Academia, I’ve given you all and now I’m noting:
You’ve taken my youth
And given me back pain.
Academia, we need to talk.
I am trying to love you.
I talk about you in therapy.
I linger at your gates,
armed with citations, theories,
theories about theories.
I’ve read Foucault, Bourdieu,
even Butler,
trying to decode your obsession with power,
and here I am.
Rationalizing.
You tell me to produce knowledge,
but what is knowledge to you?
A currency, a commodity?
I study your structures like Weber’s bureaucracies,
impersonal, efficient,
measured by impact factors and H-index scores.
You move through metrics—
not people.
You demand the currency of ideas,
but there’s no room here for nuance,
for the slow work of thought.
I want to ask if you remember Walter Benjamin,
how he warned against progress at the expense of contemplation,
but you’re in too much of a hurry to listen.
You promise something grand,
some pursuit of truth,
but truth seems lost somewhere
between the double-blind reviews
and the impact assessments.
Is it the postmodern condition:
knowledge isn’t about truth anymore,
it’s about legitimation?
Sometimes I imagine you as Kafka’s Trial,
an endless court where the charges are never clear,
where I am condemned not by action,
but by being.
You are both judge and jury,
with rules that change mid-argument,
criteria elusive,
like shadows dancing on Plato’s cave walls.
Academia, do you feel anything?
Do you understand the weight of a rejection,
not as an abstraction
but as a reminder of my precarity?
I watch others drift away from you—
My friends have left you behind.
They no longer believe in your promises
but I am still here.
I still believe—
like the humanists you no longer celebrate—
that there is something in you worth saving.
I want to ask you what happened to Bildung,
the idea of education for self-cultivation,
rather than the endless competition for funding and citations.
Is this the way it’s always been,
or have we lost something?
Or worse, am I the one who’s lost,
unable to see that you’ve moved on,
while I cling to ideals long since abandoned?
You keep me at arm’s length,
insisting on your objectivity,
refusing to acknowledge the affective labor
that sustains you.
I chase you, Academia,
because I crave understanding,
but I wonder if you even know
how to be understood.
You claim to be the vanguard of critical thought,
but do you ever turn that critical eye upon yourself,
upon the way you perpetuate the very hierarchies
you claim to dismantle?
I see glimpses of hope—
collaborative projects, interdisciplinary journals,
spaces where the rigid boundaries you hold so dear
begin to blur.
Yet even in these moments,
there’s a reminder:
I must justify myself,
in terms of profit.
We live in the precariousness you’ve built—
contingent contracts, adjunct roles,
positions as fragile as the funding cycles
that dictate whether our research gets off the ground
or dies quietly, unpublished, unread.
You’ve become a marketplace.
Yes, you heard me.
I am tired, Academia,
but I keep coming back,
because somewhere, buried under layers of protocol,
I believe there’s still something worth loving
in the mess we’ve made of each other.
I submit again.
I submit because I must,
not because I believe in who you’ve become.
And I wonder,
as I hit send on a manuscript,
whether I am complicit.
Is that your genius, Academia?
That even your critics
are caught in your web?
I want to ask if you ever think about the future.
Do you imagine yourself changing?
Do you feel hope?
Do you remember my eyes when we first met?
I am trying, Academia.
Are you?
Inspired by the poem America by Allen Ginsberg
VALERIA CERNEI