The Hand that Feeds...

Lately it seems like it has become fashionable to take issue with the once darling of the progressive academic world, Academia.edu; the irony that this has mostly happened in articles and pieces themselves published on Academia.edu seems to have escaped most. I have briefly commented on a couple already in the past, and more have weighted in on the academic repository's perceived connivance with the neo-liberal, capital guided agenda of the official university world - see, for example, Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "Academia, not Edu".

While the site certainly needs improvements, the benefits it had and has for a certain subset of the academic world cannot be overstated: being an independent at the beginning of his career, with little to no support network and (seemingly always too) few publications under his belt, Academia.edu has been a great platform to know and get to know like-minded scholars - even if only through their work.

It is therefore a pleasure when an academic from the 'old guard', so to speak, recognises that even a partial and imperfect context can still bring benefits for those who need them the most. Eileen Joy's  "Open Letter to Rosemary Feal, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the Modern Language Association" goes a long way in restoring my faith on some established scholars not being completely out of touch with reality, when she states that 'nothing has been more critical than Academia.edu to my ability to connect my work with the work of others across the globe, and to forming new discourse communities and scholarly collectives."

The issue,I would say, is that many etablished scholars can afford to shoot down Academia.edu exactly because they are established: they either entered the academic world when tenures weren't still a pipe dream; the already have well-developed networks of support who could carry them over should they ever fall off official academia's graces; they, simply, can afford to criticise a resource they do not direly need (or no longer do). Usually, this is also accompained by little or no attempt to offer a viable alternative, as Joy again underlines in the same open letter.

While healthy and balanced criticism is always welcome and needed, the holier than thou, top-down view that many notable critics have adopted lately does nothing to improve, or offer alternatives to what 'those below' have to make do with on a daily basis. Rather, it shows that a large subset of academia is still in the habit of throwing the baby with the bathwater without bothering to check if someone is actually forced to drink off that water on a daily basis.