[MD] The Academy is Evil! Here's what I'd do instead...

[david buchanan]

Ian said:
Yes Dave, a no-brainer, but what people say individually and what their behaviour actually is collectively, are entirely different.

Arlo replied:
 I agree, Ian, that there is enough rigidity in the Academy to warrant complaint. I can use the painful slow progress of Pirsig's ideas are making as a case in point. But I also think that there IS progress, as evidenced by Ant's work and others working on dissertations regarding Pirsig's ideas (I'll point out to those who do not know, but Granger's book on Dewey and Pirsig began life as a dissertation).

dmb says:
Sometimes good stuff is resisted for too long. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis was considered a crackpot theory in the 1960s but his work has been pretty well vindicated by now. Pirsig's work is like that too. People dismissed it as new age pop but it is officially over the academic wall now. McWatt and Granger are quotable scholarly texts and that usually breeds more texts. 

But step back for a moment and consider the fact that our Universities exist within our culture and if they weren't a progressive force, conservatives wouldn't hate them so much. I think they are already about as progressive as they can get away with. Can you think of a prominent anti-intellectual liberal or progressive? I can't. There might be a few, but I'll bet they're pretty mixed up dudes. And conservatism in the academy, to the extent that it exists, is almost always found at the upper end of the administrative levels. The President of the Uni has to reach out and please the Governor and if he is to be a good fundraiser, he has to kiss the ass of the business community too. It's the Deans and department heads who decide about actual content, about what to emphasize or focus on in the actual task of teaching. They can remake a whole department or college if they want, within limits of course. 

Ian said:
Pirsig's "Giant" is in there somewhere, I'll need to write an essay to join up the dots, but it's not news.

Arlo replied:
I'd go so far as to say that the "Giant" of social power (celebrity, prestige, money, etc.) has its hands in The Church of Reason. This has an external and an internal aspect.

dmb says:
As I see it, the academic world is supposed to be free of social control and the giant is that social control. Money and politics are like tentacles of the giant trying to get a grip and control it. As I read it, anti-intellectualism is the voice of the giant and one of the central tasks of the academic world is to criticize and scrutinize the giant. To the extent that that giant is in there somewhere, that's a bad thing, a form of evil, a form of corruption.
Personally, I do it for the cheerleaders. Naked cheerleaders. In hot tubs. Isn't that what motivates all philosophers? It's all about the nookie. It's all about those hot, sexy philosophy groupies. They always sit in the front with a certain look on their faces. You know the look, the one that says they want to skillfully manipulate some concrete realities for a change.







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