"WHich is to say what? That some who have had some deeper knowledge of the university are critical lof it, while those who have been left out still idealize it?
I think several people on the list have written that they have had experience of working within and without academia and have found academia to be more stifling, less intellectually alive, and less collegial."
As someone who has definitely worked "within and without" I have found academia to be far less stifling, more intellectually alive, and more collegial. I'll take it over working in a shop, a bank, cleaning houses, marketing, or anything else I've done any time of the day anywhere. I even say this in a situation where mounting union action and public protest over my employer's intention to cut jobs seems to me not only justified but crucial. The conditions under which I work in general (at an industrial level) are spectacularly good compared to anything else I can imagine. I'm not saying I don't know lines of work where I'd get paid more but precisely because it is all of those things above I couldn't care about that at all.
Lest I be seen to say exactly the same thing as Carrol - after so many years that would just seem weird - I will add that criticism of universities doesn't only come from within in my experience. Not at all. I think some people with higher degree training are more frustrated and critical than those who have less clear targets but there is comparatively little idealization of universities outside them in my experience. That is, in comparison to the people who happily, and with very varying kinds and degrees of evidence or information, condemn intellectualism and what they see as the elitism and irrelevance of higher education.
I don't agree, even though I've lately worked only in universities that could be described as "posh as fuck" to use the previous subject heading. But I have more time for that position than for those who work in universities and are conversely certain that they are overworked and exploited by terrible conditions. There are things I would improve around me, absolutely, but it's all relative and those improvements are not much about the capitulation of education to capitalism per se--after all our version of education is so closely tied to it at every level, not just universities... but very ambivalently so (even Althusser and Bourdieu could concede that). OMG I'm agreeing with Carrol some more! Instead I resent the industry/institution failing to aspire to any but the nastiest and least valuable versions of elitism--that isn't even about quantification as course quality is just as easy (ie. hard) to quantify as research quality and I don't really care about workload management as long as it's both actually equitable and actually counts all the things we value equally.
I always want to recommend my colleagues who think they are so hard done by at work try working in a shop, a bank, cleaning houses, marketing, etc and then get back to me. I generally don't, and perhaps it's impolitic of me to say it here as well. Let's hope Joanna's at least partly right about relative privacy.
Catherine