ABSTRACT
The term Academicus Superciliosus was first used by E.P. Thompson in Warwick University Ltd, a critique he edited in 1970, about what he saw as the invasion of Warwick University by the values of the market place and the subordination of academic standards and decisions to those of private industry. Thompson was scathing in this volume about the willingness of dons to be bought by concerns about money and economic prestige. In a passage in Warwick University Ltd he wrote:
I have never ceased to be astounded when observing the preening and mating habits of fully-grown specimens of the species Academicus Superciliosus. The behaviour patterns of one of the true members of the species are unmistakable. He is inflated with self-esteem and perpetually self-congratulatory as to the high vocation of the university teacher; but he knows almost nothing about any other vocation, and he will lie down and let himself be walked over if anyone enters from the outer world who has money or power or even a tough line in realist talk. . . . Superciliosus is the most divisible and rulable creature in this country, being so intent upon crafty calculations of short-term advantages – this favour for his department, that chance of promotion – or upon rolling the log of a colleague who, next week, at the next committee, has promised to roll a log for him, that he has never even tried to imagine the wood out of which all this timber rolls. He can scurry furiously and self-importantly around in his committees, like a white mouse running in a wheel, while his master is carrying him, cage and all, to be sold at the local pet-shop.
