Posted on 12/09/2020 4:51:00 AM PST by karpov
Every time I read an op-ed piece from some English professor (and isn’t it always an English professor?) whining about the demise of the humanities, in The Chronicle of Higher Education or elsewhere, I’m reminded of that great scene from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
You know the one. As Anakin Skywalker and his erstwhile friend and mentor turned mortal enemy Obi-Wan Kenobi engage in an epic lightsaber duel, Anakin accuses Obi-Wan of being responsible for the recent disasters in his life, including the loss of his beloved Princess Padme.
Obi-Wan regards Anakin stoically then delivers one of the best lines in the entire saga: “You have done that yourself.”
Similarly, virtually all the ills plaguing the modern humanities—declining enrollment, loss of funding, fewer tenure-track jobs, decreased public appreciation—have been caused primarily by the people who study and teach them, the humanists. Regardless of where they try to lay the blame, from college administrators to state legislators to students too dumb to know what’s good for them, humanities professors have indeed done all that to themselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Last year, the University of Pennsylvania removed a portrait of William Shakespeare from its main office. Can you have an English Department without Shakespeare?
If war chants of pygmies has the same artistic and cultural value as Hamlet, there is no need for English professors.
We’ve been in this predicament a long time.
Recall in the Clinton error 1990s when professors were wailing against the teaching of texts by “dead white males”.
There was a call for enlightened inclusion, to find the arts and sciences missing or excluded in academia.
Today the call is for deletion, denigrate and bullying. The real humanists have all been intellectually beheaded.
Rob Jenkins needs to look up post-modernist neo-Marxism.
That will help him find his root causes. But he’s definitely not drinking the Koop-aid of the vast majority in his field.
End the tax deduction for donations to colleges and universities.
Yes, I remember. The cultural Marxists use race as one of their weapons of divide and conquer. Actually, there is no scientific basis for “RACE.” The species of homo sapiens are the result of relentless migration and adaptation over hundreds of thousands of years.
The adaptations have been physical—but also mental. But “race” is merely a social construct. Marxists are masters of positing intellectual constructs and abstractions as if they were objects in reality. Real science is the antidote. The universities have to be purged of cultural Marxism and grants given to real research instead of Communist propagandists.
In the 1990s they wanted to cast out the works of Shakespeare, Twain, and others just as they do now.
DEAD
WHITE
MALES
they had no use for “them” or their works
You did not understand what I said.
How about "BREEDS?" - As in the breeds of man?
There is a scientific classification of breeds amidst a species, such as breeds of dogs. Everyone with a few brain cells
will notice that doggies can interbreed and have distinctive classes and characteristics.
Are such distinctions verboten when talking about homo sapiens?
You mean war chants like these?
The Germans thought Jews were a race. “. The English referred to the Irish as the “Irish race”. The Chinese thik the Koreans are ugly. Americans during the gold rush referred to the “Chinese race”.
Some people have white skin, some people have small calves, some have large ears, some are tall and some are short. The farther you are from the equator, the lighter the skin—but that is an adaptation, not a “race”. We are al one species—although we still have genetic markers from other species, like the Neanderthals.
“Can you have an English Department without Shakespeare?”
This has been going on for a long time. A university had their English department declare that they were dropping Shakespeare. A friend of mine then publicly declared he’s teach it from the engineering department. They backtracked of course, gotta defend turf doncha know.
English departments have been radical since at least the early 1980’s.
In elementary schools they have started calling those programs “Language Arts”.
“Language Arts” is English’s abstract form. They teach an abstracted form of math as well.
It’s too bad most parents don’t care what’s taught in schools.
Very well said!
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