Crises in Academia Today

This business of ‘publish or perish’ has been a catastrophe. People write things which should never have been written and which should never be printed. Nobody’s interested. But for them to keep their jobs and get the proper promotion, they’ve got to do it. It demeans the whole of intellectual life.

— Hannah Arendt

The epigraph above comes from a panel discussion titled “Values in Contemporary Society” in Thinking Without a Banister. The discussion took place on July 13, 1972 between Hannah Arendt, Paul Freund, Irving Kristol, and Hans Morgenthau; it was organized by Kenneth W. Thompson, the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

At the end of the conversation, Arendt comes to reflect upon the current state of higher education. Thinking about problems of academic integrity in teaching and writing, she argues that the principle of “publish or perish” has had devastating consequences for pedagogy and academic work. She says:

The one who really loses is the person who has a passionate interest in matters of the mind, who is an excellent reader, who can establish contact with his students and make them understand that his subject is important, but who will not write. Or, if he is forced to write, will not write well. And, by doing something which he is forced to do because of ‘publish or perish,’ he will become a lesser…