Sam Kriss is a dreadful person, but unfortunately he has this insight:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-carrion-eaters
The actual problem is much vaster. Right now, the entire British university sector is kept afloat by roughly three quarters of a million international students. They’re here because Tsinghua is hard to get into and Cambridge isn’t, and we’re happy to have them. We’ll let them exist in an unofficial parallel system, where they get to take lectures in a language they barely understand and cheat on an industrial scale, because the last thing we want is to scare away the money. For the moment it works, bosses in Shenzhen are still impressed by an international degree. It won’t last forever. You can only debase the coinage so long before people start noticing; eventually the halls that nurtured Newton and Wittgenstein will rank alongside the Changchun Institute of Canned Food Technologies. But the domestic students are the same. Have you been in a university lecture theatre lately? Go: it’s fine, everyone’ll just assume you’re a particularly unfortunate-looking mature student. Sit at the back. At the far end of the room there’s a little person trying to talk about textuality, performance, and production; meanwhile the space in between is a glowing, rippling sea of laptop screens. Every single one of these students is scrolling through pictures of jumpsuits on Shein. When they need to submit an essay they get ChatGPT to print one out for them. And frankly, the academics aren’t any different themselves. Their main function is research: investigating the world, finding interesting new facts or startling new interpretations, and writing them down so other people can be interested and surprised by them too. And a lot of research does take place. A constant stream of high-quality world-leading papers, all duly rubber-stamped under the Research Excellence Framework, all of it totally meaningless dreck. In Arday’s field of education studies, something like fifty thousand papers are published every year. You could sit down every day from nine in the morning to nine at night and do nothing but read high-quality research in education studies, and it would take you eight years to get through a single year’s output. But these texts don’t exist to be read. They exist to drive research grants, so the department can produce even more texts for no one to read, more and more, filling every crevice with useless words.
It is genuinely deranged, in this situation, to start ginning up a moral panic over academic standards. We’re in November 1918 and you’re trying to have a Prussian infantryman whipped for not shining his boots. It’s over; the academy is a literate institution marooned in a postliterate world, governed and staffed by people who no longer have anything to do with whatever way of being these places were once built to protect. They’re all form-fillers, generating excellence in predictable increments. They don’t know how to read. Which is how an institution like Cambridge could hire a man like Jason Arday, who left a grammatical error in the title of his dissertation. Not because he was black, and not because of his purported disability, but because there was probably no one on the hiring committee who had actually bothered to read his work. Just check his citation numbers. Why not have a professor who, by his own account, takes an hour to read a single page of text? In a fully literate institution that would be disqualifying. Not everyone has to be an academic; it has nothing to do with your worth as a human being, but maybe, in light of your disability, this particular line of work isn’t for you. In the postliterate university it’s no impediment at all. Welcome; you’ll fit right in.