Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem | Hacker News Reader

Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem

chronicle.com

15 pointsjseliger12 comments

'In 2011, Louis Menand observed that "few people think that … in the matter of what kind of art people enjoy or admire, the fate of the republic is somehow at stake." The Apprentice signifies once and for all the hubris of such blitheness.'

Is the author old enough to have watched television in the 1970s?

Is the intended audience supposed to be humanities professors or the layman? Hypocritical how the article appears to be talking about humanities alienating the wider population, and a few paragraphs in I’m already lost on context.

The website is called The Chronicle of Higher Education, so I'm going to go with other professors.

This essay seems like it was largely written to make the author feel smart while doing very little to illuminate or clarify their ideas and insights (which seem to boil down to basically calling Donald Trump Hitler and suggesting his voters are uneducated imbeciles who must be stopped by academia, which is among the least original thoughts possible to express).

To disguise what is really a bland central point and weak call to action at the end (hey, let’s try harder people is how the essay ends), the author dresses up the language to obscure what he really thinks and vomits forth a labyrinth of self referential jibberish which does little to enlighten anyone of anything while wasting the reader’s time.

It is a singularly academic trait to believe that bullying one’s readers into submission by attempting to cudgel them with their lack of knowledge in your particular domain is an effective persuasive strategy. Dominance games of this sort make these people generally unemployable in the real world.

Reading this sort of reminds me of listening to the rapper “The Game.” Most of his records consist of name dropping of other rappers and quoting the words of others. There is a reason The Game had a short career.

Likewise, here we have a piece of writing which is a network of references to authors few have read, unnecessary deployment of $10 vocabulary words which would best be replaced by shorter words which are more generally known. Orson Wells, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway perfected writing. This guy and his kind ruined it for the rest of us for their own benefit.

A great way to determine if someone really knows something is the clarity of their writing. By this metric, the author has very little to communicate.

If Richard Feynman can explain quantum physics to a 3 year old, this writer can call Trump Hitler and suggest his voters are uneducated morons without wasting everyone’s time with the unnecessary and obfuscatory language porn.

The reason people don’t respect these academics? There is no penalty for them to be wrong and their ideas are not provable. They are effectively employed via tax dollars by the state to disseminate fundamentally political ideas to their students while feigning impartiality. They never read outside of their own domains, resulting in a permanent state of educated ignorance.

Being obligated to pay 1/4th of our already overly expensive college funds to sustain the employment of people like this makes little sense anymore, Fire them and get your education from YouTube.

Don’t pay for it anymore.

I see how the author would reference various sources and names to support their position, much like you would in a scientific paper, but it does come off as a bit egotistical and self-righteous when you have to drop so many names to support your unoriginal thoughts (The Game analogy is spot on).

Disclaimer: I don't like the writer either.

However, I don't think he's trying to browbeat anyone. I think he's just living in the humanities bubble - and this is all really middle-of-the-road stuff if you're in that world.

>Fire them and get your education from YouTube.

The problem is, you wouldn't get anywhere with the humanities by watching youtube. The online resources for philosophy are pretty bad, and for literature it's even worse.

I think the point about the humanities - and about culture in general, is that you don't want to live in a society without it. You don't want to have a society where there are no politics professors, or sociologists, or philosophers. They aren't expensive, and they make it so if somebody is interested in one of those fields, they can actually find an expert. And if you don't have any experts, you end up with a shambolic politics, a dysfunctional society, and shitty philosophy.

A lot of what america does wrong is to ignore people paid to think deeply about things in favour of the gut feelings of charlatans. People commonly notice this when scientists are ignored by politicians. Perhaps it would be worth it to extend the thought to other fields.

In light of this article and that it already made the Hitler comparison, I would like to point out that the nazi did also employ a lot of people in charge of political, cultural and philosophical area of their society. In their view they had a lot of employed experts, and yet from the rest of the worlds perspective they all were in a extremely limited bubble.

The answer is naturally not to stop having experts, but maybe what we need in days of extreme polarization is experts on social and cultural bubbles. The humanities bubble can't continue forever.

The fundamental thesis is

> Three generations ago, literature professors exchanged a rigorously defined sphere of expertise, to which they could speak with authority, for a much wider field to which they could speak with virtually no power at all.

Hence all the references to various scholars and their works.

Nowhere does the author bash Trump or say his voters are uneducated imbeciles. The quote most related to this is

> For going on 50 years, professors in the humanities have striven to play a political role in the American project. Almost without exception, this has involved attacking the establishment. As harmful as institutionalized power can be, as imperfect as even the most just foundations inevitably appear, they are, as it turns out, all we’ve got. Never has a citizen been so grateful for institutions — for functioning courts, for a professionalized FBI, for a factually painstaking CBO or GAO — as since November 2016.

Which boils down to "The humanities anti-establishment position needs to be toned down. This election when many of us did not get an outcome we wanted, we realized the value in having strong and trustworthy public institutions."

The main theme of the essay is self-awareness:

> Yet the editorial logic of right-wing media resembles closely the default position of many recent books and dissertations in literary studies: The true story is always the oppositional story, the cry from outside. The righteous are those who sift the shadows of the monolith to undermine it in defense of some notion of freedom.

Considering the essay starts out with

> Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence?

The takeaway is that humanities professors have become ineffective because they've traded expertise for politically motivated analysis. There's a feel good, all inclusive, woo woo diversity culture about the humanities, but its come at the price of critical analysis and discerning judgment. Instead of providing a a critical, reasoned opposing view, they've become increasingly radical and reactionary. Instead of seeing their view as a small, but important contribution to the greater project of society building, they've tried to monopolize the project. The end of the essay reaffirms that the humanities have something to offer, but that that offering has to be a balanced towards improving the establishment instead of encouraging critiques with no means of improving or fixing it.

I think there should be a footnote to all of this: the crux of the argument is as old as the humanities itself. He's disingenuous to pretend that political concerns were implanted into the humanities 30 years ago, when the truth is, the role and position of politics in the humanities is basically the inaugural concern of the entire field.

What's more, it's also disingenuous to characterize the scholarship of three decades ago as 'rigorously defined' - especially in comparison to contemporary stuff. New Criticism / Formalism etc. are in theory 'rigorously defined', but the reason why their 'rigorous definition' has been broadly abandoned was because it was nonsensical and arbitrary. Humanities scholarship is much more rigorous than it was in previous decades - it's just a shame that so few read it.

I don't think the rigorous definition of the field is the important bit, rather the kind of area one has expertise in. These days people will develop expertise with a set of "tools" and then apply them to whatever area they'd likem. We get feminist critiques, Focauldian critiques, deconstructive arguments, LGBT critiques, etc., that take on political and social issues in a very slanted manner because they analyze the issue in terms of a this framework. Instead of being experts on feminism, for example, we get experts on everything from a feminist perspective. It's good to have this perspective, the problem is that the perspective is overwhelming. The point is to analyze the issue from this perspective, but we've lost a focus on the relative importance of this perspective and the issues it raises. Moreover, sometimes the issue itself is obscured because it is contorted to be analyzable by this framework.

I will say, the problem he delineates doesn't seem to plague all of the humanities, only certain areas. Analytic philosophy departments and history departments seem to not suffer from the same problems.

I don't know if I'm living in a bubble, but I don't think I've ever come across a Foucauldian critique in the wild, as it were. Occasionally I've come across a moral panic over some careless tweet an assistant professor wrote. It is true that a lot of humanities faculty are pretty far-left, but that's just one end of the broader trend in academia, exacerbated by the fact that so few artists, philosophers, or writers find much to like in capitalism.

As for analytic philosophy, I like some of the work - but I think you've pointed at something like a nice cover over a dirty secret when you mention its apoliticism. Analytic philosophy essentially restricts philosophy to a very small subset of its traditional topics, which are emphatically non-political. That's part of why it's tended to survive and dominate in countries that have regular panics about professors having the wrong political opinions. It hasn't done well out of the strength and clarity of its arguments - often they are orthogonal to the concerns of French and German philosophers. It has done well out of the conservatism and cowardice of university administrations, and embattled accademics.

jeez louise this comment is beyond silly. I'm in stem and I sort of think a lot of scholarship in the humanities is just fashionable noise (see sokal hoax) but your comment is very troubling. I worry for the state of western civilization if people like you have power over other humans.

"This essay seems like it was largely written to make the author feel smart while doing very little to illuminate or clarify their ideas and insights (which seem to boil down to basically calling Donald Trump Hitler and suggesting his voters are uneducated imbeciles who must be stopped by academia, which is among the least original thoughts possible to express)."

This is just not at all what the author said. It lacks all the nuance of this essay. I think the call to action is very clear-look at yourself for these ominous trends in american politics and try to root them out stem and branch..I think it is quite well written and not at all self referential. (Do you know what self referential means?)

"It is a singularly academic trait to believe that bullying one’s readers into submission by attempting to cudgel them with their lack of knowledge in your particular domain is an effective persuasive strategy.

The audience is academics in the humanities!! not someone who thinks scholarship in the humanities can be replaced by youtube. (seriously not even vimeo?)

"Likewise, here we have a piece of writing which is a network of references to authors few have read, unnecessary deployment of $10 vocabulary words which would best be replaced by shorter words which are more generally known. Orson Wells, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway perfected writing. This guy and his kind ruined it for the rest of us for their own benefit."

Sometimes to say complicated things one must be complicated. I don't think this prose was particularly abstruse. The author was trying to make a point about long term academic trends in the humanities..it is hard to make arguments about that without references the authors who make up those trends...some of whom are obscure to the relative public. How did this scholar ruin writing for you? You haven't even heard of most of the people he references!

Richard Feynman can't explain quantum physics to a 3 year old. Moreover- "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize."-Richard Feynman.

Not everything can be turned into a pithy analogy without losing all meaning.

source for quote: (not a very good source I'll admit) http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/02/magazine/tm-10496/4

"this writer can call Trump Hitler and suggest his voters are uneducated morons"

I would like to introduce you to a word you clearly have never heard. This word is `nuance'. From wiktionary the word `nuance' means "Subtlety or fine detail. " Here is the word in an example sentence: `Understanding the basics is easy, but appreciating the nuances takes years.'

Clearly you have no idea what nuance is if your impression from this essay is solely that trump voters are all uneducated morons and trump is Hitler.

(Sidenote:Hitler was evil and all but he clearly was an effective and skilled leader. Trump is anything but. Trump's sheer incompetence has been a blessing. ).

"They are effectively employed via tax dollars by the state to disseminate fundamentally political ideas to their students while feigning impartiality." I think this a KEY part of the criticism of this essay.....

"They never read outside of their own domains, resulting in a permanent state of educated ignorance."

The pot is surely calling the kettle black here...

" Being obligated to pay 1/4th of our already overly expensive college funds to sustain the employment of people like this makes little sense anymore, Fire them and get your education from YouTube."

I have no words. Fire them and get your education from Youtube..Speechless I am. No one forced you to go to college by the way. Maybe you could find and instead an institute with no english professors? IIT? University of Phoenix?

I think you should turn off your internet connection and take a deep hard look at yourself. Are you a contented, happy, person? Are you at peace? Do you get more than eight hours of sleep a night? Do you ever look at yourself introspectively?

I think you are clearly a roiling cauldron of insecurity, self-loathing, and resentment of people who can use poly-syllabic words. YOU ARE HATEFUL. Please go home and rethink your life for your own benefit and the benefit of whatever other humans that are forced to intersect with you on your very finite time on Earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com