Spash, Clive L. “A Worthwhile Academic Life. Editorial.” Environmental Values 17, no. 2 (2008): 121–24. doi:10.3197/096327108X303800.
The good academic life is a hard one to follow and has become no easier in the past 50 years. Each academic is now to be treated as if a small business enterprise. Expectations are that accounts will be kept of all activities which are to be listed and weighed-up for net worth and value added. Inputs will be judged as wasted if outputs are insufficient or not of the “right sort,” e.g., articles in appropriate journals. Of course what is right becomes what is measurable, e.g., citations. Measures become goals and regulatory devices; so soon there is no academic freedom at all, just inputs, outputs and targets. (…) In such a world Aristotle’s ideal of achieving wisdom, virtue and happiness through contemplation is increasingly difficult to sustain. Academics who aspire to such goals and see themselves as contributing amongst friends to a wider community for the general good are becoming an endangered species. So people like Alan Holland, who managed to maintain some semblance of the academic ideal, and instil that in others, are to be valued.
— Text from The White Horse Press website
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