Pierre Rimbert: Can France's Left Thinkers Escape the Ivory Tower?‏

"Back in the 1930s, Paul Nizan depicted academia as conservative and filled with “watchdogs”. Then in the radical 1960s and 1970s, human sciences, social critiques and revolution seemed to go together. Their connection has enlivened an institution riven with tensions, designed to back the bourgeois regime but also capable of nurturing revolutionaries. This contradiction may explain why critical publishing is both fascinated and repulsed by academia and lecturers or researchers. The stereotype of the independent publisher suggests a 30-40 year-old who has begun, or even finished, a doctorate in human sciences but hasn’t found a research or higher education post that allows him or her to combine academic work with anti-Establishment action. Though this picture fails to take account of the diversity of the new “militant” publishers, it captures their conflicted environment, falling somewhere between the scholarly and the political."

http://www.counterpunch.com/rimbert05112011.html