Academia likes to imagine itself as a space apart from the market, a place where ideas matter more than profit, where curiosity leads and knowledge serves the public good. But anyone working inside the university today knows that this ideal is fiction. Academia is not just influenced by capitalism, it is structurally entangled with it. And that entanglement is reshaping what knowledge is produced, who gets to produce it, and who ultimately benefits.

Under a capitalist model, productivity becomes the dominant metric of worth. Publications are counted, grants are totaled, citation indices are ranked, and “impact” is reduced to numbers that fit neatly into spreadsheets. The slow, careful, relational work that much scholarship actually requires, mentorship, community collaboration, long-term fieldwork, interdisciplinary thinking, teaching that changes students’ lives, often becomes invisible because it is difficult to quantify or monetize.

This logic also narrows the kinds of questions we are encouraged to ask. Research that promises quick results, technological applications, or marketable outcomes is prioritized, while work that is critical, exploratory, or socially uncomfortable is labeled as too “niche”, “unfundable", or "this study doesn't have enough background." (hm maybe because it's never been done). Students are not trained as scholars but rather academics, where they  design projects that fit short grant cycles and tidy timelines, rather than projects that follow unfolding biological, ecological, or social processes.

Reframing this mindset would not weaken academia, it would expand it, and make knowledge acquisition richer. It would open entirely new avenues of research that are currently foreclosed by rigid timelines, funding structures, and career precarity. Many of the most meaningful questions in science and the social sciences are longitudinal by nature. They require patience, continuity, and trust built over years, sometimes decades.

In my own work on maternal care, this tension is especially clear. Maternal behavior, development, and caregiving strategies do not reveal themselves neatly within a dissertation window, a two-year grant, or a single field season. Yet under current academic constraints, limited funding, compressed timelines, and scarce opportunities for early-career researchers to return to the field, longitudinal studies led by young scholars with novel questions are rarely possible. These researchers are often encouraged to scale down their ambitions, retrofit their questions to existing datasets, or abandon longitudinal designs altogether, not because the science is weak, but because the system cannot accommodate it.

What is lost in this process is not just individual projects, but entire ways of knowing. We lose insights into change over time, intergenerational processes, slow adaptation, and care systems that only become visible through sustained engagement. We also lose the creativity of early-career researchers, whose ideas are often the most theoretically adventurous but the least supported by existing power structures. This erosion of long-term, relational scholarship reflects a broad failure within academia: a systematic distancing from Indigenous knowledge systems that center patience, reciprocity, and learning across generations. Going back to the roots of scholarship means confronting this history—unlearning extractive modes of inquiry and relearning how to engage with knowledge as something cultivated in relationship, not extracted on a deadline.

A more progressive academia would recognize that good science does not always move quickly, and that innovation often emerges from long-term commitment rather than rapid output. It would invest in continuity—supporting early-career researchers in returning to field sites, maintaining long-term datasets, and building research programs that grow organically rather than reset every funding cycle. Or in other terms, it would invest in the fundamentals of indigenous knowledge. Something that has been buried since the beginning of western academic practice.

Also academic labor must be rethought. Universities increasingly rely on precarious workers, adjuncts, graduate students, postdocs, whose intellectual contributions sustain institutions but whose livelihoods remain unstable. Or, promise positions that cannot be upheld, leaving these scholars with a debt of opportunity. Passion is quietly substituted for pay. Devotion to students, collaborators, and communities is used to normalize burnout. The message is subtle but persistent: if you truly care about this work, you will accept insecurity, overwork, and silence.

These structures disproportionately harm scholars from marginalized backgrounds, who are more likely to be filtered out by funding gaps, visa precarity, unpaid labor expectations, and opaque norms. When academia adopts the logics of capitalism, it reproduces inequality rather than challenging it.

Getting out from under capitalism’s thumb does not mean rejecting rigor or excellence. It means redefining them. Excellence should not mean exhaustion. Productivity should not require precarity. Impact should not be measured solely in grants won or papers counted, but in how knowledge deepens understanding, strengthens communities, and reshapes how we care for one another and the world we inhabit.

If academia truly wants to be progressive, it must go back to the roots of scholarship and indigenous ways of knowing. This means reclaiming curiosity over productivity, depth over speed, and responsibility over branding. Scholarship was never meant to be optimized for quarterly returns or compressed into grant cycles that ignore the realities of biological, social, and ecological time. Returning to these roots would allow research to be shaped by the questions themselves, especially those that demand longitudinal, relational, and care-centered approaches, rather than by the constraints of funding structures and academic timelines.

Periods of political and economic instability have a way of clarifying what is often obscured in everyday academic life: scholarship is a privilege. The capacity to engage in sustained intellectual work, to read, write, analyze, and theorize, depends on conditions that are not universally available. It requires time, financial stability, institutional support, and personal safety.

This is a reality I, and many American academics/scholars, are now barely reckoning with. For my life, I moved through academia without questioning whether scholarship itself was accessible to me. I travel to other spaces and interact with environments that are novel to me. That ease was not accidental; it was made possible by structural privilege, citizenship, relative economic stability, and institutional protection, that insulated my work from the most immediate consequences of political and economic instability.

When people face precarity, displacement, censorship, or violence, scholarship is no longer an accessible or even imaginable pursuit. Yet academic systems often proceed as if research exists outside these realities, expecting uninterrupted productivity regardless of crisis. This quietly privileges those whose lives are least disrupted, while pushing others—often scholars from the very regions and communities being studied—out of academic participation.

In this sense, academia not only reflects inequality; it reproduces it. Knowledge production becomes centralized in spaces of relative stability, while insights from places under strain are filtered, mediated, or lost. What remains is an incomplete understanding of the world, shaped by who could afford to keep thinking when others could not.

Acknowledging scholarship as a privilege is not an act of much. It is a necessary step toward honesty. If academic work is to be ethical, it must confront the conditions under which it is possible—and imagine ways to support knowledge-making grounded in collective care and responsibility.

I want to be explicit about my position. I have lived an extraordinarily privileged life. Even when academia has felt difficult or precarious, those challenges do not meaningfully compare to the lived realities of other people—within this country or across the world, now or at any point in history. Any constraints I experience exist within a system that still affords me safety, choice, and voice. Naming this is not self-castigation, but an acknowledgment of scale: my experience does not hold a candle to the realities that make scholarship inaccessible, or unimaginable, for so many others.