Cornell Student: Academia in Social Sciences is a “Circle-Jerk for Nerds”
“fancy accoutrement for privileged pedants”
Jade Pinero of the Cornell Daily Sun has a few thoughts about the state of higher education which are worth your time. Take a look:
Overthrow Academia
Academia, at least in the social sciences, is the pursuit of knowledge by and for the elite. It’s a circle-jerk for nerds.
Joining a university faculty is like signing up to play a professional game of whack-a-mole. Institutions require scholars to publish in order to remain employed; specifically, they require regular original research written for peer-reviewed journals or discipline-specific books. Behind each publication awaits the due date for the next.
Academia’s mandated curiosity (“publish or perish”) is problematic, but its mandated stylistic orthodoxy is a bona fide tragedy. The only scholarship these institutions recognize is formally written with a lexicon too complex and a subject too specific for all but the most erudite audiences.
The bulk of scholars’ time and energy is spent on such research, leaving even those who would prefer to create more accessible content exhausted. Our most gifted, inquisitive minds exist in a vacuum. Their revelations are not endeavors in awakening the masses, but fancy accoutrement for privileged pedants.
The pursuit of knowledge has, unfortunately, always been the purview of the elite.
From the 18th to early 20th century, the Western world’s movers-and-shakers partook in exclusive ‘salons’ where VIP attendees discussed politics, philosophy and culture. Like those salons, the contemporary world of academic literature cultivates revolutionary ideas far away from those who most need the revolution.
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Comments
I think of nerds as intelligent, but socially awkward, like the fictional Sheldon Cooper in “The Big Bang Theory”. I don’t think those majoring in the Social Sciences are intelligent enough to be considered nerds.
haha. Likely they consider themselves socially superior to the STEM type Nerds. The problem with “real” nerds is that they don’t care what others think of them socially, they are more interested in what goes on inside their own head.
This kid nails it with the term circle-jerk. I suspect there is and will continue to be an exodus from the stifling confines of the liberal orthodoxy.
Having spoken to a large number of black students (many of whom have become good friends), I have learned that blacks hate STEM courses because when they take an exam they have to provide a single quantified answer in order to get the answer correct and, to do this, they must understand the underlying material (i.e., they have to learn the material).
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The reason why blacks and so many others flock to the social sciences is that the so called “enlightened” professors who teach these courses appear incapable of differentiating between scholarly work and BS. Those blacks I have spoken to and confessed that they throw out a bunch of BS and since they are black, the professors view their work as profound insight into whatever. When the professors are not around, these students routinely mock them for being so out of touch that they cannot see the difference between BS and actual scholarship. It is so bad, that is has all the hallmarks of being a game they are playing.
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What I find both amazing and amusing is how these social science professors walk about with enormous ego such that no one, not even fellow professors from STEM departments, are considered by them to be their equal. Evidently, when you have less, you require a larger ego to protect it.