A year ago I took (very) early retirement from academia, and was given the title Emeritus Professor upon leaving. Looking back, I am grateful for the academic freedom I enjoyed at the University of Cumbria. Although there were exacting demands for generating income through MA and MBA courses, the University had a tradition of critical inquiry, interdisciplinarity and experiential learning. Without that freedom I could not have developed my understanding in a range of fields to be able to write the book Breaking Together – and to teach leadership the way I do today. I had always been a polymath and read philosophy about ways of knowing. I was fascinated by the pros and cons of the ways that different academic disciplines constructed their focus, forms of evidence and criteria for conclusions. Therefore, I developed a form of ‘critical interdisciplinary research analysis’, where one interrogates research from different disciplines with a prime focus on real world salience and an awareness of there being limiting assumptions within any field of inquiry. Unfortunately, academia militates against this approach by incentivising career researchers to specialise. Meanwhile, many non-scientists defer to the claims from institutionalised specialists and their peak bodies. That is an understandable reaction, although pretty lazy when coming from scholars and public commentators on our environmental predicament. As the reality with climate change appears to be far worse than what was predicted, some of that deference will reduce, along with the hostility towards better analyses. If you are interested in this matter, please see (or listen to) Chapter 7 of Breaking Together.
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