Air Travel, Vastly More Dangerous And Inconvenient Than Before, Contributes To Destroying Academia-Will Academics Re-Think Their Insertion In The World?
Taking the world as a whole, people "who are living in a country other than where they were born," commonly referred to as "the foreign born," constitute approximately 3.3% of humanity. Their distribution, however, is extremely uneven. E.g., forty million people, or, 13.6% of the total population of the United States was born elsewhere. Smaller rich countries have even higher proportions. Some of them are so reliant on labor they don't (can't / won't) produce that they don't even count most of them (the least educated ones, who do almost all the physical labor for them) for census purposes, so as not to confuse political decision makers concerning the possibility of a politics based on social rights. But that's another (long) story.
Rutgers--the university where I work in the US--is "home to more than 9,000 international students and scholars from about 125 countries around the world," and that count does not even include people who have already become citizens of the US. A vast majority of people like that, irrespective of whether they had become citizens of the US or not, still maintain meaningful connections with the rest of the world. I.e., the number of the foreign-born-hence-globally-connected-in-their-private-and-professional-lives at Rutgers is likely to be well above ten thousand.
This is very much the norm in academia, the high tech industries and in health care in the US. Clearly, people in situations like this have inhabited a global environment. They are very likely to practice what scholars of migration call "transnationalism." Proposed a generation or so ago by scholars of migration, prominent among them Alejandro Portes--my erstwhile dissertation advisor and mentor--and his students, migrant transnationalism is defined, in a widely used piece by Steven Vertovec, as "border-crossing social networks," informal social ties among people some of whom lead a life away from their country of birth. Such networks produce and make possible strategies of life conduct, ways of life and patterns of both small- and large-scale social change that, by definition, cross state borders. As a result, this social phenomenon cannot be apprehended by focusing on single "nations," states or societies viewed, as it is conventionally done in the mainstream of the social sciences, as isolated "containers." Transnationalism is a key element in social life, life that spans on the globe. Ability to go back and forth constitutes an important component of that existence. As the experience of political refugees suggests, return is not quite indispensable for the maintenance of such networks--the telephone and the internet does miracles in that regard--but, anyone involved in this kind of life will testify that being cut off makes maintenance of ties much more difficult and, over the long "haul," networks can "dry up", maintenance of ties may turn out not to be possible. Seasonal / annual commute thus quite crucial for migrant transnationalism.
Transnational commuters have just been hit by another aspect of the COVID2019 pandemic: air travel has become more of a health hazard (although, clearly, flights have never been free from disease, as my experience of catching strep throat in an overnight flight, almost exactly a year ago, from Newark to Munich, on Lufthansa, having been bumped up to business class, from a fellow business class traveler who coughed throughout the flight, an ailment that took me two extra weeks to recover from, illustrates). Air travel is also becoming more arduous in other ways. The average waiting time at immigration / customs / health check at US international airports is reported as taking an average of four hours, in an enclosed, never cleaned and sordidly un-ventilated environment. In times of a pandemic. Plus of course the indiscriminate screaming and the irrational orgy of negative energy coming from the organs of the state and employees of its various subcontractors who mistake vigilance in the protection of the country with un-called-for rudeness and disdain to the travelers.
This is bad news, in the immediate sense, for pretty much everyone. Especially for those who, like me, have been shuttling between continents, in flights that take six to ten hours, sometimes overnight. The transformation of cross-continental airliners into flying Petri-dishes and the airports becoming even more obviously dystopian landscapes displaying government autism and incompetence will likely, ultimately,
- remove, especially from academia, from the high-tech fields and from health care, a sizable proportion of people who have. meaningful commitments "elsewhere," somewhere relatively far away, simply because they can't / won't take the hassle and the health hazards any more,
- decrease the intensity of cross-continental exchange, and the overall perceived unity of the sciences, especially the social sciences (simply because, my perception, the hard sciences require less physical presence to promote their paradigms, which tend to be more unitary anyway, in other words, less rides on in-person debates, etc.) across geographical divides,
- make scholarly conversations even more matter-of-factly narrow-focused, nationalist and self-absorbed,
- "free up" slots occupied by non-locals for locals who had previously been out-competed by the "outsiders", impacting quality in as-yet unpredictable ways, especially since, given the neoliberal-corporate onslaught on academia is in full swing, universities are less likely to replace lost faculty with comparably tenure-track / tenured faculty, pushing the overall levels of protection for academic labor even lower than where they are now, hence pushing faculty and researchers who have options farther away from this institutional realm,
- in the extreme, this can cause the hollowing out of entire research fields (those that rely on non-native-born workforce, e.g., the research areas that require special skills, i.e., foreign languages, familiarity with foreign cultures, histories, other skills that can only be acquired in specific locations, etc.),
- this is likely to decrease the current comparative advantages of north American and west European academia--fields that have, until recently, used their supreme financial means and the relative liberalism of their institutions to attract talent from the entire world,
- as a result, the humanities will remain even more west-centric and the social sciences will become even more western-Europe-centric (if at all that is even possible) world-wide, and especially in north America and Europe (except of course in eastern Europe where the mantra of west-centrism, the Euro-hallelujah and the predominance of national self-pity / self-aggrandizement / shortsightedness have already been maxed out, so there is relatively little room for change; the rest of the world will become similar to eastern Europe, for sure),
- new generations of students will grow up even more short-sighted / blind to the world and even less able to think comparatively, globally, historically and critically--at least in those parts of the world where basic knowledge about, hell, just acknowledgment of the existence of, the rest of the world is not integrated into the general curriculum of primary and secondary education in any depth.
And that is happening due to a crisis precipitated, on the most immediate level, by a phenomenon that is global by definition (a pandemic) and, an outbreak brought about, and amplified, on a less immediately obvious, nevertheless equally crucial level, by an equally global phenomenon, late capitalism (see here, here, here or here).
I find this moment, the moment of the collapse of one of the global privileges of the monopolists of globally valorized cultural capital, to be remarkably revealing, and as I am writing this, I am hoping that it is possible to use this moment for some serious self-reflection on what we, academics, and especially globally mobile academics, are actually doing. Awareness of the environmental damage that air traffic does did nothing of the sort, not that I can recall. Maybe the imminent physical danger will make us think a little self-critically? I don't know.
Rutgers--the university where I work in the US--is "home to more than 9,000 international students and scholars from about 125 countries around the world," and that count does not even include people who have already become citizens of the US. A vast majority of people like that, irrespective of whether they had become citizens of the US or not, still maintain meaningful connections with the rest of the world. I.e., the number of the foreign-born-hence-globally-connected-in-their-private-and-professional-lives at Rutgers is likely to be well above ten thousand.
This is very much the norm in academia, the high tech industries and in health care in the US. Clearly, people in situations like this have inhabited a global environment. They are very likely to practice what scholars of migration call "transnationalism." Proposed a generation or so ago by scholars of migration, prominent among them Alejandro Portes--my erstwhile dissertation advisor and mentor--and his students, migrant transnationalism is defined, in a widely used piece by Steven Vertovec, as "border-crossing social networks," informal social ties among people some of whom lead a life away from their country of birth. Such networks produce and make possible strategies of life conduct, ways of life and patterns of both small- and large-scale social change that, by definition, cross state borders. As a result, this social phenomenon cannot be apprehended by focusing on single "nations," states or societies viewed, as it is conventionally done in the mainstream of the social sciences, as isolated "containers." Transnationalism is a key element in social life, life that spans on the globe. Ability to go back and forth constitutes an important component of that existence. As the experience of political refugees suggests, return is not quite indispensable for the maintenance of such networks--the telephone and the internet does miracles in that regard--but, anyone involved in this kind of life will testify that being cut off makes maintenance of ties much more difficult and, over the long "haul," networks can "dry up", maintenance of ties may turn out not to be possible. Seasonal / annual commute thus quite crucial for migrant transnationalism.
Transnational commuters have just been hit by another aspect of the COVID2019 pandemic: air travel has become more of a health hazard (although, clearly, flights have never been free from disease, as my experience of catching strep throat in an overnight flight, almost exactly a year ago, from Newark to Munich, on Lufthansa, having been bumped up to business class, from a fellow business class traveler who coughed throughout the flight, an ailment that took me two extra weeks to recover from, illustrates). Air travel is also becoming more arduous in other ways. The average waiting time at immigration / customs / health check at US international airports is reported as taking an average of four hours, in an enclosed, never cleaned and sordidly un-ventilated environment. In times of a pandemic. Plus of course the indiscriminate screaming and the irrational orgy of negative energy coming from the organs of the state and employees of its various subcontractors who mistake vigilance in the protection of the country with un-called-for rudeness and disdain to the travelers.
This is bad news, in the immediate sense, for pretty much everyone. Especially for those who, like me, have been shuttling between continents, in flights that take six to ten hours, sometimes overnight. The transformation of cross-continental airliners into flying Petri-dishes and the airports becoming even more obviously dystopian landscapes displaying government autism and incompetence will likely, ultimately,
- remove, especially from academia, from the high-tech fields and from health care, a sizable proportion of people who have. meaningful commitments "elsewhere," somewhere relatively far away, simply because they can't / won't take the hassle and the health hazards any more,
- decrease the intensity of cross-continental exchange, and the overall perceived unity of the sciences, especially the social sciences (simply because, my perception, the hard sciences require less physical presence to promote their paradigms, which tend to be more unitary anyway, in other words, less rides on in-person debates, etc.) across geographical divides,
- make scholarly conversations even more matter-of-factly narrow-focused, nationalist and self-absorbed,
- "free up" slots occupied by non-locals for locals who had previously been out-competed by the "outsiders", impacting quality in as-yet unpredictable ways, especially since, given the neoliberal-corporate onslaught on academia is in full swing, universities are less likely to replace lost faculty with comparably tenure-track / tenured faculty, pushing the overall levels of protection for academic labor even lower than where they are now, hence pushing faculty and researchers who have options farther away from this institutional realm,
- in the extreme, this can cause the hollowing out of entire research fields (those that rely on non-native-born workforce, e.g., the research areas that require special skills, i.e., foreign languages, familiarity with foreign cultures, histories, other skills that can only be acquired in specific locations, etc.),
- this is likely to decrease the current comparative advantages of north American and west European academia--fields that have, until recently, used their supreme financial means and the relative liberalism of their institutions to attract talent from the entire world,
- as a result, the humanities will remain even more west-centric and the social sciences will become even more western-Europe-centric (if at all that is even possible) world-wide, and especially in north America and Europe (except of course in eastern Europe where the mantra of west-centrism, the Euro-hallelujah and the predominance of national self-pity / self-aggrandizement / shortsightedness have already been maxed out, so there is relatively little room for change; the rest of the world will become similar to eastern Europe, for sure),
- new generations of students will grow up even more short-sighted / blind to the world and even less able to think comparatively, globally, historically and critically--at least in those parts of the world where basic knowledge about, hell, just acknowledgment of the existence of, the rest of the world is not integrated into the general curriculum of primary and secondary education in any depth.
And that is happening due to a crisis precipitated, on the most immediate level, by a phenomenon that is global by definition (a pandemic) and, an outbreak brought about, and amplified, on a less immediately obvious, nevertheless equally crucial level, by an equally global phenomenon, late capitalism (see here, here, here or here).
I find this moment, the moment of the collapse of one of the global privileges of the monopolists of globally valorized cultural capital, to be remarkably revealing, and as I am writing this, I am hoping that it is possible to use this moment for some serious self-reflection on what we, academics, and especially globally mobile academics, are actually doing. Awareness of the environmental damage that air traffic does did nothing of the sort, not that I can recall. Maybe the imminent physical danger will make us think a little self-critically? I don't know.
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