Academia May Now Be Beyond Satire

National Review ^ | 1-11-17 | George Will

[DeweyCA]

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a window on the sometimes weird world of academia, revisited a hilarious intellectual hoax from 20 years ago.

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described “academic leftist,” composed an essay that was a word salad of solemn academic jargon. He said he strove to be “especially egregious,” by maundering on about “the dialectical emphases” of “catastrophe theory” becoming a “concrete tool of progressive political praxis.” His essay’s gaudy title was: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”

He sent it to the left-leaning “cultural studies” journal Social Text, which swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists — “emancipatory mathematics,” “demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge,” “the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.” Soon after Social Text published his faux scholarship, Sokal revealed in another journal, Lingua Franca, that it was a parody.

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Sokal’s point, however, was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open. The humanities, he today tells the Chronicle, had become a “subculture” that was “ingrained and self-referential and mostly disdained critiques from outsiders, so that an ordinary type of intellectual critique was precluded.”

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Today, Sokal, who seems eager to make amends for his good deed, claims “a small amount of credit” for what he says is diminished ardor for radical epistemological relativism. But he says “the main credit” belongs to — wait for it — George W. Bush, who discredited “science bashing.” Sokal and kindred spirits — he seems to be safely back in the bubble — tell the Chronicle that the real problem is “anti-intellectualism” off campus: “Academic expertise” is under attack, “epistemological skepticism” by “the Right” is abetting climate change, etc.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443731/alan-sokal-hoax-exposed-academic-left-radical-relativism

[DeweyCA]

This article shows what an insulary bubble of groupthink that academia has become. Sokal, undoubtedly under tremendous peer pressure, had now recanted his exposing of the foolishness of academia, and is now blaming the right (conservatives) for the discrediting of the liberal professors who bought into his hoax in the first place. Leftist university professors have become a caricature of themselves. They are utter fools who think that they are bright.

Will also mentions Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution.”

[Bullish]

Academia’s idiocy is to the point where it’s becoming criminal.

[LouAvul]

I got my last of three diplomas in 2012. In the time I was in school, my observation of higher ed is that it’s populated by pretentious, pompous, self serving losers who couldn’t do anything worthwhile, so they went into education.

[Gene Eric]

Universities are replete with professional predators.

[indthkr]

Academia bump for later....

[TChad]

Best academic hoax ever. Pop goes the academic smugness bubble.

Sokal should not have lost his nerve.

Never apologize for being right.

[delacoert]

If you read George Will's article fairly, the only judgment of academia that it seems he allows as his own is,

Intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open.

This is a pretty balanced opinion, not a broad-brush dismissal of the academy as a whole.

 

In post #1, DeweyCA wrote:

This article shows what an insulary bubble of groupthink that academia has become.

All of academia? Medicine including all the health professions? Engineering? Science? Languages? Should there be athletic programs? Anything good anywhere?

 

In post #3, LouAvul wrote:

I got my last of three diplomas in 2012. In the time I was in school, my observation of higher ed is that it’s populated by pretentious, pompous, self serving losers who couldn’t do anything worthwhile, so they went into education.

Diplomas? Interesting word choice. A high school grants a diploma. Community colleges grant Associates degrees and we call them diplomas. Perhaps you meant you had received Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral diplomas from some fine institutions of higher education.

Having put all this effort into your education (and one wonders why considering what you have written) do you hold any gratitude for any educator? Is any discipline "populated" by people capable of anything worthwhile? Medicine including all the health professions? Engineering? Science? Languages? Should there be athletic programs?