Ice, Empire, and the Incentive to Say Something — Anything — New! By Professor X

A recent academic work proposes to examine ice — literal frozen water — through the lenses of colonialism, race, and power. According to the scholar in question, the aim was to place "the politics of race and indigeneity and the violence of dispossession and racialization at the center" of how we understand glaciers and snow.

This is not satire. It is institutionalized scholarship.

At first glance, one might be tempted to dismiss such work as merely eccentric. After all, academia has always tolerated intellectual oddities. Medieval scholars debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; Victorian anthropologists classified skull shapes with a zeal bordering on obsession. The university has long been a sanctuary for intellectual specialisation taken to its extremes.

But what distinguishes contemporary academic absurdities from their historical predecessors is not their eccentricity, but their structural necessity.

This distinction was identified with unusual clarity by the sociologist Bryan S. Turner (link below), whose analysis of academic career structures remains one of the most penetrating — and uncomfortable — diagnoses of modern intellectual life. Turner argued that the academic system does not merely permit intellectual novelty; it requires it. Careers depend on producing work that is not only competent, but novel. The currency of academia is not truth, but publication. And publication requires originality.

Originality, however, is a finite resource.

The fundamental laws of logic, mathematics, and empirical science were largely established centuries ago. The core explanatory frameworks of physics, chemistry, and biology are mature. In many domains, the remaining advances are incremental, technical, and inaccessible to non-specialists. This creates a structural problem for disciplines that nonetheless must produce a continuous stream of publications to sustain careers.

The solution, increasingly, is conceptual inflation.

If there is nothing fundamentally new to discover about ice as a physical substance — its crystalline structure, thermodynamics, phase transitions — one may instead declare ice to be a social construct. One may interpret glaciers as agents of colonialism. One may analyse snowflakes as participants in systems of racial power.

In this way, novelty is manufactured not by discovering new facts about the world, but by inventing new interpretive frameworks through which the world may be viewed.

This is not driven primarily by ideology, though ideology provides the vocabulary. It is driven by institutional incentives.

The modern academic career is governed by a simple imperative: publish or perish. Hiring, promotion, tenure, and prestige all depend upon demonstrating a continuous output of research. But journals cannot publish the same idea repeatedly. Each paper must offer something new — not necessarily something true, or useful, or even meaningful, but something new.

The result is what might be called epistemic exhaustion.

When the obvious truths have been discovered, and the remaining truths are too technically demanding or inaccessible, the easiest path to novelty is reinterpretation. Instead of discovering new objects, scholars discover new ways of talking about existing objects.

Ice becomes colonial. Mathematics becomes oppressive. Physics becomes patriarchal. Language becomes violence. The subject matter remains unchanged. Only the interpretive framework shifts.

This process is reinforced by academic specialisation. Modern scholars operate within narrow intellectual subcultures, each with its own jargon, assumptions, and evaluative standards. Within such communities, conceptual novelty — even when incomprehensible to outsiders — becomes a marker of intellectual sophistication.

Obscurity itself becomes a credential.

This explains a curious feature of contemporary academic prose: its opacity. The language is often impenetrable, not because the ideas are necessarily profound, but because opacity creates the appearance of depth. As Turner and others have observed, academic discourse often functions as a form of status signalling. Complexity signals expertise. Accessibility signals triviality.

The incentive structure thus favours conceptual innovation over empirical discovery, reinterpretation over explanation, and novelty over clarity.

The consequences extend beyond the university. Universities occupy a unique position in modern society. They are widely regarded as custodians of knowledge. Their pronouncements carry institutional authority. When academic disciplines drift away from empirical reality and toward conceptual abstraction, the authority of the university itself becomes untethered from the reality it claims to study.

This produces a paradox.

The more universities emphasise novelty for its own sake, the less their outputs correspond to the external world. Yet their institutional prestige continues to confer authority upon those outputs.

The result is the gradual transformation of academia from a system for discovering truth into a system for producing interpretations.

This does not mean that all academic work is meaningless; but much is. There is a core of useful work, increasingly getting swamped by the rising tide of academic nonsense. Ice, in this economy, becomes whatever the incentive structure requires it to be. Colonial. Racialized. Queer. Oppressive.

Not because ice itself has changed, but because the institutional environment demands continuous intellectual novelty, and interpretation is infinitely renewable.

Bryan Turner's insight was not merely that academia sometimes produces absurdities. It was that the production of such absurdities is structurally inevitable.

When careers depend upon novelty, and novelty becomes scarce, novelty will be manufactured. Even from ice. Especially from ice.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/ice-geographies

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/144078338602200207

"Sociology is a professional calling but, given the sociological structure of the academic market-place, we are forced to live it as a trade. Given a highly competitive struggle within the market, sociologists in search of employment and prestige are forced to innovate in order to secure clients and audiences. These market-determined innovations lead to endless changes in paradigms and perspectives which give sociology, as an institution, the appearance of perpetual crisis. These crises are intensified at the periphery of the global market and thus the struggle for clients in Australian sociology is especially intense. These waves of fashion have obscured the real and central tradition of sociology which is the call to comprehend the nature of modern consciousness and the restraints which limit human potentialities."