Commentary
Although academia is sometimes dubbed “the ivory tower,” it is anything but a quaint exception to or ancillary adjunct of the real world. Quite otherwise, academia is an ideological state apparatus. In fact, I maintain that it is the dominant ideological state apparatus. Or, to borrow a more recent formulation, academia is best understood as “the cathedral,” as the contemporary equivalent of the medieval papacy in our “progressive,” postmodern times.
The received notion of academia’s irrelevance is a guise that has allowed the institution to hide its ideological role in plain sight. Yet the cathedral does generate dominant ideologies, although time is required for its products to be disseminated across the broader social body after they have been digested and excreted by the media, the interchange between the cathedral and the unwashed. However, the time lapse has decreased in the digital age, when academics can speak directly to the public on social media, and when their publications are accessible to the layperson in digital formats—although in jargon-laden and often incoherent prose….