Academia: Reflections of an Undergraduate Student in Pakistan

By Daniyal Khan, June 12th, 2012
Daniyal Khan

“Do you think it matters, Daniyal? Do you think anybody cares about your senior project? All that matters is the people around you, and your senior project doesn’t make a difference to anyone.”

All I could do was to look at my friend with a blank expression, completely stunned and humbled. These words weren’t spoken with the least bit of aggression, as one might think. Rather, they were delivered with a straight, honest face and in a soft-spoken manner, and still managed to convey all the seriousness in the world. The words struck me more so for two reasons. Firstly, I consider my undergraduate senior thesis to be the culmination and high-point of a grueling intellectual journey undertaken over five years. Secondly, my project is dedicated to my friends because they have often been my most ardent supporters as well as my harshest critics during this journey. Yet, there she was, a friend mind you, effortlessly reducing my best academic work to a heap of worthless trash!

In retrospect, her attitude towards a piece of academic writing and a person who aspires to be an academic was not surprising at all. Current opinion on the value and worth of the institutional home of the academic — the university — is far from being conclusively positive. My friend had recently experienced and witnessed some of the worst tendencies of academia at a conference at which she presented a paper. Rather than asking a question about the presentation, a philosophy instructor in the audience had chosen to speak to my friend in a patronizing manner, suggesting that her interest in her chosen subject of inquiry was worrisome, thinking that it was unhealthy for a girl of her age.

Thus, understanding the source of her disdain towards my project was not difficult. Academics and university professors aren’t always worthy role-models, to say the least. Many people I’ve spoken to insist that academics don’t really do anything, just talk; and you can bet there’s going to be a lot of self-serving conversation (at academic conferences, for example, not to say that there aren’t constructive conferences). No wonder academics are often . . .

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June 12th, 2012 | Tags: , , , ,

Masters and Servants in the U.S. and Pakistan: Insights and Missed Opportunities

By Daniyal Khan, March 28th, 2012
Vintage chauffeur's hat and glasses © Chris Wild | Flickr

Daniyal Khan is an undergraduate student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is working on his thesis “Heilbroner and Weber: Economics as a Science, Economics as a Vocation.” This contribution was stimulated by his research on that project. -Jeff

In A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science, Ray Canterberry states that Robert Heilbroner:

…attributes his social conscience to his feelings of indignation when he realized that his mother could give orders to her chauffeur only because his beloved “Willy” needed the money and she had it. “Willy” was an intimate yet “William” was a servant, distinguished only by the formal driver’s uniform that he wore. (pg. 334)

He concludes the section on Heilbroner’s vision of capitalism by noting that “his [i.e, Heilbroner’s] vision is little removed from his early concern about his mother’s wealth being the source of domination of poor Willy Gerkin, his surrogate father.” (pg. 337) If it is indeed the case that this particular life-experience was central in shaping Heilbroner’s vision of capitalism, then it gives way to a few interesting and illuminating implications.

Firstly, it challenges Heilbroner’s own contention expressed in Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy that visions can hardly be traced back to the experiences that determine them:

At this deepest level of social inquiry [i.e. at the level of vision] our analytic and expository powers diminish almost to the vanishing point. We can say very little as to the sources of these constellations that we project into the social universe. Few of us can trace to their social or personal roots the experiences that frame our own visions. (pg. 198)

Secondly, it shows how consciousness of the social expression of Marxian self-alienation – the self-alienation of the proletariat from the bourgeois capitalist class – in a member of the capitalist class can lead to a far reaching vision and imagination of the latent possibilities within capitalism as broadly defined by Heilbroner.

From these two implications, I wish to turn towards a . . .

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March 28th, 2012 | Tags: , , , , , , ,