ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS
AT the outset, and any self-reflecting academic would admit this, scholars and professors in universities and other academic institutions have their own failings. Foremost among these is our seeming fixation on academic citations and university rankings. It appears that we count our successes not by the actual changes we have made on people’s lives, but by our google scholar metrics. We communicate in academic journals which are read only by our peers, thereby turning our academic enterprise into one big echo chamber. Thus, even as we conjure ideas that we thought would help society, we publish them in platforms which are inaccessible to ordinary citizens.