Behind the ivory facade: capitalism, the post-truth condition, and epistemic authority

Expressions of concern about an increasingly “fact-resistant” public attitude threatening higher education and science often fail to appreciate, or even acknowledge, the complicity of the professoriate in the reputation race that is the distinctive feature of competitive strategies of university management around the globe. In this paper, I argue that 1) behaving as actors in the “knowledge society,” universities undermine the legitimacy of academic knowledge; 2) the various phenomena gathered under the term “post-truth” are expressions of a loss of public confidence, and constitute a fundamental challenge to institutions of higher education, and 3) recognizing that the doubt and distrust are not entirely unwarranted is a first step toward necessary reform. On the basis of a résumé of the structural and material conditions of academic work in the post-truth era, I describe how these conditions constitute a specific sort of academic subjectivity, and propose that the role of universities needs to be reconceived in the spirit of what might be called epistemic modesty.