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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25702 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:

English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.

In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.

It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.

[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”

Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.

The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).

I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.

Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.

I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.

Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.

Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.

Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.

At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.

The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.

A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.

I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish.

There's information consumption speed. We haven't found a medium that outpaces writing in how fast it can be consumed.

I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.

Not directly, sure. But I work in engineering and the ability for individuals to read and comprehend complicated thoughts and then to express thoughts of similar complexity is rather important. I have multiple times been trying to explain something or had to go ask someone to talk out what they meant because they lacked the ability to get those thoughts into and out of the written word.

One can always overstate such a thing, and I'm aware of a long history by liberal-arts types to do so, but like many turds there is a nugget of truth somewhere in there.

There is also a bone-headed epistemic arrogance you can get when you never encounter anything unfamiliar. Books more than any other medium cover a wide range of history and geography, and being forced to take those perspectives seriously for a while is probably good for people.

Whether current Humanities degrees do this is debatable.

I am firmly of the opinion that there very much should be English literature faculties in the Anglosphere. There should be perhaps 12 in total. Oxford, Cambridge, the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley. That is sufficient. Each should have the full complement of specialists, modern literature, Shakespeareans, so on, maybe thirty or forty academics each. That is enough.

The same is true for academic philosophy. The same is true for anthropology, Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptology and so on. These are all worthwhile fields. There is nothing wrong with an advanced civilization having a couple hundred academics who specialize in niche fields within the humanities. Let us have our Chaucer experts and our Hume biographers and our hieroglyphics translators and so on.

But the idea of thousands of English literature or philosophy professors? This is wholly unnecessary. The best, the 99.99th percentile verbal IQ people who also want to be academics (rather than entertainers or salespeople or whatever) can do these jobs at a handful of elite research universities. Nobody else needs to. Nobody else should.

I actually think the key problem here is that most English lit and phil professors are, on the object level, not doing valuable work. It's not that they categorically couldn't be, under a hypothetical different academia, it's that they currently aren't - when I think of the median philosophy or literature paper published from a second tier university, I think 'filler or garbage', not 'contributing to human knowledge', and not even 'interesting hobby'. And the vast majority of it isn't even political, it's bad poetry or commentaries on commentaries on commentaries or poor reinventions of existing concepts in other fields. Most people with an innate drive to do something actually interesting got selected out in favor of people with worse taste. That's the reason they should be defunded, not anything more abstract.

Thousands of English professors might be unnecessary but why the heck not? We had many more monks in monasteries whose whole job was just upholding a way of life and an institution. As long as they're deeply passionate about it (which I think most English scholars are), I think they're adding to the sum of human fulfilment. There are hundreds of millions of people doing bullshit jobs, after all.

I think that there is a big problem with post-grad programs at low ranked schools. The school is basically scamming students who think an MA/PhD from that school will open up academic career possibilities.

I think we should accept that there are degrees that are primarily conspicuous leisure. Philosophy, literature, history - they are qualitatively different from STEM degrees or BA/Marketing/Accounting/Finance/Law.

The latter are, honestly, glorified trades. "Oh, you come from a class that has to work for a living? Here's a four-year course that will help you earn more or at the very least will reduce your occupational hazards to hemorrhoids." The former are for trust-fund kids and for those few who can't imagine any other future for themselves and are willing to sacrifice their economic prospects to study the agricultural practices of 18th century SEA peasants.

As long as we keep lumping them together into "find your true vocation", people will remain confused and angry: both the undergrads that were duped into getting a useless degree because Miss Doe the high school history teacher was their favorite and the professors that have been deluding themselves about their relative worth.

You're both overstating and understating the situation.

On one hand, it goes way beyond just literature and philosophy. Open up the STEM box and you'll find that it's only really the T and E parts that lead directly to careers. There might be more demand for PhD graduates in the sciences but the majority of students stop with a bachelors and there aren't really any more jobs that specifically need a degree in e.g. biology than those that need you to have studied history. High school teacher is basically the full list.

But on the other hand, you're missing the generic value of a degree. Pretty much all white collar jobs these days need you to have a degree and most aren't particularly picky about what you studied. Yes, maybe a lot of that is just signaling, but the signal is a real thing (earning a degree proves that you have some combination of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is also valuable to an employer) - so playing the game is rational for both students and companies.

A BA was originally about helping wealthy and intelligent people to lead a more enriched life.

The problem is that schools took over credentialization without adjusting their programs.

Right now no one has an interest in explaining to students which subjects are rich kid majors.

I think the real solution is to involve actuaries in the federal student loans program. Analyse data and warn kids that their program is unlikely to ever pay off their student loans.

Or make the whole thing more direct and don't provide loans that are statistically unlikely to be repaid.

I think we should accept that there are degrees that are primarily conspicuous leisure. Philosophy, literature, history - they are qualitatively different from STEM degrees or BA/Marketing/Accounting/Finance/Law.

I would add all of the Social Sciences to the list. Pretty much all papers I read leave me with the thought "that's nice to know" and not "this will change how we do things and generate all sorts of positive effects in practice". I'd really like to know how many Social Science papers had any large positive impact on any policy. I would guess it's a small minority and if we stopped doing it altogether, almost nothing of practical value would be lost.

I somewhat disagree. High IQ people are not the only ones who can do these jobs and there is a value in cultural production, preservation and appreciation.

There is a benefit of a shared culture and that requires more than just highest IQ people to sustain it. While some subjects can be more niche and others need to be removed entirely.

What is necessary is to purge far leftists, those who side with foreign ethnic identity while are deconstructing and are hostile to their own. So the field must be reformed. I am not against cutting it down though, so you have a smaller but more efficient at transmitting positive culture. Or exchanging academia for hobbyists who then would be more funded. Someone like the Culture Critic on twitter is reaching a lot of people. Things outside of academia such as having more neoclassical styles over more minimalist and ugly architecture, or more films that touch on themes can be part of the change.

It is fundamentally important to promote the passing the torch idea and show people a connection through their roots, and to create a common continuous culture that appreciates that they stand on the shoulders of giants and want to continue on that legacy.

A common culture that appreciates this isn't just the result of academia and so there might be areas that we can get more bang for our buck for normies while also retaining the humanities but in a more lean form, while more focused on what is good and important and with less of the negative.

This requires people writing books on history, and appreciating it. Same for great works of literature. It doesn't require certain niche stupid obsessions and certainly if we get rid feminist, marxist lenses academia, ethnic minorities and women studies, nothing of value will be lost.

Regarding Egyptology, Chinese civilization studies, even Russian studies, etc, etc, some fields can be legitimate but makes sense for them to be niche. Appreciating foreign history cannot be too subsidized but can exist in a limited degree as part of legitimate study. It isn't healthy for them to be too mainstream of an obsession, but also not necessarily a bad thing for people who retain objectivity to have such understanding and interest. But certain subjects that are pushed as a X group studies are just part of subversive foreign nationalism, and meant to instil self hatred and guilt and grievances and hatred on the intersectional alliance member groups and fit too much within progressive activism ideology and so they are much more destructive. They also have been pushed too much with the attempt to make them a mainstream obsession that parasitizes over healthier issues.

This divide and conquer education at expense of your own civilization is a net negative and I would rather to just reject that than throw away the humanities concept. Education became much more far left leaning, and much more for retaining self hating guilt complexes due to a march on institutions of ideologues who had this agenda and it can change again to promote healthy values.

I think there is certainly a value in appreciation. I’m rather a fan of history, philosophy and similar subjects. Where I think the reformation must come is in decoupling it from the protected and tenured oligarchs of college professors in university. I’m thinking of a much more open model where instead of people going to university to pay $100K to have guided programs of reading literature and history and philosophy, you simply make such material available online. The uselessness of the diplomas is in fact a good reason for moving to guided self study for those interested. You don’t need much to read literature. You need books time, and on occasion study aides all of which can be made available for cheap if not free. Once there’s no institutional value and the material is cheap/free there’s not much reason to keep the initial institutions captured. Nobody would be going to 4-year university for history or literature.

I’m thinking of a much more open model where instead of people going to university to pay $100K to have guided programs of reading literature and history and philosophy, you simply make such material available online.

It is. People still go to four year universities all the time.

By why do the university part for 100K a year? I can buy the works of Shakespeare for $50 or less. And unless you actually need the credentials, paying a house mortgage for a piece of paper that says you’re a Shakespeare expert is pretty prohibitive for most people.

A lot of people don't understand what they read or how to apply it until they have had a conversation with others about it. Hence the usefulness of book clubs.

I don't know why people do this. But lots of people take on a mortgage to get a piece of paper saying they studied when the resources for autodidacticism are readily available.

I’ll be honest that colleges have done an excellent job of conflating the ideas of education and credentials to the point where a sizable percentage of Americans believe that you cannot possibly have learned anything about a subject unless you’ve done so in a university and received a course credit if not a diploma from a university. It’s a brain bug that most people have been trained to believe that keeps them willing to spend big money to make their learning count even if the return on the investment isn’t there.

I think that this is starting to change as the prospects for those students is known to be less than people who study more job-skills oriented degree programs. The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”. It’s probably going to change a lot more as competition for good office jobs gets fiercer and thus the need to get a useful degree becomes paramount, the idea that you can’t hobby-study these interesting but not very useful things on your own will fall away. It’s hard to remain a snob about having a diploma on your wall when you have a job that doesn’t require any college and owe your college $100K in principle and interest and cannot ever see yourself being financially successful

The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”.

This isn't new. Us Millenials had "What do you say to an English graduate with a job?" Big Mac and a large fries, please and "Barista of Arts"

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a sizable percentage of Americans believe that you cannot possibly have learned anything about a subject unless you’ve done so in a university and received a course credit if not a diploma from a university

Traditionally, a diploma functions as proof that a reasonable person has assessed what you've learned about a subject and confirmed you actually understand it. A lot of autodidacts think that they know more about the subject than they do; you need someone to push you in uncomfortable directions and point out the flaws in your understanding.

Obviously, universities are increasingly bad at this, but it's still necessary.

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If you can self-study to the same level then definitely do it! It takes a lot of self-motivation though. Humans are social creatures and being around other students and professors is the typical way to become invested and excited about your ideas as they'll have more purchase with those around you. The internet and new remote learning models could maybe compensate for some of this but not all.

Then, obviously, the career value of a degree, any degree.

I mean it depends on the goals, but finding or creating a reading group for a bunch of relevant books or on a given topic could probably, given appropriate study materials do at least as well as the median introductory courses are n that subject with the added bonus that unlike the students in most introductory courses, the group using a study guide and meeting to discuss the book are quite likely to have read the material in question. In most of the same courses at university, most students don’t care enough to actually read the text and quite often barely bothered to read the study notes of the text. Most only care in the sense that they want to figure out how to get a decent grade from the course while doing as little work as possible.

And unless you’re going to try to make a career of that subject, it’s probably much better as far as utility goes as instead of spending $100K on a lit degree you can spend the time and money learning career-based skills that allow you to pay off the loans. I don’t think “a degree, any degree” advice really holds anymore. It might have been true in 1970 when going to college was pretty rare and thus “BS in X” was rare enough on a resume to make you stand out. By 2024, college has become the default, and thus “degree in X” is almost expected. In fact, outside of the skilled trades, almost anyone hiring for a liveable wage job expects you to have college, and preferably something that at least signals a practical minded person. At least by getting a skill-based degree and learning about literature or history on your own, you’ll be able to get as good a job as your talents allow rather than having to try to explain to the interviewer how your four years of reading French literature makes you a good fit for the hard nosed number crunching corporate job you’re applying for.

Interestingly, my understanding is that Oxbridge and the Ivies dominate in prestige, but US state flagship schools- EG UNC and University of Texas- are the workhorses for actual English-language research in such fields.

I mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.

I think there is value in a humanities education (though I suspect not as currently subjugated to one political cause). It was always intended as a finishing school and there is actual value in that. I don’t regret my English degree, paid for by in-state tuition at a public ivy. The price was tolerable, there. I was fortunate to get mine in the Aughts and things weren’t quite so critical-theory heavy.

And, I’ve got a comfortable career in finserv. Far from being a barista.

While I agree there is an overproduction of PhDs, I disagree that the general undergraduate population doesn’t benefit from exposure if not from gen-ed courses, alone, and think we’d be much poorer, culturally, as a society, were college purely a mercenary pursuit. Let us at least produce enough professors for the latter. It can’t all be a procession of unmitigated STEM sperges and unmoderated B-school sociopaths.

I disagree that the general undergraduate population doesn’t benefit from exposure if not from gen-ed courses

That's literally why there's high school.

The fact that US high schools aren't up to that is no reason to waste a university education on that stuff (except for the small minority who're rich enough to study just for leisure).

That's literally why there's high school

That may have been true in the past, but ever since graduation rates became a target to optimize for this is no longer the case. Turning high school into daycare was the most effective way to make number go up.

An easy counterpoint is that both should account for some liberal arts education, and at differing levels of rigor; that there’s specific benefit in high school for a future plumber, and specific benefit in college for a future banker, etc.

I mean, it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons. To the extend that 'they should have done this in high school' is true, it's mostly an argument for moving engineering, computer science, medicine, etc out of a university setting and into their own institutions- that is, trade schools.

Like, universities originated for the study of the liberal arts. The entire reason job tracks(with a few exceptions like teaching and law) go through university is so that they can have gen ed requirements attached, and I suspect that getting rid of gen ed requirements would be a nail in the coffin of the university's prestige over trade schools.

The entire reason job tracks(with a few exceptions like teaching and law) go through university is so that they can have gen ed requirements attached

"Gen ed requirement" is distinctly a US feature, found mostly in US universities and universities influenced by the US model. In the UK and continental Europe, you get to pick a specialization and perhaps may pick an elective or minor, but no always.

it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.

Snarkly, I think it makes sense for humanities students to take some math and physics classes for gen-ed reasons. I see lots of pontificating from the self-declared "educated" classes that clearly lack an understanding of calculus and other entry-level numeracy concepts.

I am entirely in agreement. When my GED gives me a better understanding of statistics than you you shouldn't be allowed to graduate from college is my attitude, even if it's a degree in psychology or communications or some other kind of bullshit that came out of someone's ass.

This but unironically. When STEM students take humanities distribution classes, they take the same lower-level classes students of the humanities take themselves. When humanities students take distribution classes, they take dumbed-down "math for English majors" classes which the STEM majors can't take for degree progression. We should eliminate that and until it's eliminated, ignore all calls for well-roundedness of STEM majors.

The idea is that virtually everyone, as a free and politically engaged liberal subject, will have to deal with questions of politics, culture, and ethics; but not everyone will have to deal with STEM in the sense of actually requiring technical knowledge. On this particular day, there were probably more people who had to engage with questions about transsexuality (and therefore might benefit from an understanding of the history and philosophy of the concepts of sex and gender) than questions about calculus or linear algebra (particularly if we exclude people who require that sort of knowledge for their professional work). The humanities are thought to contribute to the education of a "well-rounded" individual because the humanities are everywhere while STEM knowledge is primarily utilized by professionals (and is therefore closer to a type of vocational training).

I say this as someone who makes a living as a software engineer. Knowing how to code is obviously useful for making money, but I don't think it really makes someone "well-rounded" in the way that studying history or art does, and certainly not in the way that studying philosophy does.

This isn't really well-roundedness, then, it's humanities-supremacy.

Coming from the other side, I’d say that numeracy and clear logical reasoning is probably more important to creating the mythical “well rounded citizens” than humanities. The reason is that almost every decision made in policy or even discussion of policy positions requires logic and statistics. The idea that you can have a productive conversation about things like economics without understanding utility curves and statistics is crazy. Figuring out the percentages of trans people in a population and what the percentage of increase is kinda matters if you’re trying to make a case that the entire thing is biologically based. Algorithmic logic is extremely useful in learning to plan and communicate a plan precisely. And as far as understanding anything in science, understanding the statistics and how probabilities work and so on is critical to understanding what is going on.

Obviously, I think a well rounded person would know all of the above. The thing is though, that we’re actually nearly backwards where there’s more emphasis on exposing people to the humanities in ne form or another over and above giving people the tools to understand their very scientific and mathematical world. The results, as far as I can tell, is a world where people fall for conspiracy theories, but don’t understand science. They can’t understand science or technology because they re not forced to learn those things after high school, if they had much exposure in high school.

it makes sense to require eg engineering students to take some English and history classes for gen-ed reasons.

Why on earth would it? They've already taken those in high school.

Not in the UK, you study one subject all the way through.

Not totally familiar, but doesn't the UK have some system where not every high school diploma allows college admission(like elsewhere in Europe)?

I've never heard of that. The UK and European systems are pretty different. In the UK it basically boils down to your A-levels (usually you take 3-5 subjects). Any university can make you an offer, but whether they will depends on your grades. You can only apply to 5 universities, and only one of Oxford/Cambridge. So you put down one stretch goal, one safe choice, and then three you like.

I mean, I'm not going to have a kneejerk egalitarian response and discard your proposal wholesale. But if we're going to have a widespread public university system, then I don't see why we would intentionally handicap all but a few of those institutions. If Ohio State has a right to exist at all, then I don't see why it shouldn't have English and philosophy faculty as well, all else being equal.

On a personal level, there are also certain academics scattered around random state schools whose work I greatly enjoy and follow closely, so I have a personal interest in perpetuating the current system roughly as it exists now.

The trouble with politics in non-explicitly-political classes is that essentially it changes the subject of the course from whatever the subject was to, well, politics. And it’s almost impossible to make a course like that not turn into a political jam fest in whic( students game the professor for an A by telling him his politics are correct. And it’s also super easy to end up with ideologues teaching such courses and essentially having woke communist teach-ins paid by the university where everybody pretends it’s about learning English Lit.

I think honestly the best way to actually teach critical thinking is the old fashioned way — teaching formal logic, both philosophical and mathematical. People don’t know how to think clearly because they don’t read books (which can only be fixed by actually reading whole books), and because they don’t have a toolset to examine truth claims. The best way to get such a toolset is to be taught it, and use formal proofs to examine, make and refute arguments. If I want to argue for trans rights, fine, but do so in an open honest and logically correct way. Show your work. If you’re going to argue that The Tempest is about being White is good, then fine, but it’s going to need to examine its own assumptions.

Agree, just as Science + Politics = Politics, such is true for most classroom discussions as well.

Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.

I met an older pol sci professor who talked about the shift in his field. Back in the day doing a PhD in international relations meant becoming an expert in a part of the world. This is a monumental task as the student has four years to go from barely being able to find a country on a map to being able to advise diplomats and large corporations on intricate details of that country. It meant plowing through vast amounts of text and being able to quickly gain an understanding of complex systems.

The increasingly popular alternative was to chose a theory as a PhD. Thesis: investigate how some feminist theory views women's education in developing countries. Conclusion: more education in thrid world countries will liberate women. This PhD is much easier to write than one trying to explain the geopolitics of the middle east.

Having one political theory makes it even easier, furthermore the current woke dogma is fairly simple as an ideology. It doesn't take much to become proficient in it.

A part of the reason why alterntive ideas are met with immediate rejection is because they would reveal a lack of knowledge and arguments by someone with alternative views. It is shocking how many academics don't have cursory understandings of explanations other than their own. I have met profs at education departments who have minimal knowledge about heritability, which partially explains their defensive stance when probed with questions on the topic.

I think this explains most of the troubles in university. We are not actually requiring rigor to earn a phd in any non-STEM field and thus the blind lead the blind. Dispassionate inquiry requires people to actually understand the subject and be able to research it and genate useful knowledge. It explains why most people even in politics think in simplistic cartoons and comic books. It explains as well how the US government was made to believe that they could collapse the Russian economy by simply unplugging it from the world bank — as though we could really stop buying Russian oil or fertilizer. I guarantee you that Russian political science students know muc( more about our system than we do of theirs. They know about our federalist system and the electoral college, I’m not sure there are a lot of people in America who know how Russia’s federation chooses its leaders.

This isn't a very realistic model of academia.

"Back in my day" is one of the easiest and most natural criticisms to make in any field. I think you should take what this guy said with a grain of salt.

Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).

Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.

In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.

In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?

In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment.

What time frame do you have in mind, exactly?

This report suggests doctorates surged in the late 60s as the Space Race and related investments peaked. But that was tracked by similar ramps in number of institutions, amount of funding, etc. so I wouldn’t expect the professor:student ratio to crater.

I was pushing on this because it didn’t match my grad school experience. We still had wide latitude, minimal make-work, very specific classes with low headcount. I’m willing to believe that’s an artifact of engineering and wouldn’t hold for humanities, but my instinct is skepticism.

I agree that this isn't fully universal. I also was lucky, as the first PhD student of a newly minted group leader in a subfield of applied math (population models, in particular cancer) I had both great latitude and lots of attention if I needed help. My course when I did my Bachelor's and Master's also was still quite restrictive in comparison - 40 people at first, of which 20 dropped out in the first years. So our classes were also quite small.

But I also have shared some classes with medical or biology students, which would often be triple-digits, and worked quite a bit with medical or biology PhDs. Some institutes had rooms full of PhD students who had the same supervisor (though support through mentors did lessen this a bit). My wife, who used to be in neuroscience, had a supervisor who spend no more than 15 minutes on meetings with her - once per month. Her project was more or less entirely pre-defined, and the adjustments she took were due to her own stubbornness, not because the Professor really wanted to give her the latitude. When I had my defense (in the UK, you talk multiple hours, in detail, about your work with two independent reviewers), one of the reviewers positively noted that not even once I said I'd have to ask my supervisor, that for every thing I did I had a ready-made explanation on why I focused on this and where the approach comes from; According to him, his own PhD student would competently carry out his directives, but he was very frustrated how often they'd not actually understand why they did the things the way they did it. Unsurprisingly, he was a medical doctor, and this is something I've heard from multiple Profs in medical sciences. By my wife's account - and some personal discussions I've had with acquaintances -, the situation in psychology and sociology is much worse yet.

You also have to keep in mind that PhD-student do not spring into existence from nothing, and that supervisors do not spend all of their time only on PhD students; Universities as a whole have been steadily expanding since the beginning of the last century in most western countries (see for example this report though I don't think this controversial), albeit at different rates and with different timing of the surges & plateaus, which means this has been the experience of pretty much all currently living Profs independent of the exact timeframe.

So what impact does the expansion of the universities have on PhD students? First let's assume you're a specific PhD student: The professors get more teaching duties, so they have less time for you. Then, because they barely get their other duties done, they more or less need to push parts of the teaching duties on you, which means you also have less time for your PhD itself. Also, there may be more professors to deal with the increased burden, but these are those that wouldn't have made the cut. In the worst - and not even that rare - case, you have a situation as I described for the "midwife professorship", which is someone who might not even have gotten a PhD at all in the past getting a full professorship for essentially political reasons (and thus it's no surprise she tends to be more political than scientific in her attitude).

Of course, it impacts the PhD students themselves as well: As described in the earlier post, they are more likely to be used to a more standardized environment from their bachelor's and master's, making it more difficult to suddenly work independently. And similar to the professors, the additional numbers are more marginal PhD candidates, so they're on average worse to begin with.

I’ve often considered that university should be separated from job training. The university is being tasked with so many things that it cannot do anything to a decent standard. Research suffers because it’s no longer hiring people on just being good researchers. Now they must teach. And they must hand-hold the students who simply want to grade grub. And they must know what industry wants and fear their coursework to train that. It’s an impossible task made even more difficult as more and more students with middling IQs and very poor study skills must be shepherded through university in courses designed for minimum effort and maximum course satisfaction ratings when university level coursework cannot be dumbed down to the level of what would have been a high school sophomore level in 1945. It doesn’t work, and until you have an academy separate from job training midwits there’s not much chance of reintroduced rigor. We’re producing phds who should have flunked out of undergrad.

Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.

I don't think this is really true, certainly not of elite institutions. Oxbridge used to take all sorts of dullards who had the right background but were of limited disposition towards academics - think Bertie Wooster. Hence the gentleman's third

but presumably those people just took their degree and left, right? They didn't stick around to become professors and shape the entire field.

Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place.

"Critical" in English has a few surprisingly different meanings. After all this time, I've realized that "critical theory" is "critical" in the sense of "inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably", while I might have naively assumed it meant "of, relating to, or being a turning point or specifically important juncture" (both quotes from Merriam-Webster).

IMO we should find a new name for "critical thinking" that less strongly suggests it should be about tearing things down.

I'm pretty sure the "critical" in "critical theory" refers to "consisting of or involving criticism" i.e. "the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature, also : writings expressing such evaluation or analysis"

A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

Critical theory is critical of existing society, rather than evaluating works of literature without challenging the underlying social structures that produced them.

Yeah, looks like I missed the mark. The guy who coined the term simply made up a new meaning for "critical":

He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them"

It’s certainly unintuitive. A cynic might suggest that was the point.

You don't have to be a cynic to think that. The guy who coined it spells it out for you. All this far-leftist stuff is cynical and power driven, they explain why this is in detail in their writings. The conspiracy is out in the open for everyone to see.

Knowledge production as socially constructed and a means to power. The glorification of revolutionary violence. It's all there in Marx and all the various critical theorists.

I would believe its purveyors may claim that, but I've never seen "critical theory" come to a positive conclusion about any real pretty much anything. There is a lot of pontificating about how pretty much everyone suffers from pervasive, say, racism, but I don't think I've ever come across "actually, X is good enough" except about some perfect hypothetical. I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.

As someone raised Christian it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" (true), but lacks the radical forgiveness that is supposed to accompany that phrase.

I don't really see much depth to the field (happy to consider otherwise) beyond tearing imperfect things down and wanting to replace them with nothing.

As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a critical theorist nag (one can do this with critical intent, but that's distinct from theory- "fine, I'll do it myself" is still productive).

it pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God"

That's a weird framing. Nagging just to nag, nagging with the express purpose of building yourself up at the zero-sum expense of others, that's the sin.

So, back to the original wording, critical theory pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God, so continue sinning because God can take it- that's the duty of the all-powerful, isn't it?".

So, back to the original wording, critical theory pattern matches really well into "all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God, so continue sinning because God can take it- that's the duty of the all-powerful, isn't it?".

How would you respond to that question?

Given I bother to bring it up, the answer is, in a word, "no".

Which is itself kind of ironic, considering that the entire reason my username is what is it is, is to remind myself that I have better things to do than to sit here and critically theorize. That said, encountering certain views here (and being "forced" to think about them) has been helpful in other contexts; other than that I simply hope to offer responses that are less wrong than what came before.

If I'm going to be lazy and selfish it might as well be at least a little constructive.

Lol I had an inkling that might be what your username was about, but I wasn't sure. I've definitely gotten value from your posts though, if it helps. What would you tell that person was God's duty if not to bear our sin?

What would you tell that person was God's duty if not to bear our sin?

Depends on who it is.

To someone who does understand, I'm not sure God 'bears' sin at all (outside of 'bearing' the diminishment it takes to manually fix something and the frustration that the thing you made to accomplish a task does not, in fact, do that thing; grace is "didn't and shouldn't have to fix it, did it anyway"). I think God treats individual humans much like I treat computer programs- I guess I 'bear' wrong answers (and there is some physical pain that results when the program gives me wrong answers, don't get me wrong), but this is "I put a training sequence into an LLM and if it doesn't ultimately align to my desired outputs in [timeframe] I'm not bound to accept the results -> model that generated them". It's not like there's anything binding God to do anything, anyway. [Though 'bearing' does have implications if God operates/"simulates" the universe as part of himself.]

To someone who does/will not understand I'd emphasize it in the same terms they already do understand, where the [Living] Law/King/Father is [personally] aggrieved and angered every single time someone contravenes direct orders, either because they will intentionally misunderstand the spirit of what He said, because questioning the dominant interpretation of what He said is not an efficient or effective use of their time, or because they don't know/want to know how to start looking for that spirit.

For what it's worth I wouldn't come up with this answer without having encountered this framing referenced in another comment here and being frustrated by seeing people who don't quite know what to do with someone on the same 'level' as they are (and frustrated that most Christian content has the emphasis on the 2nd or 3rd 'child' as the Jewish one described above- I guess that explains why the Church is as anti-intellectual as it is but Judaism, with its explicit adherence to rules qua rules and not the... fuzziness of Christianity, doesn't have that problem as much). Which also answers a few other questions about how and what I should say, why, where I did this instinctively/unintentionally, and what to promote with people I know act on each of those levels- I do grow by reading and writing here, it's just that I have problems turning that growth into solid results.

As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a critical theorist nag

Well, yes, but that's the point to a certain extent. The philosopher is a professional nag - that's his job, ever since Socrates. So one can argue that critical theory is actually quite traditional in this regard. (Of course if you asked the classic Frankfurt school guys what they wanted to build, they would have unhesitatingly answered "communism", but that just moves the question back a step, as the content of that term is itself very ill-specified).

The Apology really should be required reading in schools. Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing. And this is the ideal by which philosophy has attempted to conduct itself ever since (but, as with all ideals, mortals fall short).

The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions. He is the grim, persistent reminder that you might not know as much as you think you do. Understandably, people tend to find this frustrating (in the case of Socrates, frustrating enough that the Athenians put him to death).

And this is the ideal by which philosophy has attempted to conduct itself ever since

Western philosophy, sure, but I don't see the Socratic school having much influence on Confucius, Mencius, Han Fei, Laozi, Zhuangzi, or any pre-20th century Chinese philosophy. Many of them seem like the sorts who'd object to holding up a guy who trolled Athens so hard he got cancelled from life (as I once heard it put) as an example for sages to imitate.

(I've been slowly working my way through Thomas A. Metzger's * A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today*. I also remember reading a comment on a forum thread about philosophy over a decade ago, from a Chinese individual arguing that Western philosophy went off the rails with Socrates and Plato, and has spent the last two millennia and change building airy edifices of dangerous nonsense.)

Western philosophy, sure, but I don't see the Socratic school having much influence on Confucius, Mencius, Han Fei, Laozi, Zhuangzi, or any pre-20th century Chinese philosophy. Many of them seem like the sorts who'd object to holding up a guy who trolled Athens so hard he got cancelled from life (as I once heard it put) as an example for sages to imitate.

Yes, that's certainly correct. I think that's what makes the European (and specifically Socratic) tradition distinct from any other philosophical tradition; the emphasis is on a dynamic process of conflict, rather than a static body of received wisdom. There's someone in our midst who claims to be wise? Very well then, let's put his wisdom to the test, let's see how much he really knows. The principal figure is not the sage, but the prankster, the rabble-rouser. (I would speculate that this impulse in the European mind is part of why empirical science, industrialization, and broadly speaking "modern civilization" in general, arose first in the West and not anywhere else.)

a Chinese individual arguing that Western philosophy went off the rails with Socrates and Plato, and has spent the last two millennia and change building airy edifices of dangerous nonsense.

Right. Well, this position is not alien to Western philosophy itself. You can find it in Heidegger (Plato as introducing the terrible mistake of thinking that Being as such could be identical with a specific being, the Form of the Good, the Christian God, or what have you), you can find it in Nietzsche (Socrates as physical symptom of a degenerating and sickly organism), and others.

The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions

As a matter of taste, I mostly disagree. Poking holes can be worthwhile, and is necessary to some level, but I think it's the lesser part of the work. One could say that philosophies are like houses: none are empirically perfect, all are flawed, but many are nevertheless inhabitable. Finding weak points is an important part of structural engineering, but that's because you want to build stronger, better structures in the future. It's totally valid to say 'yes, we know Benthamite utilitarianism produces distasteful results in circumstances X, Y, Z but we think it's a pretty good way for mathematically-inclined people to make large-scale decisions'.*

Likewise, sometimes you have to destroy old buildings because they're obviously defunct beyond repair and you need the space for something else. 'Ruling philosophies' can become impervious to criticism through arrogance and social pressure, to the point of forgetting that their assumptions are assumptions and losing sight of their weak points. Sometimes you need a bloody minded bastard to stand up and keep nagging. But I think it would be perverse to value the demolisher more than the builder.

*Like software programming, really. Loads of problems don't have an accepted perfect solution, but instead lots of standard imperfect solutions that you can select depending on how the tradeoffs stack up for your use case.

** Sorry for inserting random thoughts, perhaps it will help you understand where I'm coming from. When I read your quote: "Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing" it just seems like sophism to me. Yes, you can't prove that anything except your own mind exists, and maybe not that. It's worth knowing, and I've met very unreflective people who could use the reminder. But there's not much you can do with that except say "whoa". Sooner or later, you have to do what we all do: accept that the world probably does exist and so does your need for nourishment, and go and make a bacon sandwich. I find the latter wiser and more admirable.

I'm guessing the fact that critical theory, in practice, explicitly rejects critical thinking as a form of oppression, is likely a happy little coincidence rather than anything done with conscious intent, but it's certainly been a funny thing to notice given how much critical theory, in practice, is about conveniently eliding between various definitions of words in different contexts to get people to reject or accept certain ideas (e.g. racism, sexism, white supremacy, feminism).

but it's certainly been a funny thing to notice given how much critical theory, in practice, is about conveniently eliding between various definitions of words in different contexts to get people to reject or accept certain ideas (e.g. racism, sexism, white supremacy, feminism).

That is also critical theory in practice. It goes back to Hegel's dialectical method and the idea that the philosopher can overcome apparent contradictions through clever arguments and that all of history and reality was about contradictions being made whole again, back to the unity of god. This gets turned into a social theory of resolving all social distinctions like class, sex, race, etc. through clever arguments and revolution.

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