Quote of the day:
A small economics department today is more likely to succeed by assembling a quality group of socialists than free-marketeers.
That’s George Mason’s Alex Tabarrok and Peter Boettke, the former of Marginal Revolution fame, writing in Slate on academic arbitrage. Well, they don’t use the word arbitrage, and it’s not exactly arbitrage, but like arbitrage George Mason’s Economics department is premised on the acquisition of assets (professors’ labor and reputation) that are undervalued by the market.
The George Mason model sounds exciting, of course, but it’s almost never practiced in the humanities, at least in film studies. Most programs have a mix of established scholars and perspectives, next to assistant professors working in new areas and paradigms. A few programs, like Harvard’s VES, rely, institutionally, on hiring established stars and, academically, on capturing the most fashionable theoretical work of the moment, in this case theories of visuality and spectacle. (That’s not a slam on their faculty or even on the VES program, but it is a slam on Harvard’s utter cautiousness as an institution.) But I don’t see any George Masons in the field. The possibilities for academic arbitrage seems especially ripe right now, given a number of scholars have questioned some of the shared post-structuralist vocabulary and assumptions of the field.
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