There’s been a lot of talk lately about the downfall of academia. Universities are becoming neo-liberal brainwashing institutions; affirmative action policies have undermined their rigor. You’ve heard all the claims, and you probably have your own conception as to how true they are.
There are a few different perspectives about this. For example, I listened to Jonathan Haidt (a social psychologist and university professor) on Joe Rogan last month, and his take on the subject was more nuanced than most. His argument goes something like this: while the universities themselves have succumbed to the extremes of left-wing ideology (no one wants a discrimination lawsuit), most people operating within these institutions are much more moderate, and not really concerned with politics at all. It’s a classic example of a vocal and extremely powerful minority imposing their will over the majority.
This makes sense—particularly since the place where you hear most about this is the Internet, a known perpetuator of ‘extremist’ beliefs. However, I attended college fairly recently, and saw a lot of this stuff firsthand.
Set the scene in your head. It’s 2017. First day of the spring semester. Nineteen-year-old Melissa Petrie strolls into what is supposed to be an ordinary, core-curriculum English class titled “Great American Writers.” There’s a twenty-something, blonde, stick-thin, white-as-toothpaste woman sitting on top of a desk at the front of the room with her legs crossed, wearing a band t-shirt, black high-top Converse sneakers, and the most smug look I’ve ever seen on a human being.
Without saying a word, she distributes the syllabus. The heading:
ENGL 153W: Black Women Writers
Huh? I flip through. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Standard. Roxane Gay’s World of Wakanda. A little weirder. Then, right smack in the middle, as the topic of our midterm paper, Beyonce’s Lemonade.
What? Was there some kind of mistake? Why’d they choose this girl of all people to teach “Black Women Writers?” Would dropping the class be considered racist?
The professor goes on to explain that yes, we did sign up for “Great American Writers,” but that she decided to change the course to “Black Women Writers” because she didn’t want to teach a class about a bunch of “dead white guys.” If we don’t like it, well, too bad.
In case you’re wondering, I did my Lemonade paper, I got an 89% on it—the lowest grade I’ve ever received on an egregiously-long, nonsensical college paper—and yes, the album was as unpleasant as I thought it was going to be.
Edit: I just remembered another fantastic moment from the first day of this class:
“This is a Liberal Arts college. That means my job is to make you more liberal.”
She actually said that.
Another edit: There were two black people taking this class. They were silent the entire semester. I don’t think either of them liked this teacher very much.
Perhaps this professor was one of the ‘extremists.’ However, it happened, and this woman probably has her Ph.D by now, so do with that information what you will.
I set out to write this today because I’ve been really into history lately, and thus, I’ve been reading a lot of academic journal articles. I’ve noticed that modern journal articles (particularly those written in the last 20-30 years) are extremely tedious, badly written, and littered with quotations from other articles with very little to add to the discussion. By contrast, journal articles written a hundred years ago are actually easier to read, free of all the quotes and nonsense, and they just give a straightforward account of the history.
I wanted to hypothesize about possible reasons for this. Does no one know how to write anymore? How to research? Are they capable of writing twenty or so uninterrupted pages? Cobbling together strings of somewhat-related quotes from other ‘experts’ is much easier to do than actually writing something worth reading. Or perhaps they’re taught that a paper isn’t ‘scientific’ enough unless it’s rendered unreadable by references, footnotes, and academic jargon.
I don’t know the answer, but I suspect things have been going south for a while now. No wonder we’ve gotten to the point where someone can confidently sit in front of a college class in a decently-rated school and proclaim that they’ve taken it upon themselves to replace Ernest Hemingway with Beyonce.
I think the 'bad writing' is intentional. I have slogged through some awful books by supposedly great thinkers. A lot of postmodern writing is like this; it is written in this dry and academic tone, a word salad that is intended to obfuscate truths rather than reveal them. Postmodernism has mastered the art of "hiding in plain sight" - you write something that is utterly unreadable and you slip your degenerate ideology in between the lines.