MaxedOutMama
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
In Search Of Kant
Dr. Sanity slugs it out of the ballpark in this post about the intellectual deficits of the professorial elite:
But the real innovators - the scholars who want to carefully study social trends, programs, how our society works and how to make it better - aren't honored. They're just not extreme enough. My personal politics is not really left or right. When I hear some new social program being proposed, I don't say "Oh that's socialism!" or "That's free-market bunk!" My question is always, "How is it going to work in practice?" It's those types of questions that we don't study very much any more - and it's those types of questions that would actually pay off for our society. So I get really irked with the knee-jerk feminism, I'm not into fashionable fascist arguments cloaked as progressive views, I'm tired of dubious environmentalists worrying about dandruff, and I'm still hunting for answers to reasonable questions that I have about trends in our society.
IMO a society that isn't looking at itself critically and trying to figure out how to do better is probably headed downhill. We live in a world that is rapidly changing and if we can't figure out how to change with it we will pay an increasingly price. But without a solid basis of theory, investigation and testing we can't figure out how to change. The 60's movement morphed into the vacuous revolutionaries of the 70's, whose hallmark was never being forced to propose a workable solution to any problem. That brand of thinking is still haunting us.
Is it really a surprise that our society is dominated by big corporations and their lobbyists? If the bulk of what we get out of universities is faked data, skewed studies and artistic frothing at the mouth, there will be no counterpoint to a seemingly solid company-funded study. So the corporate lobbyists are winning the day, and all too often it is because we lack a solid objective body of scholarship on the issues of the day. This is not good.
Thirty plus years ago those who are the current professors were just students acting out during the Vietnam war. Their legacy continues to infect our college campuses. I won't bother to detail the entire insanity of that time (those of us who lived through it can remember it well enough), which was driven by the love affair of the so-called intellectuals with Marxism.What is admired and supported on campuses is mostly radicalism. A reasoned critique of our society is rarely found. There are people who are leftists who work in the realm of careful reasoned analysis, but truth to be told, many of them aren't really admired. The kudos goes largely to whoever can take the next most novel and extreme position. Reasoned criticism is out - extremism is in. The Ward Churchills have excellent careers and those lucrative speaking engagements, while careful scholars are frequently ignored. If you're a female professor, your best path to tenure is to find some really outrageous way to critique current institutions. Then everybody claps and sits around feeling self-righteous and satisfied.
Those students are the intellectual elites of today's campus. Since Marxism and its social experiments have been consigned to the dustbin of history, the object of their infatuation has changed somewhat. Nowadays they don't much care what they believe, as long as they are anti-American; anti-Israeli; anti-Freedom; anti-Capitalism.
But the real innovators - the scholars who want to carefully study social trends, programs, how our society works and how to make it better - aren't honored. They're just not extreme enough. My personal politics is not really left or right. When I hear some new social program being proposed, I don't say "Oh that's socialism!" or "That's free-market bunk!" My question is always, "How is it going to work in practice?" It's those types of questions that we don't study very much any more - and it's those types of questions that would actually pay off for our society. So I get really irked with the knee-jerk feminism, I'm not into fashionable fascist arguments cloaked as progressive views, I'm tired of dubious environmentalists worrying about dandruff, and I'm still hunting for answers to reasonable questions that I have about trends in our society.
IMO a society that isn't looking at itself critically and trying to figure out how to do better is probably headed downhill. We live in a world that is rapidly changing and if we can't figure out how to change with it we will pay an increasingly price. But without a solid basis of theory, investigation and testing we can't figure out how to change. The 60's movement morphed into the vacuous revolutionaries of the 70's, whose hallmark was never being forced to propose a workable solution to any problem. That brand of thinking is still haunting us.
Is it really a surprise that our society is dominated by big corporations and their lobbyists? If the bulk of what we get out of universities is faked data, skewed studies and artistic frothing at the mouth, there will be no counterpoint to a seemingly solid company-funded study. So the corporate lobbyists are winning the day, and all too often it is because we lack a solid objective body of scholarship on the issues of the day. This is not good.
Comments:
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Question authority, something that I think needs to be done, has lost sight of the fact that the questions should at least be reasonable and relevant. IMO.
# posted by 
: 6:46 AM
: 6:46 AM
Yes, you're right. But sometimes insanity is part of the air we breathe. That's why I think free speech, especially in academia, must be protected.
At one time racism was the conventional wisdom. Questioning it was radical - but right. Sometimes the radical course is the only sane course.
On the other hand, just announcing radical nonsense doesn't make you a brilliant visionary. The only way to separate the wheat from the chaff is an open and vigorous debate.
At one time racism was the conventional wisdom. Questioning it was radical - but right. Sometimes the radical course is the only sane course.
On the other hand, just announcing radical nonsense doesn't make you a brilliant visionary. The only way to separate the wheat from the chaff is an open and vigorous debate.
I will agree in part and disagree in part.
First, the agreement. Freedom of speech must be protected in academia. If you look at the universities in early America, individualism and freedom of speech was not only discouraged, but punished. As much as I dislike Ward and pretty much anything he says, just because of one nut, we can't start suppressing the greater debates that occur in universities. And MOM makes a great point about racism.
Second, the disagreement. I grew up in academia and saw the tenure process as applied to my parents and many of their friends/colleagues. Getting tenure has little to do with how outrageous you are. Most department chairs tend to be fairly conservative in their administration and don't want to deal with the 'nuts.' Tenure, most of the time, is only concerned with how much you publish and how much funding from grants you bring in. A over the top professor has much less chance of making tenure than a professor who causes little trouble for the department chair. It is usually only after tenure do you see the Churchills of academia making waves. For university administration, they believe bad publicity IS bad publicity.
First, the agreement. Freedom of speech must be protected in academia. If you look at the universities in early America, individualism and freedom of speech was not only discouraged, but punished. As much as I dislike Ward and pretty much anything he says, just because of one nut, we can't start suppressing the greater debates that occur in universities. And MOM makes a great point about racism.
Second, the disagreement. I grew up in academia and saw the tenure process as applied to my parents and many of their friends/colleagues. Getting tenure has little to do with how outrageous you are. Most department chairs tend to be fairly conservative in their administration and don't want to deal with the 'nuts.' Tenure, most of the time, is only concerned with how much you publish and how much funding from grants you bring in. A over the top professor has much less chance of making tenure than a professor who causes little trouble for the department chair. It is usually only after tenure do you see the Churchills of academia making waves. For university administration, they believe bad publicity IS bad publicity.
Dingo, You definitely have a point in writing:
"It is usually only after tenure do you see the Churchills of academia making waves. For university administration, they believe bad publicity IS bad publicity."
But you know what - Churchill got tenure because of who he was, not his credentials. He was perceived as "authentic" and that had a lot to do with a man who didn't have a PhD becoming tenured professor and a department chair. Singer got the chair at Princeton because of his views, not in spite of them. Academic celebrity, to a certain extent, does have a lot to do with jumping rungs in the academic world, and to some extent jumping on the bandwagon and even getting out of head of it is conferring academic benefits on people.
But that's not always wrong, either. That's my point and yours. Radical scholarship is that which defies the convential wisdom of either society or academia. We need those different perspectives; to me that is a fundamental axiom.
And I don't think your observation is totally false, but but I think its very truth really supports the observation I'm trying to make. Certain types of radical scholarship (defying society's conventional norms) are respectable in academia, but in many departments types of radical scholarship (defying the department's norms) are not.
Granted, this also has to do with which departments we are talking about. But Doran at Princeton is being opposed for tenure because of his views, not because of lack of credentials. My basic point is that you have to support free speech all the way or not at all.
What is really happening is that academic norms are being imposed on scholarship and academic speech in certain areas. And that's not good, because it leads to a type of groundless radicalism. In the end the campaign against racism, segregation and bigotry won out because of its fundamental truth. If we can't openly debate these matters we are in trouble. I don't want either society's norms or academic norms imposed to suppress free thinking. Our entire society is based on it and if we abandon it we will end up having the same societal culture as the most hidebound Arab dictatorship, and maybe even worse.
Take the case of Lawrence Summers. His speech was not beyond the bounds of academic tolerance. He asked questions for open debate. But how was that greeted? Not with reasoned rebuttals, but with fainting spells and a media campaign. We are failing, at least in some respects, to support an atmosphere of reasoned debate in academia.
And the droolingly rabid anti-Semitism in some academic quarters is more than I can take. There are reasoned criticisms to be made of Bush's policies and Israel's policies, but a lot of what I am reading in academic circles could have been pulled out of a Ku Klux Klan brochure of the 1920's. It's clear that it is academically respectable in certain disciplines to teach the underlying precepts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
How did we get here? Is that not a fair question to ask? Why is it no bar to teaching or tenure to advance some types of speech and not others?
"It is usually only after tenure do you see the Churchills of academia making waves. For university administration, they believe bad publicity IS bad publicity."
But you know what - Churchill got tenure because of who he was, not his credentials. He was perceived as "authentic" and that had a lot to do with a man who didn't have a PhD becoming tenured professor and a department chair. Singer got the chair at Princeton because of his views, not in spite of them. Academic celebrity, to a certain extent, does have a lot to do with jumping rungs in the academic world, and to some extent jumping on the bandwagon and even getting out of head of it is conferring academic benefits on people.
But that's not always wrong, either. That's my point and yours. Radical scholarship is that which defies the convential wisdom of either society or academia. We need those different perspectives; to me that is a fundamental axiom.
And I don't think your observation is totally false, but but I think its very truth really supports the observation I'm trying to make. Certain types of radical scholarship (defying society's conventional norms) are respectable in academia, but in many departments types of radical scholarship (defying the department's norms) are not.
Granted, this also has to do with which departments we are talking about. But Doran at Princeton is being opposed for tenure because of his views, not because of lack of credentials. My basic point is that you have to support free speech all the way or not at all.
What is really happening is that academic norms are being imposed on scholarship and academic speech in certain areas. And that's not good, because it leads to a type of groundless radicalism. In the end the campaign against racism, segregation and bigotry won out because of its fundamental truth. If we can't openly debate these matters we are in trouble. I don't want either society's norms or academic norms imposed to suppress free thinking. Our entire society is based on it and if we abandon it we will end up having the same societal culture as the most hidebound Arab dictatorship, and maybe even worse.
Take the case of Lawrence Summers. His speech was not beyond the bounds of academic tolerance. He asked questions for open debate. But how was that greeted? Not with reasoned rebuttals, but with fainting spells and a media campaign. We are failing, at least in some respects, to support an atmosphere of reasoned debate in academia.
And the droolingly rabid anti-Semitism in some academic quarters is more than I can take. There are reasoned criticisms to be made of Bush's policies and Israel's policies, but a lot of what I am reading in academic circles could have been pulled out of a Ku Klux Klan brochure of the 1920's. It's clear that it is academically respectable in certain disciplines to teach the underlying precepts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
How did we get here? Is that not a fair question to ask? Why is it no bar to teaching or tenure to advance some types of speech and not others?
Lancelot,
Because telling the truth is often so darned unpopular, I think the tenure system is indispensable. For every professor who uses tenure to spout nonsense there should be a professor using tenure to speak views that are against the conventional wisdom. If that is not happening wouldn't it be better to ensure that more professors with different ideological positions got tenure rather than to abolish it?
I agree that certain types of speech should not be respectable, but all I have to do is read a few eugenicist scholarly treatises from the 1920s to realize that at any one time, society's judgement on what speech is acceptable or not may be flawed. So if I don't trust the rulemakers, my only logical recourse is to say that rules may not be imposed.
The problem at Columbia, for instance, is not just a few professors. It is that those professors feel that they have the right to quash the speech of the students questioning their teachings and academics who would criticize their positions, and they are apparently being backed up by an administration that is anxious to suppress the controversy rather than talk about it openly or try to work out a middle ground.
Oh, and btw, please post the text link. I just noticed that blogger comments seem to be censuring out the html links, which is frustrating.
I find your arguments interesting, but which legislators do you trust to make the judgement of what benefits the public? Sometimes we don't know for decades. In the meantime, these people have to live.
Because telling the truth is often so darned unpopular, I think the tenure system is indispensable. For every professor who uses tenure to spout nonsense there should be a professor using tenure to speak views that are against the conventional wisdom. If that is not happening wouldn't it be better to ensure that more professors with different ideological positions got tenure rather than to abolish it?
I agree that certain types of speech should not be respectable, but all I have to do is read a few eugenicist scholarly treatises from the 1920s to realize that at any one time, society's judgement on what speech is acceptable or not may be flawed. So if I don't trust the rulemakers, my only logical recourse is to say that rules may not be imposed.
The problem at Columbia, for instance, is not just a few professors. It is that those professors feel that they have the right to quash the speech of the students questioning their teachings and academics who would criticize their positions, and they are apparently being backed up by an administration that is anxious to suppress the controversy rather than talk about it openly or try to work out a middle ground.
Oh, and btw, please post the text link. I just noticed that blogger comments seem to be censuring out the html links, which is frustrating.
I find your arguments interesting, but which legislators do you trust to make the judgement of what benefits the public? Sometimes we don't know for decades. In the meantime, these people have to live.
I agree with a lot of what you said MOM. I wish there was any easy and logical answer to some of your points about tenure. Politics in Universities (departmental/administration politics) is some of the most extreme and asinine stuff I have ever seen. You can't imagine some of the silly and petty stuff that can make or break a professors career. Unfortunately, the biggest problem, is that being a good teacher is actually at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tenure determination. When I was at Dartmouth, the teacher that everyone thought was the best teacher on campus, was denied tenure. Almost the entire student body signed a petition for him to be reconsidered, but that was ignored.
So, I will agree that there are bad tenure decisions. the point I was trying to make is that the vast majority of tenure decisions are made on departmental politics, but not left/right politics.
I'll also agree that a professor that kicks kids out of class because of their political beliefs need to be re-evaluated. That is a dereliction of their duty as an educator.
I'll also concur with your rebuttal to Lancelot. Having legislators regulate speech on campus is a very bad idea. And since private schools would be exempt, it would pull the top students away from public universities because public universities would be relegated to second rate educational facilities.
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So, I will agree that there are bad tenure decisions. the point I was trying to make is that the vast majority of tenure decisions are made on departmental politics, but not left/right politics.
I'll also agree that a professor that kicks kids out of class because of their political beliefs need to be re-evaluated. That is a dereliction of their duty as an educator.
I'll also concur with your rebuttal to Lancelot. Having legislators regulate speech on campus is a very bad idea. And since private schools would be exempt, it would pull the top students away from public universities because public universities would be relegated to second rate educational facilities.
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