Seize the Means of Community

For centuries, academia—especially its most prestigious institutions—has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of intelligence, merit, and social value. It has operated as an enclosure, defining who counts as “intelligent,” who deserves access to status and opportunity, and who holds the authority to shape public knowledge. Degrees and credentials have been treated as markers of moral and intellectual worth, justifying access to influence, power, and higher social standing.

But this system is facing a profound crisis, one born not from a single cause but from a series of betrayals, contradictions, and systemic failures. AI is just one factor accelerating a collapse that has been long in the making.

Academia as Enclosure

For generations, academic institutions have served as enclosures that control access to social power. By determining who earns credentials, who produces knowledge, and who gains entry to the “inner circle” of expertise, they have shaped the very meaning of merit and intelligence. But this enclosure has always been artificial. Intelligence, as academia has defined it, has been deeply shaped by cultural biases, class structures, and historical exclusions.

This is not just about who is accepted into prestigious programs, but about which forms of knowledge are legitimized, who gets to be heard, and what counts as “real” scholarship. It’s about who gets to produce narratives that shape society and who is excluded from the conversation.

The Betrayal of Ideals

The crisis facing academia is not merely about external technological pressures but about its betrayal of its own proclaimed ideals. Recent examples lay bare the extent of this failure:

• Suppression of Free Speech and Democratic Values: Columbia University's suspension, expulsion, and revocation of degrees for 22 students who protested in support of Palestinian peoples is a stark example of how academic institutions have betrayed their professed commitment to democratic discourse and free expression. Rather than fostering critical engagement, academia is actively silencing dissent to maintain institutional alignment with dominant power structures.

• The Replication Crisis: The “publish or perish” culture has fueled a replication crisis across numerous academic disciplines. Under pressure to meet narrow, reductive criteria of “merit” and “success,” researchers have produced work that is increasingly unreliable, driven by the need for quantifiable outputs rather than meaningful insight. The system values quantity over quality, compliance over criticality.

• Exploitation of Academic Labor: Academia has also proven to be an exploitative employer. The adjunct professor system, where highly educated individuals are paid poverty wages without benefits or job security, exemplifies how the institution values profit and efficiency over fairness and intellectual integrity. This is not an aberration but a structural feature of the modern university.

• AI as a Disruptive Force: AI further challenges the legitimacy of academic systems. If AI can replicate many forms of academic output—from research summaries to essays—then the value of credentialed labor as a marker of merit erodes. AI is not the cause of academia's crisis but a harsh light exposing its long-standing weaknesses.

Academia's Defensive Response

Rather than confronting these crises, academia often responds by reinforcing its enclosures:

• Gatekeeping Discourse: Institutions suppress controversial discourse and punish dissent under the guise of maintaining “order” or “academic standards,” betraying their proclaimed commitment to open inquiry.

• Valorizing Process Over Insight: Institutions elevate methodologies and procedural rigor as shields against critique, even as these processes produce unreliable, redundant, and exclusionary work.

• Defending Institutional Prestige: The prestige of traditional academic institutions is presented as self-evident proof of their value, despite the ways that prestige reflects historical exclusion, economic privilege, and complicity with power.

These defenses are not about protecting intellectual rigor but about preserving authority and the structures of power that depend on academic enclosure.

Reclaiming the Purpose of Knowledge

The crisis facing academia is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge and how we structure learning communities. The intelligence-merit link is already broken, and academia must now confront hard questions:

• What is the Purpose of Higher Education? If education is no longer about credentialing intelligence, what should it be about? Should it be about cultivating mutual learning, collective problem-solving, and social engagement?

• What Counts as Valuable Knowledge? If academic knowledge is no longer privileged by virtue of its institutional enclosure, how can we elevate more diverse, emergent, and community-grounded ways of knowing?

• Who Gets to Create and Share Knowledge? Should academic institutions continue to gatekeep knowledge production, or should we prioritize more open, participatory, and collective models of inquiry?

• What Becomes of Expertise? If expertise is less about individual credentials and more about collective interpretive capacity, how should authority and knowledge be shared and cultivated in community?

The Communitarium as Counter-Enclosure

The Communitarium can be an experimental alternative to traditional academia—a site that rejects the intelligence-merit narrative and the sacralization of academic prestige. It offers a model for mutual, emergent, and relational knowledge-making that is free from the hierarchies of traditional institutions.

• Mutual Learning Spaces: The Communitarium is not about certifying intelligence. It’s about cultivating spaces where people learn from each other, hold complexity together, and deliberate in mutual, open-ended ways.

• Resisting Knowledge Gatekeeping: It resists the tendency to define legitimate knowledge through rigid methodologies or institutional conventions. Instead, it values diverse insights, practical experiences, and emergent collective reasoning.

• Valuing Process Over Prestige: The Communitarium doesn't measure value by outcomes, credentials, or institutional status. It values the process of inquiry, mutual care, and shared meaning-making.

• Democratizing Expertise: It treats expertise as a communal capacity, developed through deliberation and mutual understanding, rather than as a scarce resource controlled by credentialed authorities.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

AI didn’t break academia. Neither did any single scandal or betrayal. Academia’s collapse is the result of a long history of complicity, exploitation, and enclosure—a system that has betrayed its own ideals and reduced intelligence and merit to narrow, exclusionary categories.

The collapse of this fiction is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge, how we share it, and how we create spaces for collective learning and understanding.

The choice is clear. We can double down on the illusions that have protected exclusion, hierarchy, and prestige, or we can begin constructing new, mutual counter-enclosures that prioritize openness, deliberation, and collective emergence.

The Communitarium is an experiment in the latter. It is an invitation to imagine learning and knowledge differently—not as markers of merit, but as practices of mutual engagement and shared becoming.