I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with, well, pretty much everything, including what I feel is academia’s abdication of what should be its role in addressing our many planetary predicaments. A seemingly blind adherence to the Standard Technological Narrative has culminated in this disappointing display by my home institution.

I just got around to listening to this recent episode of the Overshoot podcast, and this comment from the guest articulates well my feelings:

Samuel Miller McDonald (00:34:21):

I think the academic degrowth community is coming out of this tradition in the social sciences that is very humanist, very anthropocentric. I think academia has kind of always been this ambivalent institution that is the only institution or one of the only ones that’s earnestly trying to understand the world, understand phenomena and get to closer models and frameworks of truth, but has also historically been a servant of the state, of empires and imperial expansion and more recently has been totally captured by neoliberal values and ideology and growthists. I mean that’s every major university that I’m aware of is run by a management team that is primarily interested in growing the endowment, in making institutional investments that will deliver returns so they can increase their land holdings and invest in buying up more and more of the city that they are based in, and less concerned with that mission of expanding knowledge and building upon this kind of humanistic tradition.

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