The Conceptual Penis in Breastaurants

So, yet another gotcha! moment in the academic world of "research."

In case you missed it, because you were preoccupied with the teetotaler pussygrabber defending a beer-drinker by claiming that Jews were ruining the country, well, you are correct in ignoring the latest tempest in the academic teapot.

But, we shall address that here.

Yawn!

To me, this is merely yet another dog bites man story.

Note that in the opening sentence I wrote "yet another" ... because the one that really should have alerted academia was the original--by Alan Sokal.  That was more than two decades ago.

However, academe couldn't be bothered.

Academe didn't change because of the entrenched publish-or-perish culture.  Publishing intellectual masturbation as "scholarship" is a requirement for promotion.  These days, it is a requirement to even get the first job in higher education--in contrast to the old days when intellectual masturbation began after getting hired!

Does it bother you that I repeatedly refer to intellectual masturbation?  It should.  I am being intentional here.  As I wrote in an essay in the Chronicle Review, 17 years ago, almost to the very date, most of the academic "research" is pretentious work that will not sell even for penny, or for a kopek according to Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" that I quoted in that essay.

I had always hoped that the financial urgency will force higher education to review its bizarre facade of scholarship, before the public figured it out as much as Uncle Vanya figured it out.  But, academic "scholars" could not be bothered with all that.  The intellectual masturbation continues with cries of orgasmic pleasures within the walls of the ivory towers!

In this essay in The Chronicle Review, the authors note:

We need policy makers and grant makers to focus not on money for current levels of publication, but rather on finding ways to increase high-quality work and curtail publication of low-quality work. If only some forward-looking university administrators initiated changes in hiring and promotion criteria and ordered their libraries to stop paying for low-cited journals, they would perform a national service. We need to get rid of administrators who reward faculty members on printed pages and downloads alone, deans and provosts "who can't read but can count," as the saying goes. Most of all, we need to understand that there is such a thing as overpublication, and that pushing thousands of researchers to issue mediocre, forgettable arguments and findings is a terrible misuse of human, as well as fiscal, capital.

The authors list a few suggestions for reform.  What is their bottom line?

Best of all, our suggested changes would allow academe to revert to its proper focus on quality research and rededicate itself to the sober pursuit of knowledge. And it would end the dispiriting paper chase that turns fledgling inquirers into careerists and established figures into overburdened grouches.

Here is the ultimate kicker: the authors are, implicitly, referring to the research universities.  If this is their set of observations on the happenings at research universities, then one can easily imagine the state of "research" at the vast number of universities that are not research universities but teaching universities, like the one where I teach.

In another essay, Arthur Levine noted that rapidly widening gap between "Digital students, Industrial-era universities" :

[It] is important to ask how much colleges and universities need to change. In 1828, facing industrialization and a Connecticut legislature that disapproved of Yale’s classical curriculum, the Yale faculty responded with a report which asked, in part, whether the college needed to change a lot or a little. This, Yale’s faculty said, was the wrong question. The question to be asked, they argued, was: What is the purpose of a college? This remains the right question today.

What is the purpose of college, and what is the role of "research" that faculty do?

If only college faculty were public intellectuals in the classroom!

Thinking about what I do, in the classroom and outside, I was reminded of this by Tim Clydesdale:

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what's worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Likewise, the work of public intellectualism must go on outside the classroom as well. Others have made that case eloquently in these pages, so I shall simply underscore their appeals with a few suggestions.

First, I applaud the efforts of leaders of scholarly associations to promote and reward the work of public scholarship, despite membership pressure to preserve the status quo, and I encourage those associations to continue that work. Second, I respect the efforts of many agencies that support academe to promote general dissemination of research results and encourage other sources of financial support to do the same. To be sure, there is a place for highly specialized research programs; I simply ask program officers to ensure that each call for proposals includes a question about how results will reach a general audience and that responses to that question be considered in the proposal's evaluation.

Third, some of us need an attitude adjustment. It is not just residential-college students who live in a bubble — many faculty members do as well. We take for granted our privileged status, become consumed by petty controversies, talk only to ourselves, and ignore the wider public that makes our work possible. It is tempting, I know, to want to curse the culture and withdraw into like-minded enclaves. But neither catharsis nor retreat will satisfy those who demand accountability, raise financial support for public higher education, or generate more students who cherish college as an opportunity to learn and think.

Even though our interests often diverge from those of the general public, we remain beholden to it. With a few adjustments at our end, we can begin to rebuild trust among a critical mass of fellow citizens ...

I could not have said this any better.

What is the matter with academic sociologists?

I know, it is far too difficult to restrain oneself from offering a gazillion punchlines as responses to such a question.  But, I suppose we could ask such a question of many academic disciplines and their scholars, too.  It is this question about sociology and sociologists that Russel Jacoby takes up in his funny, sarcastic, and biting review of a book by the president of the American Sociological Association (ht).  Jacoby has plenty of zingers there, which had me laughing aloud.  Like these:

The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential.
In a memoir elsewhere, Wright comments that every September since kindergarten in 1952 he has been in school. It might be time for him to take a break.
That he did not label this book Volume One and promise Volumes Two through Ten shows restraint.
To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water.
[Only] sociologists force-fed as graduate students will not choke on this book. That many of them have come to adore this stuff is only striking proof of the discipline’s collapse.

 Jacoby's concluding comments?l:

C.Wright Mills, who despised sociological jargon, has been succeeded by Erik Olin Wright, once given the C.Wright Mills Distinguished Professor Award at Wisconsin, who cranks out sociological cant. With Wright as elected president of the sociological profession, the conservative nightmare of radicals taking over the university has in part come to pass. But if this book exemplifies academic Marxism, conservatives can rest easy. We should all fear, however, what it suggests about the contemporary university and its scholarship.

And in another book review, again thanks to A&L Daily, are these concluding comments, which fit into this discussion really well:

[When] it comes to the state of contemporary higher education, there are no quick fixes. That is why, today, Herbert London continues to cast his vote against liberal academia​—​but from the outside: “I realize, like G.K. Chesterton, that the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.”