How to support academia and view much academic work as nonsense

[Kimstu]

@ITR_champion

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.

Well, there’s your problem: you’re evaluating this claim on the basis of two polemical articles with little or no specific quantitative information and a vaguely-defined “general attitude” that you claim to have encountered.

Show us some credible evidence that “whole fields within the humanities” actually HAVE “wandered into a jungle of nonsense and seem unable to get out of it”, rather than merely repeating cherished items of recreational-outrage gossip from the popular press about how post-modernism is destroying the academy, and then we can have a debate about it.

At present, however, you just sound like one of those daytime-talk-show devotees who’s convinced that all Hollywood actors are secretly gay Satanist drug addicts or that the average black female teenager has borne four babies by at least three different fathers. Just because some scandalous behavior gets a lot of play in popular media doesn’t mean that it really represents a significant trend.

@ITR champion

Now personally, I believe that is possible to have useful, positive humanities research.

Well gosh, that’s mighty big of you.

@ITR champion

I would love it if there were original material coming from literature departments that ordinary people could understand and appreciate.

How nice. Have you ever thought of going out there on that Internet thingy and, you know, looking for some?

Perhaps, for instance, you might enjoy the article “Zhu Shenghao: Shakespeare Translator and a Shakespearean Tragic Hero in Wartime China” in a recent issue of Comparative Literature Studies, by a professor of cultural theory at the University of Montreal and Shanghai Jiaotong University, which describes the early to mid-20th-century literary phenomenon of Chinese translations of Shakespeare and Chinese intellectuals’ responses to encountering Western literary classics.

There are literally thousands of literature studies articles being published every year that use painstaking research to provide fascinating information on serious aspects of literature. Just because every literature-studies research article that you’ve ever heard of may have been a farrago of high-concept post-structuralist gobbledegook cherry-picked by some journalist or popular pundit in order to tsk-tsk about the deplorable state of the academy doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of more interesting material out there.

@ITR champion

Merely ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

And merely ignorantly asserting that there is a problem will not make it so.

@ITR champion

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.

And as long as you can’t even be arsed to tell us what counts as “a significant part of the academic world” and to provide a cite for how much of it really is “acting like this”, you will still fail to have a credible premise for debate.

The problem with “academia’s relationship with the rest of humanity”, at least as represented by you, seems to have less to do with academia’s failure to sustain its intellectual responsibilities, and more to do with humanity’s natural preference for lazily believing cheap bombast and scurrilous gossip over taking the trouble to actually do some research and find out what the facts are.

[lew_cody]

Marx, Derrida, Lacan and various other theorists still have their adherents, although really hardcore deconstruction (say) is a relic of the 1970s and 80s and probably more than a bit passé.

Post-colonialism was quite popular in the program I was in, and cultural studies had a notable following. Both of these do incorporate Marxist, Freudian, post-structural and post-modern theory while still being a bit larger than the sum of these parts. Strangely, the area with some of the most dogmatic “critical theory” people was freshman composition and composition theory. Some freshman comp anthologies try to teach freshman to write like academics by cultivating critical awareness of how “positioned” they are, an approach I thought was perfectly insane. Ethnographers and anthropologists were a big fave among the comp people, even though it was no picnic trying to get freshmen to understand the fine points of their complex theories. What’s more (and what ties in with the theme of this thread), faculty from other departments sometimes complained to the comp people about the quality of students’ writing and couldn’t something be done about it? Well, no, because correcting their grammar or teaching them sentence structure would be imposing a narrative on them.

Academics from many departments other than some areas of the humanities have no patience for critical-theory drivel, and even many English profs are that fond of it. But in some departments, groupthink is very strong and no one wants to rock the boat too much–least of all the graduate students who depend on the profs to sit on their committees and grant their degrees. So while it’s true that the stereotypical excesses of critical theory are embraced by a fairly small segment of academics, some of them hold to these views very tenaciously.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

Hey ITR champion, I want to thank you for this thread because it caused me to look for some literary criticism websites focused on modern authors: The Literary Index. The link goes to their links page because i wanted you to see there are others.

I only bring it up because as I skimmed some of the articles I saw some very clearly written, straightforward, ones like this analysis of Stephen King’s “The Body”. I also saw some that looked a little more dense, like this analysis of Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik”.

I thought to myself, “Well this is how that ITR-guy can start to quantify the bullshit. He can go through all these articles and sift out the pseudo-intellectual articles and calculate a percentage for us”. Why don’t you do that for free and report back to us with how you categorized each article. It’s something an academic would probably do.

[BrainGlutton]

@Inner_Stickler

I can confirm that I never read any Marx, Derrida, or Lacan in college.

:mad: I hate people who get by on the Cliffs Notes!

[Wendell_Wagner]

In philosophy, the sort of things like deconstruction, postmoderism, etc. are what’s called continental philosophy. This is usually opposed to analytic philosophy, which is the sort that stays away from those things. I’ve read that over 90% of American philosophy professors consider themselves to be analytic philosophers rather than continental philosophers. There are more adherents of the continental sort of stuff in literature departments, but I’d estimate that at least two-thirds of literature professors are no fans of continental-like theories. There are some adherents of the continental sort of studies in other fields like anthropology, but the percentage of professors inclined towards that sort of thing is probably closer to that in philosophy than in literature.

So contrary to what you say, there is no field of humanities that’s dominated by this sort of thing (the “continental” approach). Continental theories are a minority of the research done in a few areas of the humanities. The humanities are only part of all liberal arts. Liberal arts are only part of the courses taught in universities today. In no sense do the theories that you’re so worried about dominate academia.

And, as has been stated before, research into deep theories is only a tiny part of the work of most academics. In English departments especially, the largest part of most professors’ work is teaching low-level classes. They mostly don’t get to teach high-level undergraduate classes and even less get to teach graduate classes. Once they finish their Ph.D.'s they don’t get much chance to write academic papers. Even so far as they believe in continental-type theories, they get very little chance to teach, write, or even talk about them.

[BrainGlutton]

Academia is just about the only place left in America where you can be a Marxist, and proclaim it openly and argue for it, as part of your job. (Tenure helps.) That apparently gives rise to a certain public perception/stereotype, even though Marxist profs are a minority in probably every academic field including Socialist Studies, if there is such a thing.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Furthermore, not all advocates of these continental-type theories are Marxists. I’d be surprised if even half of them are. Bigger spending for higher education (which what the OP was asking about) is thus removed from Marxism on many levels. Claiming that you don’t want to fund your local community college, where most of the graduates get associate’s degrees that lead directly to jobs and even the graduates who go on to four-year institutions get degrees in non-liberal arts subjects like elementary education, nursing, and business, will lead to producing Marxism is incredibly stretching things. The community college mostly doesn’t produce people who get four-year degrees. Those four-year degree people mostly don’t do liberal arts subjects. The liberal arts graduates are mostly in fields not affected by continental-type theories. The ones in such fields mostly disagree with continental-type theories. The people who advocate continental-type theories mostly aren’t Marxists.

Incidentally, as I forgot to mention before, although other posters have, the influence of continental-type theories in any academic field has been declining since the 1990’s.

[Voyager]

@ITR_champion

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.

Jumping up and down about the problem does not make it actually exist.
Most science is not driven by commercial necessity. And real science and engineering papers are just as dense and impossible to read by the average person as an academic paper on literature. However in the former case there are lots of equations and so the difficulty is expected; in the latter there is specialized vocabulary in English which a naive reader thinks he should understand. Now, use of this vocabulary can product junk, but so can the use of equations.
Yeah, the humanities may be more isolated, but that is because they have a hard time convincing companies to give them research money. And in line with the Ubik example, I just read a monograph on E. E. Smith by an academic author - quite clear and well written, in fact.
And I agree with others - showing that there is a real problem takes more than a few famous examples.

[Docta_G]

@Condescending_Robot

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.

This is glib nonsense. Postmodernism does not attack the legitimacy of these studies, only their meaning. It reinterprets, say, what scientific explanation is, rather than dismissing it. It redefines, say, truth as justification, rather than as correspondence or coherence, and is rigorously intellectual in doing so.

Your post indicates a gross misunderstanding of postmodernism, and is itself glibly anti-intellectual on this topic.

[BrainGlutton]

@Voyager

And in line with the Ubik example, I just read a monograph on E. E. Smith by an academic author - quite clear and well written, in fact.

Unlike E.E. Smith (if you mean Golden-Age SF writer E.E. “Doc” Smith).

[Voyager]

@BrainGlutton

Unlike E.E. Smith (if you mean Golden-Age SF writer E.E. “Doc” Smith).

Well-written, no, but clear, yes. I never noticed any tangled prose. I’ve read far worse - like van Vogt, for instance.

[LinusK]

@Condescending_Robot

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.

No, they’re merely pointing out that values are constructed; they don’t exist in the nature of things. They’re put there by people. And because people are what we are, our values are more informed by self-interest, than by anything else. And one of the self-interested things we do is we pretend that our values are True, in the capital-t sense of the word, when they’re not.

It hardens back to Socrates, who said (supposedly) that he was the wisest man in the world, only because he knew that he knew nothing.

It’s the opposite of whoever it was who said: “Science is true, whether you believe it or not.”

Which isn’t to say a lot of academic writing isn’t drivel. It is. The first step to fixing it would be to get rid of academic journals, and the peer review system. Not sufficient, but necessary.

[ITR_champion]

@Kimstu

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.

Maybe so, but what you say misses the point. Academics are concerned about the way they and their work are perceived by the world at large and worried about tendencies in many quarters to be dismissive or hostile towards anything that comes from academia. Any institution wants to be perceived positively. Some don’t seem to realize that positive perceptions don’t happen automatically. Institutions must manage their perceptions and clean up things that are producing serious negative publicitiy. Hurling insults at anyone with a negative perception won’t accomplish anything.

[Wendell_Wagner]

The problem is, ITR champion, that you didn’t start this thread by saying that continental-type theories are full of incomprehensible terminology and whatever useful observations they might possibly contain are buried deeply underneath that nonsense. If you had simply said that, there wouldn’t be much disagreement with you. You started by asking us why we believe more money should be spent on higher education when many academics spend their time on meaningless drivel. The answer is that the amount of academic time spent on these theories is incredibly tiny compared to the proportion of the amount of time that academics spend on their work. You insisted on claiming that these theories somehow taint all academia. The problem is that you have an agenda. You think that these theories somehow characterize academia when they don’t. Furthermore, I suspect that the reason that these theories bother you is that they challenge your political beliefs, not that they are nonsense.

[LinusK]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

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?

I call bullshit.

Academics don’t make less than farm workers, and its not a charity. (If it was, why are academic j

[LinusK]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

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?

I call bullshit.

Academics don’t make less than farm workers, and it’s not a charity. (If it was, why are academic journals so expensive? Why arent the services they’re performing available to the public?)

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@LinusK

…get rid of academic journals, and the peer review system. Not sufficient, but necessary.

@LinusK

I call bullshit.

Academics don’t make less than farm workers, and it’s not a charity. (If it was, why are academic journals so expensive? Why arent the services they’re performing available to the public?)

Well, academic life starts in graduate school. The lucky academic gets a teaching assistantship or research assistantship. The rate of compensation for these jobs is tutition plus a yearly salary of roughly $20,000. In return this budding academic teaches 2-3 classes in addition to the full-time job of taking classes and doing their research. There is no on the clock/off the clock. It is constantly on the clock. From my experience, this is the best case scenario, and it is representative of the sciences. The hourly rate of pay is from ~$7/hr to ~$15/hr.

That’s not much different than a migrant farmer. Their hourly rate of pay varies by the field (no pun intended) they work in. These living conditions for the academic go on for about 6 years on average.

In the humanities, which is what this thread is really about, there typically are not assistantships available. Everything is out of pocket, and the Ph.D. takes longer. Up to 10 years. So yeah, that’s a lot less than a migrant farmer.

Moving on to the first academic postdoc, these start at $36,000 to $45,000 in the sciences. If you want to get past this step in the stairway to tenure you better spend a lot more than 40 hours/week doing research and writing. A lot of writing. This amount of writing blends so well into your everyday life that 60-80 hour weeks is completely normal. We’re still in the $15-$20/hr range. From what I am reading, a good mushroom picker can make about that much. Granted one job is objectively harder than the other, but you did call bullshit on the rate of pay. Anyway, this circumstance can go on for 6-8 years and grants from places like the NIH put a cap on how much a postdoc can make and some schools put a cap on how many years you can work as a postdoc. In other words, there is a lot of job insecurity as any kind of academic, from technician to professor, and that is a lot like a migrant farmer.

Now for the humanities…wait are there many postdoc positions in the humanities? I think they just go straight to teaching. Adjunct teaching for the most part. $2000-$5000 per class. At $3500 (in the middle) that is 10 classes to make $30K per year plus no benefits typically speaking. Most schools won’t let an adjunct teach more than a few classes per semester so that means working at multiple colleges, spread all over a city or possibly a state. Almost sounds like a migrant farmer!

Now, if you are one of the relative few, the tiny percentage, that gets a full-time teaching position, then you never get paid much but the hours aren’t bad either. If you continue to do research, it’s a lifetime of incremental increases while contributing to the knowledge of humanity.

My rhetoric was probably over the top with analogizing to charity, but the point, which I sincerely hope you understand, is that academics, on average, are not compensated well, especially in comparison to their peers in the private sector, for the wonderful service they do humanity.

As for your comments concerning journals, I don’t know how that relates to being an academic since these companies that publish journals are private entities.

In the end, the successful academic is a person who commits long hours to expanding the knowledge of humanity at a liveable to fairly nice rate of pay. The unsuccessful academic contributes to the knowledge of humanity and has a rate of compensation that steadily declines from graduation until they finally give it all up to start picking mushrooms.

[LinusK]

Not that I want to get too far into the weeds with this, but you’re comparing students to migrant farm workers. If you want to compare grad school students to migrant farm workers, I’ll go along with it - in that case, many grad school students make less than farm workers. Some make far less, because they go into debt to get their degrees.

According to Wikipedia, though, the average pay for full-time faculty in the US is $73k. For farm workers, $11k.

The thing about the journals is that they are money-making businesses. And they make money by charging outrageous fees to publicly supported libraries. And academics go along with it - even to the extent of producing all of the content in the journals themselves, for free - because their goal is advancing their careers, not performing a public service.

Soup kitchens make soup in order to provide soup to the public, for free. So there’s a difference there.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

@LinusK

Not that I want to get too far into the weeds with this, but you’re comparing students to migrant farm workers. If you want to compare grad school students to migrant farm workers, I’ll go along with it - in that case, many grad school students make less than farm workers. Some make far less, because they go into debt to get their degrees.

I know my reply was long and boring but it was just as much about life after graduate school as well.

@LinusK

According to Wikipedia, though, the average pay for full-time faculty in the US is $73k. For farm workers, $11k.

Well see now? I know one of those is a loaded statistic. “Full-time faculty” is not anything like the group described by the term “academic”. Go to any smaller schools’ website, any department and compare the number of full-time faculty to adjunct faculty. Half or more of the teachers at almost any of these schools, almost any department, are part-timers.

Anyways, the essence of the post you originally replied to was that for their level of education, for what they contribute in service to human knowledge, their compensation is nothing to celebrate. To have such a strong, overly-generalized, opinion on the quality of academic output by harping on the tiny percentage of published works that are fairly silly or just too dense with jargon to easily understand, such as displayed by ITR champion, is bizarre to me. This is especially the case considering that it takes a relatively tiny investment to get decent to excellent academics to produce incremental to astonishing works expanding the range of human knowledge. It’s unreal to me that given the cost-benefit ratio of the entire range of people called an ‘academic’ that somebody would want to stereotype the lot while focusing on the tiniest proportion.

@LinusK

The thing about the journals is that they are money-making businesses. And they make money by charging outrageous fees to publicly supported libraries. And academics go along with it - even to the extent of producing all of the content in the journals themselves, for free - because their goal is advancing their careers, not performing a public service.

Academics go along with it because it’s their responsibility to share the results of their work and have it criticized by their community. Many journals provide their articles for free, and many academics share their manuscripts for free. This behavior advances their career, sure, but it does so in the same way that properly handling any aspect of one’s chosen profession tends to advance your career. You can be 100% certain that academics would share their work by some means or another without their career riding on it. They want their work to be analyzed and critiqued by their peers.

I think you are letting your cynicism get ahead of itself. Academics as a whole are performing a service at a relatively low rate of pay.

[Lamia]

@LinusK

(If it was, why are academic journals so expensive? Why arent the services they’re performing available to the public?)

They’re so expensive because 1) they are not supported by advertizing dollars and 2) some publishers are kind of evil. That said, the content of these journals is available to the public through university libraries. I am a university librarian, and anyone can come in to the library where I work and read our journals. The visitors we get from the local community tend to be more interested in using our computers to look at pornography, but I have occasionally assisted community patrons with finding articles related to some personal or professional project of theirs.

There’s also a growing number of open source academic journals available on the web for free. Visit the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to search/browse these free journals.