Abstract
Abstract: This paper presents a critical-philosophical reflection on the state of working conditions and academic production in contemporary higher education. It addresses the concept of "bullshit" advanced by Harry Frankfurt and developed by others as it might apply to those domains. The necessity that professional academics either "publish or perish" is a gentler way of saying one must "work or starve." And this economic condition introduces extraneous motives that undermine the epistemic goals of intellectual inquiry and scientific community. In short, those economic conditions of intellectual work give rise to much of the "bullshit," as Frankfurt might put it, which academics and even those outside of the academy must now endure, given the current institutional situation. The paper concludes, however, that academic work is not exactly what David Graeber has called "bullshit jobs," though it does indeed seem inseparable from the latter.
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