Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Jackson

Jackson’s line lands because it refuses the polite fiction that universities are frictionless marketplaces of ideas. Instead, it frames academic turf wars as a survival reflex: not principled disagreement, but instinctive, panicked guarding of scarce resources. “Cornered animals” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s visceral, unflattering, and strategically unfair in the right way; it strips departmental politics of their self-mythology (rigor, tradition, standards) and recasts them as fear management.

The pivot clause - “though with far less justification” - is the knife twist. Cornered animals have a defensible reason to lash out: a direct threat to life. Departments, Jackson implies, often don’t. Their “territory” isn’t existential; it’s budget lines, course enrollments, faculty slots, and prestige. By comparing the intensity of the defense to an animal’s and then denying the moral alibi, he exposes how institutional self-preservation can masquerade as intellectual seriousness.

Context matters: a public servant is primed to see organizations as systems competing for funding and authority, not as pure temples of inquiry. Read that way, the quote is less anti-academic than anti-bureaucratic. It’s a critique of how universities, especially under austerity, reward internal border patrol: departments hoard students, police interdisciplinarity, and treat curriculum as land grabs. The subtext is that these battles feel “academic” only in the pejorative sense - detached from the public justification universities constantly claim, and intensely attached to power they rarely admit.