‘Zombie’ Academia – Hurtful Meme or Living Supremacist Bigotry in the Academy?
I know this is starting to resemble beating a dead horse (which would be cruel, and if the horse was Zombified, actively against our mandate) but could we please, PLEASE stop using the word ‘Zombie’ to signify anything with which a writer actively disagrees and wishes would disappear?
Academics have also begun to feast on this latest popular culture craze: Princeton University Press has published “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us,” which lists privatized Social Security, efficient financial markets and trickle-down economics as examples. In February the press is scheduled to release “Theories of International Politics and Zombies.”
Now three Australian professors have sent out a request on the scholarly listserv H-Ideas for contributions to a book on how zombie culture resembles the culture of higher education itself.
“We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead,” said the professors, Andrew Whelan, Chris Moore and Ruth Walker. By their measure the undead include “a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum.”
Once again, ‘Zombie’ is not a synonym for your personal pet peeve, writers and academics. Zombies are people too, not some monolithic, imaginary block of phantom enemies you can dismiss or utilize as strawmen.
So here we have a book on ‘Zombie’ ideas in economics, a book on Zombies and international relations (which may, to be fair, talk about literal Zombies, albeit probably in terms of how to exterminate them, see this previous post on a Foreign Policy article along those lines), and a proposal for a book on outmoded ideas in Academia, framed as being ‘Zombie’-like in some fashion.
Groan. Mindless repetition of trite, uninformative and useless ideas? Adopting or adhering to trends regardless of their timeliness or merit? Stubbornly clinging to false, baseless, or misleading concepts in the face of opposition and differing perspectives?
That isn’t being a ‘Zombie’ at all, but it does sound a lot like Professors Whelan, Moore and Walker, doesn’t it?
Quite to the contrary of these misuses of the term, to be a Zombie typically is to demonstrate fierce individual achievement while oriented properly within a collective sharing similar goals and full trust and cooperation. (Though of course there are always exceptions in any large group of individuals).
Zombies have these behaviors not just because of who they are, but because of what they are: a repressed minority who need, desperately, to work together in order to survive enormous injustice and persecution. If Zombies weren’t able to function in such a fashion, ask yourself, how precisely could they pose an even remotely plausible threat to the mass of Living Humanity? Romero-esque self-loathing aside, how many people truly believe that a disorganized, directionless, mildly hostile threat could undo all of civilization?
This brings us back to the central paradox of Anti-Zombie hate: if everything Zombie Haters say about the Undead was true (it’s not), then what do they have to worry about? Why, precisely, with all their learning and tool using ability, do they fear the Hollywood Zombie? If they buy into the brainless, shambling stereotype of the Differently Animated, then why are they so terrified?
The short answer is, barring previously mentioned self-hatred, they really shouldn’t be.
Which brings us back to using ‘Zombie’ as a slander. When it serves the needs of alleged scholars or commentators like the three Professors above, the word means one thing; when someone needs to sell books or movies, it means something drastically different, or else dissolves into incoherence.
I for one am sick of explaining this dichotomy to supposed intellectuals. For shame, Professors. For shame.
(a tip of my hat to Media Bistro for bringing this to our attention originally)
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