Bad Education
I recently read The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff, an article by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent on global terrorism and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He claims that the multiple failures that beset the USA can be laid at the feet of our elite universities, and explains how Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think, focusing instead on creating hordes of competent systems managers.
I got a sense that this was true several years ago when I worked as an ad manager for a political consulting firm during the 2004 campaign. I was the nexus for a staff of mostly recent college graduates from places like Yale and Harvard, and was impressed (and a little intimidated) to be working with the best and brightest that our country has to offer. After spending a few weeks working with these people, I was profoundly disappointed. Stripped of my illusions, I could separate the office cleanly between the ivy league kids (empty receptacles of their parent's largess) and the creative folks who were thoughtful, interesting, and actually did the best work. In the years since then, I haven't been given much reason to change my opinion.
I found this passage particularly resonant:I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every graduate department across the country.
I was at a party recently where I sat for half an hour questioning a graduate student who was feeding me this type of bullshit. After I was done grilling him for clarity, he told me "That was the clearest I've ever explained what it is that do!" Yeah. And it was all bullshit.
As I watch Congress and the new administration try to solve the various crises of our time and explain their actions through a language of gobbledy-gook, I can't help but recognize that the faces may be different, but the schools they came from are not.
8 comments:
I had a really hard time in grad school, at first, wading through all the invented language of the intelligencia in "the literature." I realized after a few months that it was all bullshit, with academics making up words to make themselves sound more important and to instill fear in others who would have to bow to their superior intelligence. I invented a term for this: esoterrorism.
Ha, I like "esoterrorism." As a grad student in the fifth year of my Ph.D., I can certainly attest to the prevalence of this stuff. The flip side of the issue is that academics have to try to use very precise language in order to dissect the nuances of whatever it is that they are studying. In an effort to be precise, we often end up getting bogged down in "sciencey" terminology that the layman could not possibly understand. The art of being a good academic, I think, is being able to speak both the language(s) of our specialized fields and also be able to communicate what we are doing to a broader audience (usually our students). Not all academics are good at this, but I think it's vital that those of us who view our jobs as teachers as equally important as our research (and this, unfortunately, varies widely) really need to do a better job of translating our academic-speak into accessible language. Otherwise, we're just engaged in a pointless exercise of group masturbation, speaking only to each other. I wonder if the large state universities with which I have been affiliated during my life are any better at this than the big Ivy Leaguers.
I like the concept of esoterroism as well. It's that kind of thing that makes me want to drop out of grad school on a regular basis (I'm only in my second year but I am already completely bitter and jaded about academics).
Regarding Hedge's article, I can't really speak to the quality of education at "elite" universities, but I can say that large public universities are failing students just as much (basically functioning as glorified degree factories). The whole structure of academia is responsible for this. Professors have to churn out meaningless academic articles rather than teach critical thinking skills to their students (otherwise they won't get to keep their jobs). And because only mainstream ideas get published, there isn't much of a forum for critical thought out there either.
The passage you quote sums up the reasons I did not go to graduate school. I found the academy to be a prison.
...and I have always made a clear distinction between academics and intellectuals based on the ability for original thought. Rarely are the two coincident.
The Academy is like The Church and academics like priests: doctrinaire and myopic.
When the college professors on my thesis committee heard that I intended to go teach public school, they all just about choked simultaneously. But I couldn't bring myself to do what they wanted me to -- go and get a Ph.D and become one of them -- in large part because of this very issue. I believe in language as a tool of communication, and all too often, it is instead used by academics as a way to obscure meaning. Pseudoscientific language does not make arguments more impressive when it hinders understanding.
this is part of the reason i avoided formal education for so long. for instance, one of my good friends took a course on blade runner (well it was slightly broader than that) and then had to apply all this made-up language to legitimize the fact that they were paying 10000 dollars to sit around and talk about 80s sci-fi for 4 months.
instead of taking pedestrian topics and applying academic language, wouldn't society benefit much more from taking academic topics and applying pedestrian language? academia really isn't much more than a blatantly elitist club.
I left grad school after a semester of Literary Theory (which I aced, but felt dirty, LOL). I have learned more by reading and studying on my own than I did during all my undergrad and grad school years. There's now a buzzword for those who grab the reins of their own education - edupunk. I'm so-so on buzzwords generally, but I like this one because it has the "punk" ethos attached, ;)
Does anyone else recall the Sokal incident? Alan Sokal was disgusted with academic jargon, so he wrote and had published a paper in which he "proved" that gravity is a "social construct". When the hoax was exposed, there was a big furor in academe. Hilarious!
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