The Problem with Dark Academia

Let's talk elitism, mental health, racism and more in this Dark Academia internet aesthetic deep dive!

___HIRE ME___

I deliver engaging and inspiring workshops and talks at events, businesses, and universities across the world (see below for more details).



___WORKSHOPS___

I facilitate tailor made workshops, designed to give participants a variety of discussion opportunities, interactive elements, and a final longer task individually or as part of a group.

The goal of my workshops is that participants come out of the them with actionable points to be put into practice afterwards, rather than feeling as if they had simply talked through the same old topics on that subject.

___TALKS & PANELS___

Talks, presentations, panels and Q&As allow for an in depth look at a topic or issue. I can deliver solo talks on a specific topic and/or moderate or sit on group panels. I have previously spoken on topics including:

- Building Inclusive Communities

- Using YouTube for social good and charitable efforts

- LGBTQ+ Representation on TV/Film

- LGBTQ+ History

- Pop culture and Feminism

- Writing Strong Female Characters

- Women on YouTube

- How to use YouTube/social media as a tool in your career.

- & many more.

[danielacedeno]

I need an aesthetic for overworked gay millennials who were "going places" in high school but now havent been able to commit to sit down and read a book for 10 years and now rely on audiobooks and podcasts to maintain the joy of learning while doing the dishes and cleaning the house every single day. Everybody, help me come up with a name.

[AliJardz]

"for three years when I was 18"
Rowan is a vampire confirmed :P

[blushingteewrex]

I went to a very prestigious high school in Sweden, that would've perfectly fit into the dark academia aesthetic - upper class people trying to pass as lower class, with most students being at the top of the class prior to starting high school and suddenly realizing how impossible the work load would be, all whilst being brainwashed that the "culture" of the school was worth developing depression and other mental health problems. The in-official motto of the students were "dark, difficult 17-yearolds who read Kafka and drank their coffee black" (it sounds better in Swedish lmao).

We had both teachers and students who sadly committed suicide due to mental health issues most likely caused by the pressures of the school during my three years there - the school was known for it being very common... It's awful romanticizing these aesthetics without acknowledging the actual deep rooted problems that come with them as well. Thank you for this video Rowan!

[wiildsage]

“People who are fans of cottagecore don’t necessarily want to go live on the countryside, for example” cracked me up so much, I was trying to explain cottagecore to my mom and her wife (my stepmom) the other day because they have a small farm that is, for sure, super cute, but talking to two women who Live In Shorts and Galoshes about the appeal of linen dresses and stuff was admittedly really funny. As a broke ADHD-haver who adores learning but got screwed by the educational system I feel similarly about DA, where I absolutely get half of it but the other half is a total mystery 🥴

[EnnameMori]

As an ex professional academic who studied the Middle Ages, and someone who currently works in rare books... dark academia tends to represent all the toxic things that I am against. Elitism, lack of diversity of voices, hideous workloads, perfectionism, tweed covered men who treat you like a child. The focus on artist and individual of the late 19th century. I do get the attraction, but I find the imagery to be too deeply rooted to attitudes and ideas I have fought to over turn.

[johanflock_art]

Me, who thought it was just a way of dressing and decorating your room:

😐

[tassiasmith]

As someone who paints miniatures (yes, I paint tiny plastic, metal and resin figures of monsters and fantastic creatures), as well as someone who studied art history, I have one tiny nitpick about your comment about the marble statues. They have absolutely been stripped clean, and the traces of pigments left on them are often extremely garish and bright, but something no one seems to mention is that these are likely the base coats or underpainting. Base coats are even, smooth layers painters apply over the original material to hide the colour of the original material and form a strong base for the paint used in later techniques (which tend to require thinner and more delicate layers) to adhere too, as well as distinguishing different areas of sculpture from one another (for example, skin, different clothes, hair, etc). These layers are the most durable, less likely to rub off over time, and bottom layers of paint, the first layers applied. From there, you apply all your shadows, highlights, texture (as created through use of various colours, like the hint of veins under the skin, or delicate tinting of some areas more reddish than others, or creating the illusion of leather texture). These layers tend to be much, much more fragile, you tend to thin your paint for this (which, if you aren't careful with how you thin your paint or how much you thin your paint can even lead to the agent binding the pigment losing integrity and badness to the point that this is something shared very frequently with new painters). Now, I work with acrylic paint, which obviously didn't exist back then; I remember learning ancient Greeks used tempera (egg) based paints, which I've never used. So there would be some difference in techniques I'm sure, but there are people in mini painting circles that use oil paints, and for the most part the thinning paints is the same. If you use thick paint and layers (which generally has a stronger bond between pigment and medium, and just doesn't rub off as easily because there is simply more paint to protect the original material), you can and will obscure detail as you layer up, so it's likely the ancient painters preferred thinner than thicker coats over all.

Obviously, none of this can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but what we know of ancient Greek paintings from what has been described about them by writing of the time is that they were obsessed with realism and painters knew how to portray realistic textures, lighting, and perspective in two dimensional paintings. So there is no reason to believe that painters working on three dimensional objects weren't as equally skilled. The Romans were obsessed with verisimilitude taking it even further, so it's incredibly likely they employed highly skilled painters to make their statuary as lifelike as possible as well.

Um, sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. TLDR; the garrish colours were likely what we in the miniature painting community refer to as the ugly phase, the point where you have the most basic form of the colours set out on a form with no shading, highlights, or details at all.

[one_smol_duck]

Having gone to an old, "elite" liberal arts school, Dark Academia just makes me incredibly sad. I was one of the few people at my school who came from poverty, and goddamn it was a horrible experience. But my peers had a bad time too -- even the ones who were ridiculously rich, came from ridiculously good educational backgrounds. It felt as if many of them had been working their whole lives to get into that school and once there, were forcing themselves to be perfect students because if they wasted a single moment there, what was all that work for? I was thoroughly traumatized by my time there. It sucked all of the joy out of my life and replaced it with exhaustion and a deep seated anxiety. I can think of _literally one single student_ I knew there who didn't obviously have mental health issues. I'm not saying that flippantly.

I do have to give credit where credit is due, though. The school I attended went out of it's way to provide for me financially during my time there. Tuition, room and bored, travel expenses -- even my books and mealplan were paid for. No loans, no payments, nothing. Many elite American schools actually have astoundingly good financial aid if you're poor enough to qualify. Harvard? Columbia? Princeton? Good luck getting in without the help of private schools and tutors, but if you get accepted you can attend any of those schools 100% tuition free if you're poor enough. Now... If you're middle class, or if you have a complicated financial background that effectively makes you poor without technically qualifying you for this aid then that's a different story because dear God the tuition is high.

[beckyginger]

Chaotic academia is just undiagnosed ADHD

[taynamarinifontanela]

As a neurodivergent person, I've used the aesthetic to cope with the fact that the way formal education currently works just isn't suited for me. I'm only a high-school graduate (where I'm from it's legally required for anyone up to 18 to be enrolled in school, and homeschooling isn't an option), and even then, attending school caused a lot of damage to my mental health. Even during highschool, when accomodations were provided to an extent and the amount of homework was reduced compared to the school I was previously enrolled in, I was constantly disassociating, having meltdowns on a weekly basis, and engaging in self-destructive behavior like not keeping a sleep schedule (not that ADHD makes it any easier to retain any kind of sleep schedule). I would also take any flimsy excuse to try and skip class, which is very out of character for me. The guilt associated with not being able to succeed in school even knowing that I have potential really damaged my self-worth. As you said, a lot of what makes dark academia resonate with people is the love of learning, which I have, as well as a wish to make friends with people who want to pursue similar careers, but I know it's not the best option for me, so I like to dress like I'm enrolled in a prestigious British college to cope.

[JaceReboot]

A striking contradiction I can't help but notice...This aestetic sells itself as "eccentric", yet is so uniform and conforms so rigidly to socially accepted tokens of value. I mean wouldn't a truly eccentric lover of learning say over analyze The Lion King as easily as reading The Oddessy? The answer is yes lol As one with a love of not just learning but also understanding I can easily dive deep into seemingly shallow topics that traditional western culture may find "unacedemic"

[kirstenpaff]

Rowan: British elite university fees can be as high as 9000 pounds.
Me: Laughs in American.
Honestly, I think one of the big reasons why the humanities are so devalued in the modern American education system is that the amount of student debt you accrue as compared to your earning potential in that field means that a humanities degree is likely going to result in you being in crippling debt for the next couple of decades.

[hope-cat]

I just like it for the clothes. I have always had a serious soft spot for preppy clothing. I didn't know there was so much discourse over a Tumblr/Pinterest moodboard. 😳

[sawyerk]

I think a very overlooked aspect of Dark Academia’s appeal is the _dark_ part. So many of these stories are about the dangers of learning, and schools. Like analyzing horror, Dark Academia talks about how these institutions don’t usually have our best interests at heart, and that reflects a very real anxiety students from all walks of life have. While we participate to better ourselves, there’s this underlying “madness” in a lot of #darkacademia literature that the tragic protagonist will either fall prey too, or have to fight against.

Examples include…
1. Kill Your Darlings - Alan Ginsberg fetishizes the dark academia life that his love interest lives, but learns how shallow and repressed he (and by extension, that lifestyle) really is.
2. Harry Potter - all defense against the dark arts teachers are villains. We’re learning spells to fight a war, but also our nazi classmates are also here please send help.
3. Frankenstein - one of the OG “uh are you sure you want the power of god? I don’t think that’ll end well…”

And for the record, I like light academia too. In terms of literature I would classify light academia works as things like Brideshead Revisited, or even Alice in Wonderland? They emphasize like, POV, and morality, and wanting love and happiness. Really, it’s a lot like the divide between romantic literature and gothic literature—one grew out of the other, and there are a lot of similarities, but with some key aesthetic and content differences.

[sabrinabeeart]

I attended two universities and failed both times due to depression and anxiety. I felt so out of place and like I didn't belong there because of my background. My parents are farmers and there are so many stereotypes around this profession. Maybe they don't know a single work by Byron but my dad can fix any tractor and my mom just looks at a knitted item and knows how it was made. It's a different kind of knowledge and I felt people at uni only valued, well, academic knowledge and getting good grades without the awareness that that doesn't inherently equal intelligence. What I realised since then is that everybody pretends to know what they're talking about at uni. It all felt so disingenuous to me and without the self-awareness to combat the flaws. My mental health improved so much since I turned my back on the academic world. I still love learning, but now I do it because I want to, not to impress a professor or to get a good grade. I still wear lots of knits though lol

[butasimpleidiotwizard]

I don't have time to watch this yet but my mum went to Cambridge in the 80s and she regularly had people assume she wasn't meant to be there because she had a middlesborough accent, she ended up consciously changing her accent because of the discrimination she faced for it and that's what I always keep thinking about when I see dark academia stuff online, it just feels like its only for some people.

I saw an article recently about the same issue at Durham university, despite being located in the North less than 10% of its graduates are from there, and it's northern students regularly face classist bullying for their accents just like my mum did, so this is still happening over 30 years since my mum experienced it and people who romanticise universities like Durham either don't seem to be aware of it or just don't care and both are pretty bad.

[hurta_]

Skill share is the kind of thing Dark Academia should encourage but doesn’t lol

[itsyaboiroman]

My friend is going to Durham uni next year and he said that, despite being in the North, it’s a very Southern feeling university as it’s just where all the middle class, Southern, private school kids go because they didn’t manage to get into Oxford.

[spacecloud]

I'd say that the aesthetic and lifestyle that comes with Dark Academia are, for the most part, disconnected from real-world classism, etc. that was rampant in the time period that the style is based on. It's rooted in escapism and a romanticised take on education and a passion for learning. The reason that it's quite euro-centric is because the aesthetic is rooted in European fashion, creative works and architecture, like old British stone college buildings with moss and ivy growing up the walls and black-rimmed single-pained windows looking out onto a cobbled courtyard, the classic British rainy weather and consumption of teas.

But, that doesn't mean that POC can't adopt this style for their own though, and of course, there's no rule that the androgyny of the style can't mean boys in skirts. The aesthetic is euro-centric because that's the basis of the style, but that doesn't mean it can't be added to or that POC can't join in. I don't think there's anything inherently bad about Europeans embracing elements of their culture and history and adapting it for the modern day. But, it is definitely important to be aware of the views of the time being outdated and harmful.

You are right about the mental health implications though, as a lot of people do get obsessed with grades and running themselves ragged to feel accomplished, burning both ends of the candle. Though, that doesn't come with Dark Academia specifically, that is an issue that comes with the high-pressure environment of elite schools and colleges in general and it is amplified for those who were considered "gifted" when they were younger.


I can say from my own experience (I don't have a Dark Academia style, but I am very-much a chaotic person who works constantly. I write, make art videos, illustrate, make a comic and work a part-time job), as someone who went to art school, there is definitely a lot of stress and pressure that comes with higher education regardless of aesthetics. I would have break-downs every couple of months over deadline stress, and I sometimes found it hard to wind down and focus my energy into self-care when I needed to. Finding that balance can be very difficult and I certainly didn't have it figured out myself.

EDIT: Just to add to this, I will say that I think it is romanticised and that Dark Academia is used by many who are from lower class families, who dreamed of being able to attend a fancy, elite school, to have the opportunity for a better or more renowned education/degree. In the hopes that by working hard and becoming this hard-working, dedicated, chaotic individual will allow them to get into a well-paying field and break out of poverty (without having to let go of creativity and passion along the way).

[JustEssayIt]

It's so funny to me how academia actually TOOK AWAY all of my passion for learning. No longer was I the person who could get so lost in a topic of research or in a good book that I'd lose track of time. No, I had to be painfully aware of time constantly to see how I could fit all of my papers and reading in. Getting lost in your interests requires time and material security... whereas all university did for me was making me worry about both of those constantly. Not enough time, not enough money. I, too, had to cut my course load in half for a semester and spent 4 out of my 7 years at uni in therapy. It's only now, after uni, that I'm rediscovering my passion for learning, for reading, for falling down arbitrary research rabbit holes. I actually get to have weekends off from work, and I earn enough money to pay my rent. That's where my love for learning is blossoming again, when all university made me do is suppress my natural curiosity for paper deadlines and exams and trying to be the most "well read" person in the room.