Bullshit On The Academe

I couldn't have criticized it better myself. Thanks for finally pinpointing the source of my immense frustration and annoyance!

"over the past ten or twenty years, there has been some criticism of political correctness at universities. i had never read any of that stuff. in economics, we didn't talk to people in other departments and so didn't encounter any of the conversation. i felt i just didn't understand any of it, neither side. after getting into new media, however, i've had several moments where i was surprised at how someone was reacting to something. example: i view ev psych as a pretty neutral, benign, reasonable, and persuasive theory about the pressures that help create human behavior. yet at ludium I it got an extremely hostile and emotional negative reaction from my colleagues at terra nova - pretty much all of them. That surprised me and i've been trying to figure it out ever since.

moreover, i've learned that there's a language that works, and another that doesn't work, when you're talking to folks on the cultural studies side of communications. this was evident in my trip to UT Austin, where I had numerous meetings with critical theory scholars. they have a different way of approaching subjects.

i was reading an essay about the election that i found interesting, and surprisingly the author was roger kimball, the guy who wrote the book *tenured radicals* back in 1990. me and bryant paul were joking around about the possibility of tenured radicals at IU a while back. i remembered it as a book that inspired fistfights. so i bought the book and decided to read it, just for fun.

i started reading it yesterday and just finished it five minutes ago, reading it word for word. as some of you know, i *never* do that.

of course i don't agree with much that he writes. but i felt that i was reading an MD's precise, clear diagnosis of a vague illness of which i had been aware but couldn't really describe.

just a few examples: it has bugged me for a long time that so much academic writing is hard to understand. in economics, i chalked that up to the math-heads getting obsessed with formulas and never really learning how to write. but those few times i tried to join the wider intellectual conversation - and i really did try, i read the post-moderns -- i couldn't understand it either. well, kimball explains that there used to be a norm among intellectuals that you should try to express profound ideas simply. it's been abandoned, he says, and replaced by a norm of gamesmanship over word-play. whatever you think of Kimball, that does seem to be true in my experience.

which leads to another thing: i became convinced long ago that academic success is largely a game that you play. But Kimball's view is that this is new; it didn't used to be that way but has only happened because we have given up on notions like truth and merit. again whatever you think of the book, this part has seemed absolutely true, in my experience.

Here's another: my big beef with Brad Bushman is that he clearly has an agenda. Kimball says that the ideal of scholarship used to be disinterested pursuit of truth, but that we're giving that up, concluding that since our biases are always present, we might as well surrender our scholarship to them. and reflecting on my experience as an academic, it turns out that the people i have respected are the ones who seem uninterested in the directions of the implications of their findings, only interested, rather, that the implications be significant (real-world significant!). people who are clearly pursuing some kind of an agenda have always bugged me, whatever the agenda.

finally, i could never understand why i felt i was not really getting anywhere in the academy, i mean, as a "person of higher thinking", even though i had worked hard as a kid to expose myself to music, the arts, and literature from the western tradition. i thought it was weird that few people in economics knew the difference between bach and beethoven, that none of them spoke a foreign language (unless born with it), and nobody seemed to care. Kimball argues that by removing our respect for a common body of knowledge said to be "higher", we've un-democratized education. See, if a person needs to know Shakespeare and Mozart to be educated, and if that standard is accepted and understood by everybody, then even a kid from industrial Cleveland can listen and read and work his way into the system, by showing that he knows his stuff. But if there isn't a set of accepted things-to-know, then the only way to become a person of thought is to get accepted by the in-club on, well, *some* grounds, like an SAT score or your ability to sound like Derrida. when we lose the canon and the attempt to pursue merit, truth, and disinterested scholarship, we turn academia into a good-buddy club. it is truly not what you know, it's who you know - because it's assumed that people cannot know things, only other people.

On all these points, reading the book gave me many 'aha' moments, where i felt i understood the academy i have lived and worked in quite a bit better. i mean, in my 20+ years, i have never met a single person in the humanities who says positive things about western culture. i had never really grasped that, how weird it is. this book puts a spin on that fact, a spin that fits surprisingly well, though like i said, i wouldn't agree with all of the political pronouncements. (i am sure he'd be appalled that there's such a thing as a tenured professor of video games.) and while kimball himself is politically conservative, i think his point of view on universities isn't. this seems to me like a debate between old liberals and the new left.

well, i would recommend this book or something like it as you guys prepare for interviewing in the communications market. if you look at the NCA program, you know you're going to get into environments where they take this kind of stuff very seriously. on one side or the other, i mean. i think you can use kimball's book and reviews of it to see both sides. and you ought to know that there's a debate going on at a much earlier point in your careers than i did.