International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
‘Academia’ is the academic world of colleges and universities, institutions of post-secondary education usually comprised of faculty, administration and students. Those who are ‘in academia’, also known as academics, administer or teach at the college level. Until the later nineteenth century in most countries, the ranks of academia were comprised almost exclusively of men; to this day, men constitute the majority of academics.
Academia is etymologically derived from the Greek Academy, founded in Athens in the fourth century BCE for the purposes of educating both men and women in philosophy, science and mathematics. The present system of academia is more recognisable as a descendant of the first European universities founded during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in Bologna and Paris, respectively.
Universities throughout the world owe their form and function to this European system of academia, often through direct colonisation by European nations but also through the conscious adaptation of European models of the university (Rüegg 1992).
Although the education of students remains a chief academic concern, those in academia are also charged with the production of knowledge in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. Academics, then, are not just teachers of post-secondary education but also researchers, scientists, scholars and writers.
Feminists have criticised the academy for its overt sexism and also for its hierarchy and methods of pedagogy, both of which have been cited as particularly masculine in orientation. In terms of overt sexism, much evidence suggests not only that male students are given preferential treatment and male academics remunerated more substantially and promoted more frequently, but also that those disciplines generally considered masculine (the sciences, mathematics and engineering) are often accorded more prestige and funding than those considered more traditionally feminine (the arts and humanities). The critique of masculinity as inherent in this form of the academy argues that women and men typically learn and interact in different ways, men through hierarchy, women through cooperation. Because the academy originated as an exclusively masculine domain, it continues to employ those operational practices that favour the masculine (see Martínez Alemán and Renn 2002).
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