I think of nothing so much as this:
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| And this was written almost 30 years ago. It's only gotten worse since. |
Yep. Most of what passes for academia and scholarship today would make Cliff Clavin blush. Your average Neanderthal would call it out for the stupid crap that it is. But for generations now, the world of intelligentsia has forged its own cant, filled to the brim with jargon, multisyllabic buzzwords, and linguistic codes that only the inner cliques of exclusive same-thinking research clubs can decipher.
In short, acting like snake oil salesmen, they've learned how to hide the fact by sounding like someone wiring the latest space shuttle. In reality, they're just shoveling manure.
Yet with a combination of almost mandatory secondary education, and a sympathetic media and Washington sympathizers propping them up as geniuses and sages, they're the prophets proclaiming the laws of the new godless paganism here to drive out the One, True God. The results of the last fifty years more than speak for themselves.
Where did you find the first one? It's hysterical
ReplyDeleteI think Rod Dreher had it as an example of the bat nuts crazy that passes for scholarship today.
DeleteI'd need more evedence that it isn't a parody. I wouldn't be too surprised if it was real, but I'm not entirely willing to say it isn't satire.
DeleteNever mind, I just looked it up. It's completely real. The destruction of Literature studies in Higher Education is nearly Complete
DeleteFewer than 1,000 baccalaureate degrees are awarded in Classics in a typical year in the United States. (There are 1.9 million baccalaureate degrees awarded in toto, with business administration, nursing, psychology, and biology the top majors). The department which hired and tenured this man are begging to be shut down and put out on the curb. Well, they would be if Berkeley had serious people on its board of trustees. The trouble is, almost no institutions do.
ReplyDeleteI fear what we see above is becoming more the norm, and those who have a problem with it will be the ones who are dismissed.
DeleteOn a related note, did you see the news on Matthew Harris the UCLA Manifesto writer? The man is so hilariously unhinged it's amazing.
DeleteI did not know that. It wouldn't surprise me.
DeleteIt depends on the field. As a physicist, I resent being grouped together with "gender studies".
ReplyDeleteHeh. I don't know if such distinctions matter as much as they used to.
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