequal academic system designed to produce small numbers of ‘stars’ rather than sustainable lives for ordinary PhD-holders finds it match in a media system that promotes singular figures endowed with auras of interestingness.