[MD] Academic philosophy

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[JC]
#2:  I said I never read anyone who takes philosophy personally [look of great distaste] or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.

#1:Right.  If they want to talk about philosophy as if it matters personally they need to get out of the profession or at least go back to school.

[Arlo]
I imagine this is just a Platonic-style dialogue, and, here, the "academics" are the dreaded "Sophists" who are creatively demonized by unfair, and largely fictional, dialogues. I say this, mostly, because its absurd. Every philosophy professor I have EVER had has gone out of his way to make philosophy personal. The constant theme was "this matters, this effects your life, this shapes who you are, this is PERSONAL!". It was precisely abstract, irrelevant, 'mind play' that they were arguing against. Good god, imagine trying to understand Adorno's Minima Moralia from an impersonal perspective. Imagine trying to teach Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy without constant recourse to the immediate, lived life of the students.

No, either he's using a completely unrepresentational dialogue to slander all of academia, or he's writing his own demons into his narrative. 

The fact that you buy into this man's psychological rage really demonstrates how little real experience you've had in the academy. Or maybe, you're co-opting an "damn the academics" attitude to assuage your own personal failures as not your own, but of an inflexible and "sociopathic" institution. 

Are there more rigid (but still plastic) boundaries around the academy? Sure. There HAS to be. Is it entirely perfect and entirely fair to everyone immediately? No, of course not. But the alternative is an uninformed bazaar that can not distinguish at all between "flat-earth theory" and "the theory of relativity". And, let's be honest, our cultural and intellectual libraries are enormous. Even 'favored' philosophers within the academy, like Nietzsche, get barely any screen-time at all. At the undergraduate level, students are lucky if they hear his name, let alone read select writings. Foucault? Until you're in certain graduate programs you probably won't even hear his name.

The larger, and more devastating, problem with the academy is that it has turned into little more than a glorified jobs program. Does it bother me that Pirsig doesn't warrant his own course in our philosophy program? Absolutely. But it bothers me more that even the philosophers that DO are relegated to irrelevant status in our quest to fulfill an increasingly singular capital goal. The problem is not with the philosopher-academics, but with the businessperson-deans that dictate curricular and degree structures- and the capital culture that wants our graduates to be little more than skilled workers, not critically-thoughtful, agenic beings.