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Extant literature tends to see Homo academicus as a full-time, increasingly stressful, position as new emerging challenges in the managerialized high education field seem to distance from the authentic academic behaviors and attitudes (Mazza, C., & Quattrone, P. (2018). Living in a world of foam: Global ideas, bubbles, and the fairy tale of business education. In M. Izak, M. Kostera & M. Zawadzki (Eds.), The future of university education. Palgrave-MacMillan, (pp. 111–121). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46,894-5_1 ; Parker, Pluto Press, 2018). Building on my personal experience combining academic job with consulting and managerial roles, I discuss whether a multiplicity of belongings crossing academia and other fields, the position I called “academic-cum-something else”, is a viable solution for this stress or just a limbo excluding from each of the belongings. I adopted an autobiographic style, reporting self-reflexive, post-hoc rationalizations of events. The autobiographic genre allowed me to report my observations about Homo academicus at the same time as an insider and as an outsider, critically assess constraints and habits. Therefore, the experience I described in this chapter is ambivalent. It includes the reflections on the academic life by somebody who had the illusio of academic field but also invested in the value of membership of other fields, such as consulting and management. This ambivalence may help shedding light on controversial aspects of what the life of a Homo academicus meant to be and, more in general, on the extent to which roles and trajectories in different fields could coincide in a single life. It results in the paradox that by staying in the limbo across different fields, I can feel the enchantment of the illusio of the different fields but, reflexively, I could doubt the real value of the stakes of their memberships (Bourdieu, Pascalian meditations, Stanford University Press, 2000), thus experiencing disenchantment. This paradox leads to further reflections on how the Homo academicus should change to cope with the challenges that today’s societal context poses on the higher education field.

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Living as an Academic-Cum-Something-Else: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Academia

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    2025年

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  • Carmelo Mazza

摘要

Extant literature tends to see Homo academicus as a full-time, increasingly stressful, position as new emerging challenges in the managerialized high education field seem to distance from the authentic academic behaviors and attitudes (Mazza, C., & Quattrone, P. (2018). Living in a world of foam: Global ideas, bubbles, and the fairy tale of business education. In M. Izak, M. Kostera & M. Zawadzki (Eds.), The future of university education. Palgrave-MacMillan, (pp. 111–121). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46,894-5_1 ; Parker, Pluto Press, 2018). Building on my personal experience combining academic job with consulting and managerial roles, I discuss whether a multiplicity of belongings crossing academia and other fields, the position I called “academic-cum-something else”, is a viable solution for this stress or just a limbo excluding from each of the belongings. I adopted an autobiographic style, reporting self-reflexive, post-hoc rationalizations of events. The autobiographic genre allowed me to report my observations about Homo academicus at the same time as an insider and as an outsider, critically assess constraints and habits. Therefore, the experience I described in this chapter is ambivalent. It includes the reflections on the academic life by somebody who had the illusio of academic field but also invested in the value of membership of other fields, such as consulting and management. This ambivalence may help shedding light on controversial aspects of what the life of a Homo academicus meant to be and, more in general, on the extent to which roles and trajectories in different fields could coincide in a single life. It results in the paradox that by staying in the limbo across different fields, I can feel the enchantment of the illusio of the different fields but, reflexively, I could doubt the real value of the stakes of their memberships (Bourdieu, Pascalian meditations, Stanford University Press, 2000), thus experiencing disenchantment. This paradox leads to further reflections on how the Homo academicus should change to cope with the challenges that today’s societal context poses on the higher education field.