Cold War Ain’t Over Yet (Political Correctness and the Academic Caste)

Abstract

Cold War left hidden injuries in sense-making strategies of academic bureaucracies. Universities were left after three waves of expansion with an impossible mission. They had to embed the researchers-teachers-experts and to house the numerically increasing cohorts of future citizens and employees socialized into knowledge intensive societies. Are they succeeding? Brexit demonstrates that they do not. Citizens, if given a chance to bypass the established elites, reject the authority of the experts, and undertake the independent navigation of the information space, populist prejudice of the elites notwithstanding. Access to knowledge matters more than monopoly of patented intellectual property. Knowledge workers of the world unite? Hardly. Communism collapsed, neoliberalism failed. History of access to knowledge is no guarantee that a future will resemble it.