Jon Chait on academic liberalism
I've been meaning to link to this Jon Chait op-ed about 'liberal academia' for many days now. It's already been talked about a lot on the internets, so I don't have much to add, so I'll just fast-forward to the money quote: "[S]ome of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?"
Poor Jonathan... Clearly still living in the deprecated reality-based community. You know, they're phasing out support for that standard entirely by 2006, I hear.
posted by AmyN @ 12/22/2004 08:44:00 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Jonathan Chait overlooks what, even as a liberal, I have to call the arrogance of academia toward the general public. Anti-intellectualism has been a besetting American weakness since Andrew Jackson's day, but it has been energized by academic penchants for the incomprehensible and the transgressive.
I don't disagree that sometimes, some academics could try to be a little less snotty. But as Chait points out, support for Dems is just as strong among hard scientists as it is among the Derrida-Foucault-Lacan crowd, and on balance the hard scientists I've met come off as not-at-all snotty, just very, very busy doing things I don't understand much about. So the liberal arts had a bad spell there in the last 25 years of the last century. A few fads gone horribly, horribly wrong. But given the level of anti-intellectualism in this country, can you blame the academics for some disdain for the huddled masses? Most of the academics spent their childhood being beat up on by everyone else. I nearly went into academia -- I saw my peers in college, smart people all, head off in droves to consulting firms and investment banks, working 70 hours weeks to be flown business class to Japan and gorge on expense-account sushi. I wanted to have time to think about things, and an academic career seemed to be the only one available that left me that option. Luckily, I was turned down by my grad program of choice, was about to get married, and didn't want to move somewhere else to pursue graduate school. But it took me several years to figure out how to find the time and space to think outside the tower, and it is only with the blog that I feel finally connected to a community of other people, some inside, some out, also thinking.
My point is, it has not been at all obvious that anyone in American culture outside of academia bothers to think about anything. And it is hard to fault academics for displaying contempt for mindlessness.
Do you not think that academics, as the trustees of thought, so to speak, might have done more to encourage it, to promote it, and, most important, to suggest standards for its evaluation? I really do mean to ask this. And I ask why so many smart students left academia for lucrative jobs that they probably suspected would turn out to be soulless or in some serious way unsatisfying over the long term. Where was the inspiration that used to keep such students on a better course? Perhaps I'm asking too much; perhaps social changes more momentous than any academic force simply changed the world. But I have heard much evidence of the kind of deep professional seriousnes, among academics, that excites emulation in younger generations. Setting good examples, meanwhile, has worked very well for conservatives, who have ten good and loyal men for every Limbaugh, twenty for every Bakker.
But my point is that academia is not the answer to the 'thinking' problem. Last time I looked (which was admittedly a couple of years ago), there was no lack of grad students -- rather, in some disciplines, an enormous glut. There are no decent jobs available for the majority of those who manage to complete their PhDs -- most of them will spend years in servitude to their universities, grading papers and teaching discussion sections or low-level courses, and graduate to adjunct positions at 3 or 4 different schools, none of which are tenure track or offer health care. Sure, the stars do well, but most of the others don't.
So, I suspect that a lot of smart students realize that they should go into academia only if they have a good chance of being relative stars (i.e. tenure-track somewhere not in the middle of nowhere teaching students who are not utterly braindead and too busy binge-drinking to actually bother thinking). That was certainly my calculation: there were three programs in my area of interest that I thought would get me the connections and creds I needed to not end up in post-doc purgatory, only one of them was in the place that I suddenly found myself tied to by love, and I did not get into it. If I hadn't found something else I liked to do (programming), I think I would have gone ahead and considered going elsewhere, or tried again at my program of choice, or something.) But I did find another way to make a living.
Anyway, I do have friends who have done both the soulless consulting thing and the grad school thing, and friends who have just done the grad school thing, though I have no idea if they bother to read the blog (anyone, anyone?) so perhaps they can weigh in on the topic.
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