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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, January 03, 2005

THE FIGHT AT FLORIDA STATE


UD’s father, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health for his entire career, was a staunch empiricist. His rationalism had a strong impact on UD, who still finds it shocking that there are people with advanced degrees from good colleges who believe in astrology and have no grasp of scientific method.

Although UD is far less radically empiricist than her father was, she is an enthusiast of the enlightenment, which has made her life as a literature professor somewhat trying. Arguments, whether about paramecia or poetry, should be clear, reasoned, evidence-based, plausible to a lot of people, and generally applicable, UD figures. Wishful thinking, exceptionalism, rhetorical convolution, and charismatic theatricality -- the pillars of her profession -- make UD blush.




But a focus upon the threat to reasoned thought in the academy that comes from the humanities shouldn’t distract us from other sources of magical thinking in the American university. Because they often make bogus therapeutic claims, some psychology departments, for instance (see UD post dated 4/12/2004) , are more insidious than English departments. Similarly, many schools of education instruct their graduates in how to subject our most vulnerable citizens to duncery.

There’s nothing intrinsically irrational in the study of psychology, or education, or theology for that matter; at their best, these represent disciplined ways of exploring with careful neutrality various human phenomena. But just as history can be coarsened into peace studies, anything can be degraded into a species of emotivism. Even the hard sciences.



Along those lines, the story out of Florida State University, where an escalating war rages between the university’s furious medical faculty and a politician who rammed a new FSU chiropractic school through the legislature (see UD posts dated 12/29/04 and 12/31/04), is beginning to get serious press attention. Who will prevail? And what can this high-profile fight tell us about the definition and the defense of the legitimate university?




Prompted by a reader who thinks highly of chiropractic, UD has spent some days reading up on the profession, its theories and its practices. She concludes that in an extremely modest sense, chiropractic has a contribution to make. There are some practitioners (given the weak educations most have received, UD thinks the number of such people small) who can lay their hands on a person’s back and make that person (temporarily) feel better.

Such a modest contribution amounts to less than a profession or an academic field - it amounts to a narrow therapeutic activity. But chiropractic has pumped itself up into a whole big pseudo-profession which now routinely approaches legitimate American and Canadian universities with the idea of establishing a chiropractic medical school in them. Plenty of marginally legitimate, or illegitimate, chiropractic schools already exist to teach students the hocus-pocus vitalistic jargon that dominates the field, and chiropractors who come out of these schools seem to do pretty well in terms of employment and salary. But they are restless for respectability.




The failed effort by Canadian chiropractors to establish a medical school at York University a few years ago demonstrates, writes a physicist at York, how “tenuous truth's foothold is within the contemporary university.” Administrators seduced by the money the chiropractors were offering, and social scientists who disdain truth claims (“contrary to arguments made by some sociologists, no university has a responsibility to take in an alternative medicine community simply because a significant minority of the population uses its therapies. Many adults believe in astrology, but university administrators wouldn't entertain a serious suggestion to merge with a school of astrology.”), pushed the merger quite far, though it was ultimately rejected - soundly - by York’s faculty.

The problem, though, will recur: “With ever-shrinking budgets, university administrations are challenged more and more to devise creative ways of securing funding. Enter alternative medicine, whose popularity with the public is growing rapidly. Colleges of acupuncture, homeopathy, and naturopathy have become ubiquitous in major centers, along with chiropractic colleges. Can there be any doubt that those with deep pockets will seek legitimization through affiliations with universities in the future?”




Although plenty of bogus therapies have infiltrated universities via psychology departments, the hard sciences have policed their borders well so far, and UD is confident that even in a notably corrupt state like Florida serious science will prevail against the philistines. But these dustups allow us to focus upon the essential nature of the university as a place apart from the sentimentality, the credulity, the fuzzy thinking, the passive dependency upon experts, and the herd mentality that comprise the mental world of many people.