Academic Reputation, or Voluntary Epistemic Servitude

Abstract

This chapter presents case studies of the way reputations are built at the university. If there is an institution that feeds on reputation, it is the academy. Prestige, notoriety, standing, and reputation reign supreme within its halls. Professors and scholars are not only more motivated by symbolic rewards than by economic interest. They also spend a great deal of time designing institutions whose primary purpose is the creation, maintenance, and evaluation of each other's reputation and eminence. Such rankings are sometimes even treated as if they were the most dependable hallmarks of the truth itself. The chapter shows how the very idea of an academic reputation changed radically after new systems for calibrating reputations came into their own.