192 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
study and was fortunate to be able to cooperate with colleagues abroad and progress
my work further despite this obstacle.
I learned by doing. Sometimes this meant learning the hard way. The origins and
goals of my doctoral project and the academic culture I was trying to cope with seemed
to be worlds apart. Whereas the collective orientation of the deaf world encourages
people to share resources in support of the deaf community, academic integrity has
come under pressure from the philosophy of output-oriented marketing and its
major focus on academic publications. I learned that I should only share my work
after it had been published. These conflicts were shocking to me and made me more
aware of academic integrity, research ethics, and my own position as a deaf scholar.
In his article “De Effecten van een Neoliberale Meritocratie op Identiteit en Inter-
persoonlijke Verhoudingen” (“The Effects of a Neoliberal Meritocracy on Identity
and Interpersonal Relations”),^10 psychologist and Ghent University professor paul
Verhaeghe (2011) analyzes the consequences of this contemporary ideology in the
academic world. Whereas the priority of education originally was, arguably, a quest
for knowledge relevant to society, today universities have evolved in the direction
of being market-driven enterprises. Although a purely meritocratic economic and
educational philosophy of “you get what you deserve” (salaries based on effort and
equal educational opportunities for all) seems reasonable at first sight, in practice
the ideal may be hard to realize. Neither employees nor students start with the same
capital, but this philosophy ignores variation in sociocultural backgrounds. In com-
bination with a postmodern market society, this often results in fierce competition
between people, which can be seen as focused on individual progress at the expense
of others and of communities.
Verhaeghe (2011) argues that this output-oriented organization of the
Anglo-Saxon academic world is, as the philosopher Michel Foucault might put
it, “disciplined” by an anonymous global “evaluator” that ranks publications and
universities. Although the criteria are supposed to be transparent, the evaluators
themselves seem exempt from the measurements they apply. Sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman (1999) submits that the evaluators observe those whom they are judging
through a “glass pane,” a one-way mirror that also reflects the evaluated ones’ own
misery back at them.
Whereas at the beginning of the meritocratic era it could be argued that aca-
demics felt largely in control of their professional lives, now there is a perceptible
decrease in agency. Scholars are obliged to conform to external criteria of evalua-
tion, and they appear to lose control over the content of their work. The intrinsic
motivation to strive for professionalism, integrity, and responsibility has shifted to
an exterior motivation to meet external standards of quality. This may contribute
to an erosion of ethics in both employment and research, as well as a loss among
members of the scholarly community of involvement in and responsibility for each
other’s work.
This obligatory competition also has a snowball effect: It can be seen to put soli-
darity under pressure and stimulate “displaced aggression” toward the less dominant- Throughout this chapter, all translations of quotes from non-English sources are mine.