But Is It Anti-Intellectualism, Really?
It is totally fine to feel disillusioned about academia
‘Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,’ says Dr Ally Louks, the Cambridge University lecturer who is shortly and temporarily to become one of the most famous women on the Internet. She posts a picture of herself smiling with her bound dissertation: ‘Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern or Contemporary Prose.’ Then her abstract. Twitter goes wild. Quite a few people are very mean and misogynistic (‘You would have spent your years better by getting married and having children,’ says one, and another emails her a rape threat), so others begin a campaign of what I call ‘reactionary niceness’ (‘This woman did a hard thing and the worst people are making fun of her because they don’t know what a PhD is,’ actual quote) which obviously only makes the entire affair even more passionate.
Of thousands of PhD dissertations, why is this the one to set us all off? Young-ish academics tend to be very online - they post their research on social media all the time. The journalist Charlotte Gill runs a popular Substack called ‘Woke Waste,’ where she picks out politically-driven humanities projects that have received five or six figures of UK taxpayer money. What is it about Ally Louks and olfactory ethics?