The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
academic freedom and independence in society: academic systems have always been granted (in most modern societies) the autonomies they assert in order to assure the functioning of their essential function, the reproduction of society and its classes of citizenry. But, were we to take their declarations of independence too literally, we should be in danger of losing sight of its external functions and particularly the social functions which academic selection and hierarchization always additionally perform, even when they seem to be exclusively obeying the logic, and even the pathology, proper to the educational system. Thus, for example, the apparently purely academic cult of hierarchy always contributes to the defense and legitimation of social hierarchies, because academic hierarchies, whether of degrees and diplomas or of establishments and disciplines, always owe something to the social hierarchies which they tend to reproduce (in both senses). So it has to be asked whether the freedom the intellectual system is given to enforce its own standards and its own hierarchies, at the expense, for example, of the most evident demands of the economic system, is not the quid pro quo of the hidden services it renders to certain classes by concealing the resulting social selection of its functioning under the guise of technical selection and and legitimating the reproduction of such social hierarchies by transmuting them into academic hierarchies.