By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – Last week, I found myself at a conference on universities at New York University. Well-informed professors spoke eloquently about the casualization of academic work and the rising threats to academic freedom, the destructive efforts of politicians and soi-disant reformers to transform the public schools and the difficulty of defending the humanities. I felt myself slipping into my familiar and satisfying state of despair at the condition of my profession.

But two of the speakers, neither of them a conventional American academic, made me see the error of my ways. Simon Head described the odd paralysis that has afflicted the British universities. There, complaint — and stronger responses — would be appropriate. The government is transforming academics’ working conditions in blood-freezingly stupid ways, and for the most part the universities are going along with it all in a state of astonishing docility. Endless measurement exercises now determine universities’ funding, and most academics have made little effort to protest, much less resist, the use of meaningless categories like “impact.” This category is now used to evaluate both the quality of journals and the effects of research on the public sphere. When the journal I help to edit was evaluated, we were graded both for selectivity and for circulation, though no one ever asked for data on either point.

Nicholas Lemann, the distinguished dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, pointed out that in the realm he left to join the academy — the world of metropolitan news media — many newsrooms have lost half their staffs in the last few years. When universities reached that point, he would admit that they faced a real crisis.

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