Why Academia Matters (in progress)

Across the world, academia is under attack. Critics call it indoctrinated and wasteful. Defenders counter in the language of innovation, skills, and economic return. Both sides accept the same premise — that academia is defined by the institutions that house it, and should be judged by what they produce.

This book rejects that premise. Academia is not an institution but a practice, one that has always exceeded the institutions built to house it. Its history runs from ancient centres of learning to dissident intellectual circles, from underground seminars to the work of independent scholars and activist researchers operating outside, and sometimes despite, the academy. What unites these experiments is a set of commitments that thinking societies cannot do without — and that no university, however prestigious, has a monopoly on.

Drawing on a decade of working across academic worlds on four continents, on global histories of higher learning, and on a lineage of thinkers who have wrestled with the moral purpose of intellectual life, Why Academia Matters offers a defence of academia as a moral enterprise. The argument is simple: academia is not a finished achievement to be defended but an unfinished experiment to be renewed — one as old, and as fragile, as civilisation itself.