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The cultural form of ivory towers, ivory fortresses, ivory courts, and related institutions—the shared norms, values, practices, and assumptions that permeate academic and intellectual life. Ivory culture includes the reverence for credentials, the obsession with citation, the privileging of theory over practice, the suspicion of outsiders, the language of expertise as a barrier to entry, the performance of objectivity, and the unexamined belief that the academy's ways of knowing are simply better than others. Ivory culture is what produces academics who can discuss Foucault but not talk to their neighbors, who can deconstruct power but not recognize their own, who have spent decades mastering their fields but never questioned why their fields are structured as they are. It's the water intellectuals swim in, invisible to them but shaping every move.
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