The attacks are everywhere now. Here’s William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
[These fields are] intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
(The best attack on “Theory” remains Richard Rorty’s.)
For years, many of this blog’s posts were variations on this observation; and now, with the withering results of the election, we can go further than Deresiewicz and note the historical irony of a ridiculously, coercively, hyper-politicized academy (“ideological positions” trump, as it were, everything, including the aesthetic values that are, after all, the distinguishing characteristic of what we call literature) getting slapped upside the head by none other than the actual politics of this country.
Hence Deresiewicz’s stress on the unreality from which many professors continue to suffer: They just don’t get it that most people have rather conservative and traditional dispositions, and that this reality does not make people shitty reactionaries. The university is supposed to be the place where people’s traditional, inherited perceptions and beliefs are put into question (college is where you read Blake and Nietzsche); but as Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, pointed out in a defense of Allan Bloom, the academy went apeshit radical rather than humanely subversive.
November 22nd, 2024 at 12:01PM
Some months ago one of the Power Line contributors, might have been Steven Hayward (at Berkeley) observed that higher education had gone from (these adjectives are approximate) a skeptical to an adversarial stance respecting the civilization it inhabits.
Swapping out a few deanlets and encouraging a few faculty members to pursue their hobbies will not break the fundamental trade-off, which is that the act of cultivating fundamental truths requires the encouragement of healthy skepticism. Consider your own discipline, even if you grant the value of “the best that has been thought or written” the enterprise itself requires that practitioners spell out their criteria for “best” and even with agreement on those criteria there’s still the challenge of what to put into the course outline for those upcoming fifteen weeks.
In my discipline, this is probably the fourth alternation in policy between a consumer welfare standard as opposed to a structure-conduct-performance standard for breaking up big companies, and despite a hundred years of squabbling over the policy criteria there’s little empirical evidence to evaluate what has happened to consumer welfare under the policy regimes.
It’s likely that a lot of that work has been taken up by policy shops (with their tight priors) simply because the apeshit radicals crowded out the skeptics.
December 4th, 2024 at 3:44PM
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