"All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat,” said the Logician in Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. It was a deliberately broken example of Aristotle’s syllogism: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” Socrates, Aristotle, Ionesco, cats, and absurdity could all be hot topics for Lectures on Tap, which have become popular in America’s better-educated cities over the last year. A group called Pint of View is bringing the phenomenon to India— among others, political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has done a show with them.
Lectures on Tap are ticketed pop-up events held in bars and restaurants, where a teacher from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, MIT, or similar institute delivers a 40-minute lecture about quantum gravity or Bertolt Brecht to a nerdy audience. It’s popular because many of us have unrequited intellectual passions. Woody Allen published a story about it in 1974 in The New Yorker. ‘The Whore of Mensa’ was satirical noir in which a hardboiled gumshoe busted an extortion racket in which foolish men titillated by highbrow things were honey-trapped by erudite women in anonymous motel rooms: “For a price, she’ll come over and discuss any subject—Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas.”
There it is: whether at a pop-up lecture or a motel tryst, the buyer is in search of intellectual stimulation. But why are university teachers becoming sellers of nerd entertainment? There is no causal link between these phenomena, but the demand and supply curves have met with a satisfying thump.
For at least two decades, across Western academia, there has been a withdrawal of support for disciplines that do not make much money. Fewer students have been signing up for PhDs—and the intimidating student loans that finance them. Scholarships are dwindling as higher education is commercialised and foreign students fall back on personal loans back home. The Trump effect is the $100,000 surcharge on new H-1B applications. Foreign students have lost the standard route to residency and employment after their education. So it’s harder to pay back loans, and foreign student arrivals have fallen 19 percent, with Indian arrivals down 45 percent. Some believe that the strike on H1Bs actually targets elite universities.
Campuses are adjusting to budget cuts. The student paper Harvard Crimson reports that the university’s faculty of arts and sciences will cut PhD admissions by 75 percent in the sciences for the next two years. Arts and humanities courses will cut PhD seats by 60 percent, and the social sciences by 50-70 percent. The sociology department will have none the year after. Nearby campuses are downsizing, too. The Brown Daily Herald reports that Brown University will drop PhD admissions in at least six humanities and social science departments, including Egyptology, Assyriology and the classics, subjects that fascinate millions.
The US has been the PhD factory of the world, and its students go on to do epic research that brings the country prestige and prizes along with industrial and military pre-eminence. Now, these eminent scholars will pitch their tents to give other nations the advantage. For instance, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who shared a Nobel Prize in economics in 2019, are quitting MIT to start a research centre at the University of Zurich. The urge to move on is visible among younger researchers and professionals in cities like Boston, where academic and commercial labs lie thick on the ground. And attrition due to AI in the lower echelons has only begun. Transnationals like Amazon and TCS are shedding people on an unprecedented scale, and obfuscating the reason with management jargon.
So, no surprise if university teachers are venturing into side hustles in highbrow entertainment, popping up in bars and restaurants to do standup lecturing. It’s like a TED talk with food and beverages—the feast of reason and the flow of soul, for a cover price. Some time ago, people would have wondered what this says about perceptions of learning. Now, we know. Maybe it gives courage to teachers who feel like they’re in an extinction event, telling them that they won’t have to turn to pakoda-nomics to remain relevant. In a perverse way, maybe it’s even reassuring that there will be ever-bigger audiences for off-campus learning in many nations which are now thought leaders, where economic pressures could exclude more people from a life of the intellect.
The geographical redistribution of talent has almost no implication for India, despite the government’s earnest proposal to welcome leading academics back home. Going by past experience, India is happy to follow the lead of the US in matters of academic finance. In the early 2000s, IITs were instructed to reduce reliance on public funding and generate revenue through patents, industry partnerships, and consultancy, as American colleges do. Now, there’s no opportunity to follow Trump’s lead, because Indian governments have stepped on campuses hard enough.
Will Indian academics be tempted to go out and perform? Historians are having fun doing it. Will physicists follow suit, and further blur the boundary between the campus and the world? Who knows, democratised knowledge could be a refreshing change from the dogmatisms in traditional academia. But we must take care: as political and commercial forces eat away at the distinction between the formal and the informal, we may come to the inescapable conclusion that Socrates is indeed a cat.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)
