Azfar Hussain
a day ago
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From Henry Giroux:
On Awards, Courage, and the Seductions of Power
I often tell young academics that the more you publish, the more you speak out against injustice, and the more you refuse the comforts of conformity, the more you put yourself at risk. But there comes a point when the choice is unavoidable: whether to stand with courage or learn to live on one’s knees.
Power does not merely punish. It seduces. It rewards accommodation, confers legitimacy, and teaches people what kinds of ambitions and actions are safe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the culture of academic awards.
Earlier in my career, I was baffled by how often major awards went to academics whose work had little international reach, had not transformed their fields, and had done little to push beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. I am no longer baffled. Awards are never simply about merit. They can also function as instruments of institutional power, rewarding conformity while teaching younger scholars which risks are worth avoiding and which forms of recognition they should learn to desire.
My advice to younger faculty is simple: do not measure the worth of your work by prizes, titles, rankings, or institutional approval. Do not allow recognition to seduce you or its absence to wound you. Do the work that matters. Take risks. Cross boundaries. Become a border crosser. Hold you head as high as your standards. Speak truths that power would rather not hear. Connect scholarship to the struggle against economic and social injustice. And become, through your work and your courage, an example of what it means to make intellectual life answerable to something larger than professional advancement.
Institutions will always have their prizes. Let them. What matters more is what you stood for, what you refused, whom your work served, and whether you enlarged the possibilities for others to think, speak, and act differently. Visions matter because they make it possible to imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and think otherwise in order to act otherwise. That is precisely why visions can be dangerous: they challenge the tyranny of common sense and refuse the claim that the existing order is the only one possible. But visions do not come alive on their own. They require courage—the courage to take risks, cross boundaries, and transform hope into a practice of resistance and possibility.
As Bob Dylan put it: “You don't chase the parade anymore.” See less
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