From: bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Brian F. Redman)
Subject: Imposters in the Temple -- Part 4
Summary: Intellectuals are destroying our universities
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 15:18:04 GMT
Keywords: treachery trickery deceit deception


Imposters in the Temple:
American Intellectuals are Destroying our Universities
and Cheating our Students of their Future

by Martin Anderson

Part 4  --  The Glass Bead Game

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In 1943, Hermann Hesse wrote a novel entitled "The Glass Bead Game" 
which is a parody of the intellectual world of Hesse's time. "The 
glass bead game in Hesse's book was exactly that -- a game. But it was 
played with such intensity that it gradually took over the 
professional lives of the intellectuals who played it. As they played 
the game with increasing skill and fervor, they retreated further and 
further from the concerns of the real world... as they earned respect 
and honor for their game skills... they soared off into ultimate 
irrelevance."

Anderson believes that a great deal of what is published in academic 
journals is self-serving, incomprehensible, and irrelevant. He offers 
his confession that when he had first read these scholarly articles 
"regularly as part of my academic training and during my early years 
as a professor, I was bothered by the fact that I often failed to find 
the point of these articles." Now that he is older, have things fallen 
into place for him? "I am now fifty-five years old and the 
significance of most academic writing continues to elude me."

Anderson declares that, by and large, "nobody reads the articles in 
academic journals anymore." And yet he points out that, although 
these unread articles are piling up at an enormous rate, although they 
are essentially a waste of paper, still they are crucial for academic 
advancement. Anderson opines that much of what the academic 
intellectuals write "is inconsequential and trifling... Taken as a 
whole, academic research and writing is the greatest intellectual 
fraud of the twentieth century."

For example, in the field of literature things have become so bad 
that, according to Professor Robert Alter of the University of 
California at Berkeley, "a whole generation of professional students 
of literature have turned away from reading [the actual works 
themselves]." According to Alter, "For many of the new trends in 
literary studies... one can read article after article, hear lecture 
after lecture, in which no literary work is ever quoted." Alter gives 
an example from a discussion on Stephen Crane, author of the classic 
novel "The Red Badge of Courage." Here is what one of today's literary 
intellectuals had to say about Crane's writing:

    The becoming-visible of writing must be considered in terms 
    of a programmatic equation of identification that, I want to 
    suggest, underwrites realistic discourse. This equation 
    involves the perfect "fit" between the ontology of writing 
    and the specific material -- the historically specific 
    subject-matter -- of the social body-machine complex, the 
    perfect "fit" between the (apparently non-historicizable) 
    ontology of writing and a historically specific biomechanics.

In 1991, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities 
described the situation as follows: "If we are completely honest about 
it, we must admit that the overemphasis on research has -- in the 
humanities as in other fields -- meant a lot of useless activity, a 
lot of publishing that serves no purpose beyond expanding the authors' 
c.v.'s [curricula vitae] ... many publications will mainly gather dust 
on library shelves."

Richard West, dean of New York University's graduate school of 
business, summed this up in October of 1990 when he declared that the 
writing in these academic journals is "often crap. They say nothing in 
these articles, and they say it in a pretentious way."

Anderson however takes time to re-emphasize that when he laments all 
of this academic baloney "I am not talking about all professors in our 
universities and colleges." He thinks that many of them are 
"brilliant, learned men and women... But this type of academic 
intellectual appears to be dwindling... increasingly crowded out."

Anderson's basic point seems to be that the demand for all of this 
impenetrable publication and arcane research has resulted in a 
shortchanging of our youth. If the professoriate is compelled to pile 
up a heap of publication credentials in order to advance in their 
profession, then they are forced to retreat from their jobs as 
teachers. He is alarmed at "the decay that is eating through the 
academic intellectual world."

According to the author, the systematic corruption in the publication 
of endless journal articles "is going to be difficult to stop. The 
academic intellectuals have developed such a tight-knit scheme of 
intellectual logrolling that their evaluations of the merits of 
scholarly work have become, for the most part, worthless." Anderson 
argues for independent reviews of academic publications, "free of the 
conflicts of interest that permeate the current review procedures."

Anderson favors reform in the university. Specifically, some of his 
ideas for reform include 1) a phasing out of tenure 2) placing a 
primary value on teaching as opposed to research 3) organization of 
faculty into separate categories of teachers and researchers, with 
teaching being the more highly paid and prestigious post.


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End Part 4