A few years ago I attended a conference in Liverpool, UK. The scope of the meeting was international journalism, and thus included an extraordinarily colorful palette of participants from different parts of the world. However, I definitely missed my fellow Eastern European colleagues and it was only on the third day that I heard a Hungarian word for the first time. Unfortunately, it was not part of a sophisticated academic argument, but the Hungarian version of the F-bomb, since the cleaning woman had accidentally dropped something outside the conference hall and felt that she had to label the situation in her mother tongue. That evening, I checked some statistics and found that there are about 500,000 Hungarians in the United Kingdom, most of them in the capital city, but typically live in low-income areas and would be unlikely to frequent prestigious places like conference halls and other venues of academic meetings.
Of course, this book is not about my personal experiences, but I will never deny the fact that academic inequality as it is experienced by all researchers of the Global South and by all scholars without an elite education is the fuel of research on power relations in global academia for many scholars, including myself. It is no surprise that most researchers in women’s studies and feminism are female, most academics writing about gender and LGBTQ inequality are members of the LGBTQ community, and that the social movements against racism have been initiated by people with an ethnic background other than white. Similarly, the systematic bias against Global South academics is one that is mostly investigated by Global South authors, not only because they are the devalued, often exploited participants of this global inequality, but also because Global North academics often have the privilege of never having to encounter the problems of their Global South peers. This does not mean, of course, that Global North academics are evil or uncaring; instead they are, to some extent, blind to the problems of their Global South colleagues. While this is the typical case, there are many Global North academics that face similar problems as their geopolitically disadvantaged peers, namely elitism, exclusion and exploitation. These are the academics that work in a periphery-within-the-center position, either because they are working in downgraded institutions such as state universities or community colleges maintained for the masses, because they belong to a disadvantaged minority or are from the lower social classes (Arunachalam 2002; Bourdieu 1996). Thus, academic inequalities, academic oppression and academic exploitation could be observed and experienced on both geopolitical and societal levels. Consequently, I consider it my duty to define my position as a scholar working on the topic of academic inequalities. I come from a Hungarian working class family, and consequently, I have a typical education pattern of relatively talented working-class people: attending local schools and a state university reserved for the mass education of the non-elite classes. As soon as I had finished my Ph.D., I started to perceive the consequences of my peripherality. It was extremely hard to find an academic job, since even in Hungary, academic positions are—albeit informally—maintained for the elite. It was also extremely difficult to publish in elite international journals. On one occasion, I submitted a paper to a not too highly-rated but still internationally recognized journal that desk-rejected my article. A few months later, I found out that the same journal had published an article very similar to mine by an American professor, one which was not only considerably lower in quality than my proposed title, but even contained some paragraphs from my paper. When I wrote the editor about this issue, I was astonished by the reply: the editor could imagine how frustrating it is to be an Eastern European scholar who wants international contribution and has been rejected, but to please not bother them again. It was around that time that I decided to dedicate all of my scholarly interest to the problem of academic inequalities. In a very early stage of my research, I realized that my own personal experiences as a peripheral scholar seeking international recognition coincided to a great degree with the experiences of many other scholars in the same position (Ake 1982; Aman 2016; Bandyopadhyay 2017; Canagarajah 2002; Shi-xu 2009). After this discovery, I wanted to understand the processes of elitism and geopolitical exclusion—how these work in a way that is clearly visible for the oppressed but, in most cases, totally invisible for the beneficiaries of the system.
This social blindness is detrimental not only to the oppressed social groups, but to all of society. By “socially blind”, I mean that most members of the dominant group—including professionals—truly think that the members of the underprivileged groups somehow fall below the standard. Aristotle, one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time, honestly thought that women are less intelligent than men and that they are even not adults, but eternal children. In his Politics, he maintained the idea that women should be governed like children, and the only difference between women and children is that children—of course only boys and never girls—will grow up one day. The father of Western rationalism, René Descartes, wrote in the preface of his Discourse on the Method that he had written his paper in a style which would allow even women to understand something from it, but that he hoped that more intelligent readers would also find it valuable. And we should not forget that, even in enlightened Western democracies, women were unable to vote until quite recently on the basis that they do not have the appropriate intellectual capacity to assess political issues. In order to be taken seriously, women had to, and sometimes still have to, act like men: they had to wear suits, short hair to become similar to their male peers. In the same countries, people with a non-white ethnic background were, and in many cases, still are regarded as less valuable than their white counterparts. For many years, for example, it was maintained that African-Americans have lower IQs than whites (Rushton and Jensen 2005). Accordingly, black and other non-white individuals have had to, and sometimes they still have to, act like their white peers in order to achieve recognition. The very same phenomenon can be seen among LGBTQ people. We should not forget that homosexuality was considered a deadly sin for a long time, and in later years it was regarded as a mental illness. It was only by the second half of the twentieth century, in 1973, when the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, where it had been listed under the mental illness heading of paraphilia. Accordingly, homosexuals were somewhat tolerated as long as they appeared to be heterosexuals or, as a minimum, did not appear to be homosexual. As a matter of fact, in most countries, LGBTQ people still do not have the same rights as their straight fellow citizens, and can only be themselves behind closed doors.
In brief: women were disqualified for a long time on the basis that they failed to meet the standards of men; people with non-white ethnic backgrounds failed to accomplish the standards of white men: and LGBTQ people were discriminated against on the understanding that they do not meet heterosexual standards. The main purpose of this book is to show that, similarly to other unjust exclusions, we should examine the serious discrimination against Global South academics, who are usually regarded as people who do not comply with the standards of the Global North,...