academia
To be a hero and traitor: A reflection on truth-telling and fear
Preamble on fear
When we speak we are afraid, our words will not be heard nor welcomed,
but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak,
remembering we were never meant to survive. (Lorde, 1978: 31-32)
Publish and perish
A few years ago, I published a paper on the ‘secrets of excellence’ in the business school (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). It was written as an ironic guide to publishing in top-ranked management journals. Some of the tricks of the trade we identified – ‘productivity through people’, ‘close to the customer’, ‘bias for action’ – overlap with Peters and Waterman’s 1980s business-yuppie classic In search of excellence.
Academe under siege and the atrophy of today’s universities
[T]he marketization of knowledge is one of the world’s greatest threats to democracy. [33].