65 Comments

1. David Thomson:

I am utterly convinced that soft science advance degrees must be eliminated. No more than a bachelors degree should ever be required. As matter of fact, this must become a high priority if we are to save Western Civilization. The hard sciences intrinsically demand precise measurement. A practitioner must provide their empirical data to justify their arguments. 2+2=4 regardless of one’s ethnicity, gender, or claims of victimization. Someone like Jacques Derrida would be laughed out of the room. On the other hand, the liberal arts by their very nebulousness are easily exploited by academic charlatans and quacks. Those in power employ the ability to award degrees as a way of often forcing their students become intellectual prostitutes.

Jun 23, 2008 - 8:27 am 2. F:

I used to lunch regularly with Richard Vetter, and it was always a treat to hear his take on the latest absurdities of the university where he taught economics. They tolerated his quirkiness because he was good, and sought after by state and national legislators as a resource, but I think they resented his generally dim view of the social science faculty. I am encouraged to hear we might be half-way through this period of idiocy, but fear we are not. Thanks for the observations, Wretchard. F

Jun 23, 2008 - 8:27 am 3. Annoy Mouse:

Welcome Wretchard!

Jun 23, 2008 - 8:27 am 4. _Jon:

The article states that the institutions of higher education operate without competition. I am curious as to what such competition might look like?

Jun 23, 2008 - 9:37 am 5. heather:

The newspapers flourish where they monopolize printing presses.

The universities have huge libraries and archives. But, the libraries and archives are being digitized as we speak. What else does a university have? Teachers. But teachers can be hired by self selected students (as they did in the middle ages). What else? Universities have the right to grant ‘degrees’… and THAT is their major and ongoing source of power.

Jun 23, 2008 - 9:47 am 6. The Crack Emcee:

Congrats, Man!

Jun 23, 2008 - 9:56 am 7. varangianguard:

The validation and requirements for too many advanced degrees are simply a self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing exercise in self-justification that one cannot learn more than one subject.

Renaissance thinkers need not apply!

Jun 23, 2008 - 10:29 am 8. Spindok:

Kor writes, “The academic world that I entered is gone. [Replaced by the politically correct abominations which he denounces] I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.”

Freud had it right when asked the question “What should human beings be able to do well?” He reportedly answered “Lieben und Arbeiten” - to love and to work. To this aphorism (perhaps an apocryphal one) Kors adds an important corollary “with no expectations of success”.

It is this value; the love of a job well done without the garantee of success, which cuts through the difference between plumbing and pure mathematics. Both now suffer in western civilization but for similar reasons.

Jobs well done cannot occur without love and vise versa. They are one and the same. Rewards happen after the fact and require the risk of diminishing returns, yet craft cannot be taken away from you. Ask yourself how many putts Tiger Woods missed, or how many free throws missed by LeBraun James. These icons missed many more than they hit.

The message for young people is: Now throw yourself into the Frey and go at it.

The Academy is not to blame directly. Endowments are not to blame. This is basic social value. Work and love. Hold those as your plumb line.

Amos 7:7-8 (New International Version)
This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 And the LORD asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
“A plumb line,” I replied.
Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.

Spindok

Spindok

Jun 23, 2008 - 10:35 am 9. David Thomson:

“Universities have the right to grant ‘degrees’… and THAT is their major and ongoing source of power.”

This power was greatly enhanced by the destructive 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power. Few people are aware that the judges, for all practical purposes, outlawed employee testing as the number one determiner of their qualifications. Since too many blacks were incapable of passing tests—they were held to be inherently discriminatory. This abstractly was supposed to encourage employers to provide tests that were very specific to the job. Unintentionally, however, the employers instead concluded that it was legally safer for them to simply demand credentials! Immediately afterwards, two years degrees and the bachelor’s diploma often became the norm.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:28 am 10. Jay:

Many students at state universities work to support their non student life style and continue to party away. Thus class attendance is less than 50% in most classes, at least in the university that I work in.
Employers are catching on. There are better screening statistics than admission to schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc at least in the soft fields. The students in the soft fields, especially in the so called “elite” universities are not stressed to their limits, unlike the intercollegiate athletes.
Our top graduates make better employees than the mid level grads of the “elites” since the grads from those PC shops do not know what they do not know and are soft.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:39 am 11. Jack Klompus:

Thank you for this post. Dr. Kors was one of the most challenging and substantive professors whose class it was a true honor to take. His classes in European intellectual history were fantastic, his teaching style unmatched, and his staunch advocacy of academic freedom were the academic experiences I treasure most from my college experience. His hideously unpleasant, frumpy, colleague, the Foucault-worshiping Lynn Hunt (oh was her last name appropos but for a letter) and the intolerant fascistic joke Peggy Sanday against whom Kors locked horns were such stereotypes of what is wrong with academe and to them and their views, Kors showed no quarter.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:56 am 12. Charles:

I generally tell high school students that if they want to learn to think they need to take the hard sciences: math,physics, biology,chemistry. If they want to learn to write they they need to take history or english. If they want to learn to neither think or write then they should take the soft sciences: political science, sociology, psychology.

My major was political science. It grieves me to think how that degree made me utterly incompetent to deal with life and yet how long it took for me to get that junk out of my system.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:57 am 13. Morton Doodslag:

Welcome, Wretchard! I hope you find a much deserved and much wider readership. I will miss The Belmont Club - which was always a treat to visit to learn ftom your insights.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:58 am 14. dla:

Somehow I think the economics of higher education prevents any meaningful change in the short-term.

Funny, when the “high-tech” era was beginning, there was a shortage of electronic techicians. The first education establishments to fill this need were private “techinical schools”, who were unable to award “acredited” certificates.

Jun 23, 2008 - 11:58 am 15. Lilith:

So standing at the wall in 1969, I predicted to a friend … that there was a 50% chance that the future longevity of the wall would be between 2 2/3 years and 24 years. …But 20 years later, I called my friend … “Well, turn on your TV because Tom Brokaw is at the wall now, and they are tearing it down.”

But if you took a poll on Judgment Day of everyone who ever visited the Wall, it would likely be skewed to the year 1989 when it actually started to be torn, and people came out of the woodwork to dance on top of it, for there were many thousands who did so, while it was just onezie twozies in all the years leading up to that celebratory moment.

Jun 23, 2008 - 12:02 pm 16. Demosophist:

David Thomson #1:

I am utterly convinced that soft science advance degrees must be eliminated. No more than a bachelors degree should ever be required.

All the same, I think Marty deserved his doctorate. Moreover, he had a few ideas about how to preserve the meaning of that distinction, although he did think Derrida was sort of unimpressive.

Jun 23, 2008 - 12:13 pm 17. fred:

The Berlin Wall did not come down on its own because of the laws of entropy. Something had to give it a kick. Some crisis further to the East…

Any paradigm can collapse from its own internal contradictions. The problem with Communism and its Marxist variants is that they rest on a faith, not anything scientific. Of course any faith can reach a moment of disillusionment and this did in fact happen behind the Iron Curtain.

But, in the West, where Marxism has been rather successfully transplanted that moment or period of disillusionment has not happened yet. While yours truly is one of those Baby Boomers who did in fact undergo such disillusionment over twenty years ago, there are two generations of Americans behind us who are nowhere near that moment of disillusionment with socialism. They’re just getting started with their love affair with it. What’s worse is that many do not even know what it is they are enthralled with. Now, that Felsen fellow who is Obonga’s official weblog site manager is an open Communist (a Harvard graduate no less)and he knows the ideological framework. He knows where the ideas come from and where the bodies are buried. But the vast majority of the kiddies do not have the slightest clue - even if they are grads of elite universities - where those visions they’ve latched on to come from. I know. I’ve asked some of them. And when I tell them it’s Marxism they tell me I’m some old fart paranoid stuck in the Cold War mentality. It’s a New Age they tell me. Everything is new. A few say that they want to give Marxism a try because in its purity it’s never been tried before. Only some corruption of it.

So, we are not there yet. Not by a long shot.

Jun 23, 2008 - 12:16 pm 18. 3Case:

Welcome to your new home, Wretchard! Much good health and happiness to you and yours (extending to the entire BC community)!!

Jun 23, 2008 - 12:50 pm 19. Charles:

All the same, I think Marty deserved his doctorate.
//////////
yeah I remember reading Lipset. As I recall his sentences and paragraphs were not the grand abominations of most political science writing. But then he never pretended that he was doing science. rather he was writing history or geography.

Its the word “science” that butchers that thinking and writing of people who play in that sandbox.

Jun 23, 2008 - 1:01 pm 20. Doc99:

It’s a pity the CIA didn’t read Professor Kors. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have missed the whole damned thing.

Jun 23, 2008 - 1:09 pm 21. John Aristides:

I like the new digs, Wretchard. Also, I thought you might be interested in Michael Spence’s Nobel lecture on asymmetrical information and signaling in “markets where the issue is often undetectable or imperfectly detectable quality differential” — i.e. job markets.

The lecture is here

Excerpt:
“The idea behind the job market signaling model is that is there are attributes of potential employees that the employer cannot observe and that affect the individual’s subsequent productivity and hence value to the employer on the job.”

Jun 23, 2008 - 1:21 pm 22. Fred:

Doc99,

The CIA’s problem is that it tends to hire people from the same universities where the indoctrination takes place. I was an undergrad from 1978-82, not at one of these elite schools, and I can recall that during that later part of the Cold War the poly sci, economics, and history professors where I went to school were mostly rather smitten by how “progressive” the socialist bloc was. Thus, they and their students seemed a bit inoculated from experiencing cognitive dissonance.

I think what has pretty much crippled our CIA was the Church Hearings of the mid to late seventies, with the result that greater legislative committee oversight has been slapped on Langley. It has politicized the CIA much more than people realize, to the point where leaks, whether from CIA employees or from the Hill, seem to be a fact of life now. How can one run an effective intel agency when the worst enemy may be the domestic not the foreign one?

It was the Left which animated Kennedy and Church to make the CIA walk the gang plank. The Leftist takeover of academia, I think, was no accident. Sure, there was institutional sloth and cheap careerism involved, but Prof. Kors leaves out the conscious Gramscian strategy involved. And it is a strategy, because the nation’s public schools are also infested with these indoctrinizers.

Jun 23, 2008 - 1:28 pm 23. Stephen:

Here’s a first post after years of reading. I also wanted to pay my respects to the tip jar but it is nowhere to be found. Do they not have such things in this new upscale neighborhood?

Richard you take a good photo. You look very much like a teacher at my son’s all-boy Catholic high school. This fellow specializes in AP English and teen obedience training. He is both loved and feared, as are you.

Cheers, Wretchard!

Jun 23, 2008 - 2:08 pm 24. Honing your Critical Thinking Skills - UPDATED | The Anchoress:

[...] how I missed it but Wretchard at Belmont Club (Richard Fernandez) is now at Pajamas Media, too, and he’s also talking about asymmetrical information!. by TheAnchoress @ 4:21 pm. Filed under Critical Thinking, Philosophy, Why can’t weeee be [...]

Jun 23, 2008 - 2:53 pm 25. Bonzo:

Wretchard, is this neighborhood safe?

Jun 23, 2008 - 3:00 pm 26. Paul:

Wretchard, you blog provides an illuminating light on subjects and thought rarely discussed in the MSM world.

My view is that our colleges and universities have become the madrassas of the anti American left, brainwashing our future population to be fashionable fascists. Freedom of speech, religion and thought at these supposedly hallowed institutions no longer is respected and is routinely discouraged or punished.

This situation has occurred because most universities are each supported with tens of millions of dollars of government funding each year without any accountability or responsibility to our society at large. This collegiate funding scheme has spawned an enormously wealthy complex of colleges and associated foundations that wield vast power hell bent on destroying the American way of life.

To my way of thinking, a university should not be allowed to receive any government grant, loans or other funding if they are discriminating against people of conservative or religious views in their curriculum, grading, acceptance standards or hiring practices period. Only then we will clean up our rotten educational system.

Jun 23, 2008 - 3:01 pm 27. Richard:

I am a professional academic, approaching retirement, in one of the “better” liberal arts colleges. It greatly pains me to say that Paul has spoken the simple truth. The corruption in the academy (outside of the hard sciences)is profound. There are a few islands of sanity in the humanities and social sciences in any school, but on the whole, the damage is massive and largely irredeemable. The left clones itself and every generation is more radical. This will continue until the public demands change, but the public by and large has neither the wit to know the disease nor the desire to treat it.

Congratulations on your new format, Wretchard, and on your distinguished work as a blogger. You help to maintain my morale in the asylum that is my world.

Jun 23, 2008 - 3:19 pm 28. wretchard:

Gott’s Doomsday Argument takes as its fundamental input how long something has already existed as a predictor of how much longer it is likely to exist. It falls down if we know that we are on some special part of the distribution. If for example, we knew how badly the East Bloc economies were doing, we could have come to an explicit understanding of when the Wall would come down. But The Doomsday Argument may be useful when we don’t know how a system works.

Political correctness at universities has lasted already lasted some 30+ years. That means it is a fairly long-lived phenomenon, but nothing indicates it will last a very, very long time. Dr. Kors is resigned to fighting the good fight, but sometimes I wonder whether political correctness isn’t, like the Berlin Wall, like a “knight dying inside his invincible armor”?

Jun 23, 2008 - 3:21 pm 29. heather:

The University is actually seen as the GateKeeper to the Middle Class. This is why the content of the ’soft’ sciences and the humanities are of no relevance to the taxpayers and parents who desire, wish, hope, dream, their children will be admitted to University. In Canada, that means they can land in the soft arms of government employment.

My own advice to my grandson is: you must be able to read and you must understand compound interest in order to function in today’s society. If you go to university, take a hard science. Otherwise, don’t waste your time and money: go and get an interesting life.

Jun 23, 2008 - 3:47 pm 30. rab:

Welcome maestro!!

Jun 23, 2008 - 4:25 pm 31. trangbang68:

What happens to Fallback@belmontclub? Does it fall off the end of the earth? Although many think deeper here than my pedestrian mind; I’ve always enjoyed the insight in these trying times. My son went to an elite University and majored in poli-sci and philosophy. I wonder if we’ll ever reel him back in.

Jun 23, 2008 - 4:55 pm 32. wretchard:

fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com, like belmontclub.blogspot.com stays where it is, as archival, until I can find some way to preserve it in some other form.

Jun 23, 2008 - 4:56 pm 33. Dave Hardy:

At least in my field, there’s something of a self-perpetuating cycle. I’ve got 30+ years experience in law, solid scholarship (14 law rev. articles, one cited by the U.S. Supremes and 3/4 of the Circuit courts), etc.. Never been able to land a law teaching post. From what I see, the vast majority of law schools regard as a minimum that your degree come from the highest-ranked schools — as in good grades at the top 5, or top of the class at the top 15. I went to a top-tier school but not top 15. I’ve known attorneys from Yale and Harvard and in a courtroom I’d have them for lunch.

And teaching law is regarded as a separate career path from actually doing what you want to teach, so it’s preferrable that you get a clerking job for a judge, and then apply to teach. Actually experience in the skills you are to teach is largely irrelevant.

I rather suspect that a medical school would laugh at an MD who applied to teach surgery, and admitted that he had never performed a surgery, but he had a nice degree and had spent a year or two watching surgeons at work (the equivalent of a clerkship).

There’s also an interesting monopoly in this field. In almost all states, you can only take the bar exam if you (1) earned a JD and (2) it came from a school accredited by ABA. Understand, ABA is a purely private organization. The vast majority of attorneys don’t belong. Its accreditation standards have been controversial, extending down to size of library, what percent of faculty have tenure, etc.. I’m hard put to think of another field where a government-issue license is dependent upon a degree from an institution that meets a private, voluntary, membership organization’s approval.

Jun 23, 2008 - 5:46 pm 34. Porkov:

Sure, all of the thimgs that Kors and his commentariat say are true, but wait - there’s more. The education industry is a subset of the entertainment industry. You don’t have to go to school to indulge your learning jones, but where else can you find all the elements AND the social setting that make the academy such a glorious smorgasboard of intellectual opportunity. Too bad it’s wasted on the young under the pretense of career preparation. Even worse that it isn’t marketed as what I just described.

Jun 23, 2008 - 6:04 pm 35. Fresh Air:

Dave–

You should try the U of C Law School. You already have far more experience than one of their prominent lecturers. In his spare time he is running for president.

Jun 23, 2008 - 6:05 pm 36. RWE:

Dr. Kors says that he found a remarkable change in the universities between the early and late 60’s. Open bigotry, racism, and intimidation were practiced at the beginning of the decade - but not by its end.

But upon reflection, after looking at his arguments, you see that in fact the negative aspects were not eliminated, but rather both transformed and expanded. And like all bureaucracies, they never know when to stop.

The idea that college professors today assume falsely that the students have had 12 plus grades of American Triumphilism of which they must be shorn rings true. On entering college in 1970 I took the exemption exams and received 6 credits of American History without ever taking a class. Of course, I also was one of those aberrations that put on my country’s uniform at the same time.

This is a remarkable, eloquent, and frank analysis and I am glad that Wretchard chose to comment on it.

Jun 23, 2008 - 6:06 pm 37. Lilith:

Funny, Wretchard, it was only recently that Hugh Hewitt updated his blog list to point to your fallback site instead of the original site, which always puzzled me because he mentioned your posts at least twice that I can remember (I guess he followed someone else’s link). Now it will be a number of years before he points to this site.

Jun 23, 2008 - 6:26 pm 38. cubanbob:

Abolish the tax exempt and charitable status of universities. Limit 529 plans and tax payer guaranteed student loans to the hard sciences,engineering and business,medicine,teaching and law. Leave the multicultural and politically correct nonsense to those who wish to pay for them out of their own pockets.

Until this is done the universities will be what they are.

Jun 23, 2008 - 6:29 pm 39. Tennwriter:

I remember reading a few years back one of Wretchard’s post on a news article, and seeing him draw more information from the article than the newsman had put in. I was quite impressed by the ability to mentally correct for the filters and blurs of wrong ideas and ignorance with superior analysis and knowledge.

Congratulations on what I hope is a step forward.

Jun 23, 2008 - 8:03 pm 40. DonB71InWA:

You can already see how the Academy will become the next buggy whip.

A couple of years ago I saw on a TV science show (Nova, if I recall correctly) a scientist testing a robotic arm and hand. He was developing this to help the paralyzed and amputees. He had electrodes connected to his head and soley with his thoughts he was able to move the arm and flex the fingers. Fascinatingly, there wasn’t a direct connection between his brain and the arm. The signals were routed through the Internet.

At some point a scientist will determine not only how to send information from the brain through the internet but will reverse the flow. Then schools (if they survive at all) will look very different. The academy will lose it’s gatekeeper status.

Check out Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” for a more comprehensive description. Per Ray the timeframe for this is about 20 years.

Jun 23, 2008 - 9:14 pm 41. CornFuzed:

The argument is based on and lost with brief paragraph:
1) The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. DOUBLE FALSE; power comes from the ability to indoctrinate next generation, usually along conservative lines; and, universities do not hold monopoly of any sort.

2) As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his “Going Broke by Degree,” they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. ONLY? ALLOWED? Federal government does so extensively through various testing schemes for the military, foreign service, etc. Plus, such activities are regulated by supra-organizations, above universities themselves.

3) They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. ALL FIELDS are technical; thus, value added to all fields.

4) Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. FALSE. The heart of English is writing and critical methods–both technical fields. The heart of history is
historiography. The heart of political science is statistics. The same for sociology.

5) They hire there despite, not because of, that. ???? Nonsensical.

6) Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. FALSE. Recruiters regularly report that above all they need graduates sensitive to multicultural environment, knowledgeable of domestic and international
affairs, have the ability to think critically, and can write competently. Take these vs. teaching someone how to compute engineering principles or administer an injection–which are easier to learn, perform, teach?

7) Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. FALSE. Illogical. We may help identify existing value, but we also help cultivate what is there and what can become.

Jun 24, 2008 - 4:14 am 42. RWE:

Back in 1993 one of the networks had a piece on how the economy was so bad that even recent college graduates were having trouble getting work. They gave 3 examples that were real doozies.

A young woman had graduated with a degree in Art History. The economy was so bad that she was working as a waitress, since she could not find a job running an art museum.

Another young woman had majored in French. The economy was so bad that she was working as a nanny rather than as whatever people who major in French do.

A young man had majored in International Relations and wanted a job as a U.S. Senator. The economy was so bad that he had to start work as a door-to-door salesman because no one would hire him to be a Senator.

Then they asked the Sec of Labor, Robert Reich, a very intelligent question. Should these students perhaps have taken something that was more useful? His response was incredible. “No, they should not worry about what to take in college because whatever company hires them will teach them what they need to know.”

So we can see displayed at the highest levels the basic attitude that supports the approach that Dr. Kors describes. It really does not matter, anyway. The studies are pointless except to justify the lifestyle of the teachers. Good Old Capitalism will bail your sorry butt out.

Jun 24, 2008 - 4:40 am 43. Wretchard on Higher Education « The View from Alexandria:

[...] 24, 2008 by philo Wretchard (in his new home in Pajamas Media!) writes of the political correctness of academia, with some [...]

Jun 24, 2008 - 7:25 am 44. Pat Openlander:

What a refreshing piece about academic life and its absurdities. Thank you. I look forward to your continued work.

Jun 24, 2008 - 8:37 am 45. Herb:

Dave Hardy said:
“I’m hard put to think of another field where a government-issue license is dependent upon a degree from an institution that meets a private, voluntary, membership organization’s approval.”
The uniform engineering registration law requires that the candidate graduate from an accredited school of engineering. NCEES is the body. There is a move afoot to increase the minimum for a license to the Master’s Degree. This is to increase the supply of engineers(!)

Jun 24, 2008 - 11:03 am 46. trainer:

In the private sector now, I taught specialty engineering subjects at the University level for 8 years.

My fellow professors didn’t really know how to handle me. Not only was I a conservative, but I consciously treated their sacred cows with the contempt they deserved. What possibly can an engineer have in common with a women’s-studies professor with a peace sign tattoo’d on her wrinkled butt.

My top students regularly got 2 times the salary of the average tenured soft-studies instructors after graduation. To get me, they paid me more at the time than the University President.

It was so freakin’ unfair…from their point of view anyway. Seeing that the school was buying me only temporarily, I could care less and showed it.

Jun 24, 2008 - 11:24 am 47. Mad Fiddler:

Dear CornFuzed,

(One speculates upon the appropriateness of chosen noms-de-net.

While I don’t disagree with you on all points, your apology for the academic world appears to be founded mostly on its formal presentation. The reasoning is in many cases circular, and in other cases based on assumptions that are unstated and undefended.

(But thanks for taking the time to marshal your thoughts! I’m not so much attacking you as trying to digest what you’ve said, chew it up, test, and examine it in relation to my experience and research. Nothin’ personal.)

To reference your points:

(1) You are right in several particulars: The universities do not have a monopoly on the indoctrination business. The indoctrination is manifold, including the so-called “mainstream news” organizations and the “entertainment” industry, and certain parts of the government already fully in thrall to the doctrinaire Marxist Left. This indoctrination (”teaching the students to accept uncriticallya value system”) is by definition conservative, but only in the sense that it is desperate to perpetuate the Marxist Leftist dogma that inspires it.

(2) My experience teaching at several universities (as both part time and full time faculty) that their accountability to external supervisory (especially accrediting) bodies is mostly limited to showing that their faculty have advanced degrees from other accredited universities.

On the face of it, that speaks of an ingrown, incestuous, and insular system extremely vulnerable to corruption and misappropriation.

(3) Your assertion that “ALL FIELDS are technical” is not proven by mere capitalization. The assertion is only valid to the extent that all the so-called “soft” sciences attempt to co-opt the clothing of the hard sciences by (1) creating a set of hypotheses and fundamental self-definitions couched in terminology that has been “borrowed” and given exclusive new meaning known only to the initiated ones — i.e., “jargon”— (2) by asserting that the hypotheses and assumptions generated within the bounds of the field are testable and provable by the scientific method, which to a very great degree depends on the quantifiability of data. The whole thing falls down as the underlying criteria by which data might be quantified, are irretrievably flawed, subjective, murky, and vague. (See item 4)

(4) You state, “The heart of English is writing and critical methods-both technical fields.”
This is only true in relation to the grammar of the language (subject-verb agreement, understanding the parts of speech, sentence diagramming, etc., all of which should be disposed of prior to high school) or the logical validity of arguments and conclusions embedded in the ideational content of the writing, which are on one hand, the domain of logic and philosophy at least as much as of English, but in any case are also undeniably subject to the imposition of political dogma, as is seen throughout U.S. high schools and universities. Historiography — the study of the methods of gathering and analysis of historical data — can be a very disciplined art, but it, too, is subjective and vulnerable to political distortion, particularly within an undergraduate regime. And your statement that “The heart of political science is statistics” fails to acknowledge the plasticity of statistical data. Data may be objective. The presentation of data can powerfully distort their interpretation. Even before that, the gathering of statistical data is entirely determined by subjective decisions and criteria selected by the researchers.

(6) “Recruiters…report that above all they need graduates sensitive to multicultural environment…etc.” — While in an ideal world this would be true, the politically correct version of multiculturalism which is thumped into the minds of students in U.S. institutions is an insulting parody of actual sensitivity. It is a catechism of thou-shalt-not’s designed less to open students’ minds to diversity, than to stifle any actual thought and replace it with reflexive obedience to the pronouncements of fearless leader.

Universities emerged in the middle ages as centers of learning which the local city-states recognized needed guarantees of independence. Many of the institutions and traditions of universities — especially self-government and tenure — survive from that period. While it is arguable that there is value in having some guarantee of academic freedom and independence, the system of tenure as practiced does not necessarily produce the results originally intended, when the candidates for that tenure are selected by dogmatic Marxist dunderheads who have come to dominate many universities.

Jun 24, 2008 - 11:44 am 48. Mad Fiddler:

By the Way, Wretchard… any possibility of having a button as before allowing a commenter on reflection to WITHDRAW a comment after submission?

?

Jun 24, 2008 - 11:51 am 49. Fred:

So whatever is coming is as likely to be worse as it is to be better. 50-50 either way.

The dividing line has to be drawn a little more finely. University psychology is zoology specializing in humans and white rats. It’s a baby science. Sociology is a rats nest of political weirdness. A fine scalpel indeed is needed.

Oddly, it’s the techies that make the stereos, iPods, web, TV, and other electronica that the artists, politicians, bloggers, blowhards, MSM and scam artists use so well.

Jun 24, 2008 - 12:08 pm 50. Fred:

Let’s see, we have two buttons down here; ‘Submit’ and ‘Post’. We ought to have ‘Dominate’ and ‘Gallop’.

Jun 24, 2008 - 12:09 pm 51. Steynianism 178 « Free Mark Steyn!:

[...] IVORY TOWER-FASCISM: “The crisis facing higher education, he feels, arises from the fact that a largely selfish [...]

Jun 24, 2008 - 12:16 pm 52. RWE:

Mad Fiddler:

Great quote I read recently: “There is no such thing as Science. There is only that which rapidly becomes useful engineering - and that which is left over, which is merely unfounded speculation.”

Jun 24, 2008 - 3:29 pm 53. truepeers:

Wretchard,

Good to see you here.

It seems to me that there is a problem with this Doomsday argument: it doesn’t take into account the inevitable implication of the observer in what is being observed (inter alia, a heightened spirit of observation generally hastens the demise of the specific cultural or political phenomenon being observed). This implication is the defining quality of the humanities, or human science, which is why they can’t be simply replaced with “hard science”, and the attempt to do so only makes for mindless empiricism. Human self-understanding takes place in a market where the objective analysis discounts and demands renewal of subjective understandings of what it means to be always becoming human.

The need for human self-understanding is inescapable, if we are to survive each other, though often it is pragmatically best or efficient not to think too much and go with the crowd. But it is surely both as conformist thought dynamic, and as one of the few places where one can take time out to pursue human self-understanding that gives the institution of the academy such power despite its queer religiosity. Inevitably, however it is just this need for self-understanding, when conformity become too evidently dangerous, that compromises any pragmatic religious order, sooner or later.

There are ways to conceive alternatives to the current academic system. More free and entrepreneurial forms of certifying and credentializing each other’s achievements are conceivable, and employers could learn to respect them. I mean, we’re all here on the internet discussing the human condition because we know there is likely more to be learned here than at the local uni. This emerging reality will likely grow at the expense of the old school.

Jun 24, 2008 - 3:55 pm 54. fred:

I think that what David Horowitz proposed - an Academic Bill of Rights - was an entirely reasonable framework to leverage the needed change. All it asks for is freedom, mutual respect, and true diversity. And yet, the professors’ union and other organizations, legislatures, and institutions reject it.

Jun 24, 2008 - 5:27 pm 55. Charles:

As I’ve mentioned before there are 7 points at which this age pretty much maps over onto the early 1500’s.

1.) The internet is as revolutionary as the gutenberg press.
2.) The missions to Mars and beyond are just as impressive as columbus’s, de gama’s & magellan’s voyages.
3.) the search for gold among the aztecs 1519 and the incas 1532 mapped over onto the current age are still more than a decade and two away but the opening rounds of the quest for H3 on the moon may wind up being very similiar 10 and 20 years from now.
4.)The overturn of the roman era earth centered universe of Ptolemy by the copernican sun centered universe is about par with the big bang.
5.) We have not seen a luther put The Ninety-Five Theses on the door at worms as he did 1517. But that’s still a decade away. In the meantime its clear that the glory days of atheism from the fall of the bastille to the fall of the berlin wall–have passed. What’s left is an atheistic medieval ediface (psychology,socialogy,political science)much simliar to the catholic church of the middle ages. It makes for a lot of signs and symbols that amount to noise.
6.)Ferdinand and Isabella’s capture of the libraries of the Moors in cities like Cadiz brought the ancient greeks back to europe. today hardly a year goes by when some library or inscription of the ancient egyptians,babylonians,persians,sumerians,syrians,macedonians, romans,phoenicins etc doesn’t turn up some reference to an old/new testament character or place.
7.) the high point of islam in the 1500’s was the siege of vienna in 1532. that’s still another 25 years away. but islam is an old empire religion. and we are moving from old empire to new empire. (I’m defining here empire in the way churchill defined it–as “empires of the future will be empires of the mind”..)Then as now, Islam was a consumer of science and technology and not a producer.

Jun 24, 2008 - 7:04 pm 56. Charles:

7.) the high point of islam in the 1500’s was the siege of vienna in 1532. that’s still another 25 years away. but islam is an old empire religion. and we are moving from old empire to new empire. (I’m defining here empire in the way churchill defined it–as “empires of the future will be empires of the mind”..)Then as now, Islam was a consumer of science and technology and not a producer.
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there is a caveat here. the cost of generating solar power is now collapsing faster than computing power. the best companies now like nano solar are producing solar power at par with coal in a couple years their costs will be half to a quarter that of coal. this makes deserts everywhere one huge power center. that bodes well for north africa and the middle east.

the other thing happening now but less publicized is that the slow fall of water desalination and transport is accelerating. I blog on the latest here
http://nick2.wordpress.com/
this also bodes well for desert countries.
basically starting in 10-15 years I think the press of populations will reverse course because of technological change.

Jun 24, 2008 - 8:01 pm 57. Warren Bonesteel:

Left, right or center, agnostic, atheist or capital “B” believer, The Doomsday Argument can also be used to ‘predict’ the end of your own belief systems, ideologies, cultures, societies, economies…

Which is why some folks go so far out of their ways to discredit it.

Jun 24, 2008 - 8:29 pm 58. Charles:

Left, right or center, agnostic, atheist or capital “B” believer, The Doomsday Argument can also be used to ‘predict’ the end of your own belief systems, ideologies, cultures, societies, economies…
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oh yeah and the world is slowly coming to an end. in the sense that end of europe as the primary agent of history was foretold by columbus’s voyage.

then as now Christians have a better eschatology to deal with it than everyone else.

Jun 24, 2008 - 10:00 pm 59. Charles:

Oh and one more thing. On of Luther’s points was that catholic church of the age needed stop the practice of the sale of indulgences.

In the current age the practice has been reconstituted. It is one of the chief Obama’s chief selling points.

Vote for me and get your ancestors out of hock.

Luther contended that the sale of indulgences promoted witchcraft. I tend to agree.

Jun 25, 2008 - 11:05 am 60. Storm-Rider:

“The hard sciences intrinsically demand precise measurement…2+2=4 regardless of one’s ethnicity, gender, or claims of victimization…On the other hand, the liberal arts by their very nebulousness are easily exploited by academic charlatans and quacks.”

Hard science is the process of determining the behavior of the material universe through observation, controlled testing, and the application of human reason. The hard sciences, such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering, astronomy and biology, have as their subjects the organic and inorganic elements of nature - including the observable and testable functions of life it’s self. It is difficult to fudge hard science because the untruth of fudged hard science can be demonstrated by repetition of the original observation and testing, and proven false.

The soft sciences of psychology, sociology, political “science”, women’s studies, cross-cultural studies, etc., etc., etc. differ from the hard sciences in that the subject is the human being. The human being can only be studied in the same way as the objects of hard science if the human being is only a material object, say like a lab mouse, or a tree, or a mineral. For the Atheist and Marxist this is not a problem, but for the religious it is - since man is understood to have a supernatural component. For the religious it is understood that man is made in the image of God, and that man therefore has an eternal soul. Since the soul of man can’t be directly observed or tested as in the hard sciences, there can be no hard science in the study of the complete man - man the animal, but whose soul is made in the image of God. Soft science will always be soft and incomplete if man has a soul; and the teachers and practitioners of soft science will come to incomplete or erroneous conclusions when man is viewed as simply a thing or object for observation.

Igor Shafarevich, a brilliant Russian mathematician, came to this conclusion in his book The Socialist Phenomenon. Here is an excerpt regarding the soft “scientific” Socialist/Marxist understanding of man:

“Individuals correspond to the elemental particles of matter, which must be identical… As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules
transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.”

This is the end result of soft science: Marxist Socialism.

Jun 25, 2008 - 12:23 pm 61. Storm-Rider:

Here’s the link to work by Igor Shafarevich.

http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html#pagestart_194

Jun 25, 2008 - 12:26 pm 62. 49erDweet:

Changing gears slightly, but isn’t the military another institution we allow to classify our youth by IQ [and output]? And don’t they do a far better and much more equal job?

Best wishes, W, in the years ahead

Jun 25, 2008 - 12:46 pm 63. truepeers:

The human being can only be studied in the same way as the objects of hard science if the human being is only a material object, say like a lab mouse, or a tree, or a mineral. For the Atheist and Marxist this is not a problem, but for the religious it is - since man is understood to have a supernatural component.

-Actually, for any thinking atheist it should be a problem too. The fact that humanity is characterized by our shared uses of transcendent signs that have no material existence - words exist, in the material domain, only as letters or as sounds that the brain can associate in apprehending the transcendent sign - should throw into doubt any strictly materialist philosophy. One can bracket the question of whether God exists; but a serious student of the human sciences cannot argue away, as something unnecessary, the fact that humans are religious beings. Atheism is a form of religion too.

Jun 25, 2008 - 3:42 pm 64. Charles:

Atheism is a form of religion too.
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The great atheistic philosophers of the 19th century Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx & Freud didn’t actually prove that God doesn’t exist. They simply assumed that he doesn’t exist and went from there.

In fact, you can’t prove scientifically that God does or does not exist. Both positions are matters of faith.

See the word “scientifically” in the last paragraph. As it happens science is a branch of philosophy. Which is by definition man centered –as in Man is the measure of all things

God is by definition God centered. If Man could measure God then God would not be God.

When God is the measure of all things then you are talking theology. When man is the measure of all things then you are talking philosophy.

A great confusion came into the english speaking world by way of bacon & decartes in the early 1600’s when they created a tree of knowledge and put theology as a subbranch of philosophy.

That has caused considerable confusion ever since.

Jun 25, 2008 - 6:14 pm 65. michaelyi:

I suspect that many of the commenters here are implicitly assuming that J. Richard Gott’s Doomsday Argument makes a prediction that delivers some element of certainty about when a phenomenon will end. However, I think the Doomsday Argument only guides one toward the best way to bet given very sparse knowledge about the phenomenon. And ones current best bet may well be very inaccurate indeed as Wretchard indicated when he warned , “It (the Doomsday Argument) falls down if we know that we are on some special part of the distribution.” (Jun 23, 2008 - 3:21 pm)

Granting for the sake of discussion that US colleges and universities are IQ sorting machines with a priveleged near-monopoly position for providing that service, and the content of the educ—–, ahem, seat time matters little to employers, then why don’t we see employers hiring young people with no more than an acceptance letter in hand?

Jun 26, 2008 - 1:23 am

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