In the recent thread on Biblical scholarship I posted this link to an article by Richard Dawkins. It’s not unique, of course. One of my favorite essays is How to Deconstruct Almost by Chip Morningstar. The point of both essays and many others is that large parts of the academic world are devoted to nonsense, even to the point where an article of pure nonsense can get published in a journal.
What puzzles me is that many people can acknowledge this fact, yet still be entirely or mostly pro-academia in their outlook. In other words, how is it possible to know that so many academics spend their lives writing and publishing meaningless drivel while still thinking that we need more spending on higher education, bigger budgets for colleges and universities so that they can pay higher salaries, and so forth? And also to generally view citations to academic work as a good thing and to accuse others of anti-intellectualism, all the while viewing vast swaths of the modern intellectual landscape as nonsensical?
That would seem to be akin to an argument that “reality” television shows are a good argument to abandon the expense of the FCC or even telecommunications infrastructure.
That some segments of any particular human activity may result in silliness is spectacularly poor argument against investing in all related endeavors.
“Academia” includes medicine, physics, engineering*, electronics, computer science, etc.
“Higher education” refers to the sort of education that will be required by more than half the population to provide meaningful employment as we move further into a century in which increasing levels of labor will be mechanized.
Even Liberal Arts education continues to provide society with people engaged in meaningful labor.
By the logic of the OP, the “Bridge to Nowhere” provides the perfect rationale to de-fund civil engineering.
The postmodern/"____ studies" fields are definitionally anti-intellectual; their whole reason for being is to attack the legitimacy of liberal arts studies. They are (or purport to be) arguments against the value of science, the validity of history, the usefulness of non-postmodern literature, and so on.
I can think of very few endeavors that are reliably, or even mostly, successful. Most products brought to market fail to turn a profit. Most small business don’t last. Most books are boring. Most TV sucks. Most batters strike out. Most prayers don’t get answered. Most research yields nothing. And, yes, most academic writing is crap.
Also, it would figure that the serious supporters of academia would be specially motivated to call out those who produce schlock scholarship – a way to protect the brand, if you will.
Actually there’s plenty of them; they just tend to be either uncreative tasks with highly predictable outcomes, like “build a road from here to there”. Or on the other end of the spectrum, experiments where pretty much any result is a useful one because the goal is to find out what happens, not a specific result.
So baroque? Rococo? Archaic Greek sculpting? Or perhaps Viking rune-carving? Maybe even a slapdash of impressionism? I mean, way to narrow it down, there, champ.
How is it possible to know that so many Christians are bad people who willingly commit sins against their neighbors on a daily basis, while still thinking that Christianity is a good thing?
Could you give me a rough percentage? Could you possibly break it down by field of study?
Most academics, in the end, probably make less per hour of work than migrant farmers. Most academics, particularly from the fields your links are criticizing, live extremely difficult lives of balancing multiple shitty adjunct teaching positions with miserable pay and no benefits. Most academics would recognize that the way colleges are evolving it’s becoming more and more likely that the poorly paid shitty adjunct position will be the norm. In the end, even the shittiest academic is performing a service at a rate of compensation well below equivalently educated people in the private sector. Sure, criticize some of the garbage each field of study produces, and there is plenty of it, but to go beyond that is to attack a system that barely works for all involved. It’s like getting on somebody’s case for volunteering in a soup kitchen.
I’d argue that only a very tiny percentage of all articles in journals of every academic discipline are completely unworthy of citation. Even the most humdrum, boring, yet-another-replication-article has the kind of scholarship worthy of citation and deserves analysis as part of a debate or some other intellectual pursuit.
So you’re confused by people who are pro-academia, by people who see the value of hard-working, poorly compensated, highly motivated individuals who have added, even if by a vanishingly small amount, to the overall knowledge-base of humanity? What’s not to love?
Got a quantitative estimate for the actual figures representing those alleged “large parts” and “many academics” and “vast swaths”, not to mention a cite thereunto?
Post-structuralist extremism and its ilk may garner a lot of newspaper headlines, but in my experience they really don’t constitute a significant part of most academic departments of chemistry, political science, French, economics, German, history, physics, sociology, computer science, engineering, Russian, classics, mathematics, psychology, Italian, South Asian studies, theater, environmental science, philosophy, English, East Asian studies, religious studies, biology, neuroscience, archaeology, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, art history, geology, astronomy, comparative literature, linguistics, music, Slavic languages, accounting, education, management, cognitive science, and medieval studies, among others.
Also in my experience, even the usual scapegoat programs like women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, semiotics, and literary studies generally have plenty of non-radical and non-nonsensical academic research going on in them. But even if you reflexively toss out any academic program you’ve ever heard described as “post-modernist”, that still leaves a whole lot of the “modern intellectual landscape” to consider.
In short: People who attempt to tar academia in general, or even vaguely designated “large parts” of it, with the radical-ideological-nonsense brush are generally doing so out of ignorance and intellectual laziness. The fact that some such people work in academia themselves does not necessarily mean that they know what they’re talking about.
> Post-structuralist extremism and its ilk may garner a lot of newspaper
> headlines, but in my experience they really don’t constitute a significant part of
> most academic departments of chemistry, political science, French, economics,
> German, history, physics, sociology, computer science, engineering, Russian,
> classics, mathematics, psychology, Italian, South Asian studies, theater,
> environmental science, philosophy, English, East Asian studies, religious
> studies, biology, neuroscience, archaeology, anthropology, Middle Eastern
> studies, art history, geology, astronomy, comparative literature, linguistics,
> music, Slavic languages, accounting, education, management, cognitive science,
> and medieval studies, among others.
And the fields that Kimstu mentions are (with a few exceptions that I’ll mention) nearly all liberal arts fields. Beyond that are non-liberal-arts fields like education, business (including management and marketing), engineering (including computer science), nursing, medical technology, library science, music performance (as opposed to music history or theory), art (as opposed to art history), architecture, agriculture, public administration, public relations, as well as things that you might not know are possible college majors like video game design. Also there are things like journalism and theater which might or might not be considered liberal arts. Majors in liberal arts are about one-third of all bachelor’s degrees at the moment. So things like deconstructionism or postmodernism are not only a tiny part of liberal arts studies, but liberal arts aren’t what most people major in these days anyway. Most undergraduate college students take a few liberal arts courses to get some theoretical background for the applied fields that they are majoring in. In addition, they may have to take some for their diversity requirments. Academia as a small unified place where academics at least vaguely understand what’s going on in other fields disappeared a long time ago.
Thank you. If one believes that the problem with modern American universities is that the kids these days are reading too much Marx, Derrida, and Lacan, then all that has been proven is that one knows nothing at all about what’s going on among American university students.
But in regards to the main point, the issue is not merely that some of what comes out of academia is garbage. It’s that, at least to judge by the two pieces I linked to and the general attitude of this board and others when the topic is mentioned, whole fields within the humanities have wandered into a jungle of nonsense and seem unable to get out of it. Now personally, I believe that is possible to have useful, positive humanities research. I would love it if there were original material coming from literature departments that ordinary people could understand and appreciate. However, as Morningstar says:
Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own.
Merely ignoring the problem will not make it go away. Meanwhile, as long as a significant part of the academic world does act like this, it will be a drag on academia’s relationship with the rest of humanity.