The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?

http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Intellectuals/238354?key=dCUViR9a-EOigReN8KYScIihtePPbbZQqhqYiy7iOHA8Hz3LH5C1xjtKFu4h1LrMN2N2N1hfZm85akpmempEb0VHcHVIeVNBT3ZPbEtrMkRJSTY2RzhMVW9iMA

by lermontov • 10 years ago

37 48 10 years ago

chronicle.com

rm_-rf_slash• 10 years ago

The original Neoconservatives were bookish types who struggled to do anything more than to be intellectuals in the greater DC region until Reagan came along and saw something in them.

A few decades later, they led the U.S. to war in Iraq under false pretenses.

Be careful what you wish for.

ipnon• 10 years ago

Are you implying that intellectualism leads to war and false pretenses?

aaron-lebo3• 10 years ago

It's a shame you are getting downvoted because you are absolutely right. One of the great successes of the GW Bush administration was to use the democratic peace theory as a pattern and a justification for policy.

ocschwar5• 10 years ago

Seriously?

What boon to public culture?

We just entered a "post-truth" era, where the public at large cares nothing about truth, or anything requiring an attention span.

If intellectuals are finding ways to feed themselves and apply their talents, outside academia, bully for them. But let's not pretend they're stopping our slide to a dark age. We're still riding a hand basket right now.

devoply2• 10 years ago

Does Chomsky tell the truth, I think he does but many people don't including some of the elite? The truth serves a power structure. The public believes in the truth that serves the power structure that they want running the world, because it protects them or empowers them. If you are not protecting them then they are going to look to other power structures or to change the power structure. To do that they are going to promote truth that serves that cause. Perhaps out of a sense of paranoia that someone or something is out to get them.

Academia promotes a certain power structure, the pubic may no longer be down with that. And the economy has much to do with that. Better get on that minimum income asap, assuage their fears. Or we are headed for some really turbulent political times. Post-modernism already attacked truth and disassembled it, we're now seeing that work in real life rather than just academia.

As James Carville said, "It's the economy, stupid"

fredgrott• 10 years ago

you hit the nail on the head of why minimum income so damn untruth-Y..seems but such illusions we award people for NOT taking a risk FIND OUT some truth..

kiba• 10 years ago

We just entered a "post-truth" era, where the public at large cares nothing about truth, or anything requiring an attention span.

Can you qualify what that mean? Are you saying that people are isolating themselves into their own filter bubble?

zatkin• 10 years ago

Observe what happened with the United States presidential election.

pjc502• 10 years ago

Not exactly bubbles, but large areas of belief in things that are bizarre, harmful and unsupported by evidence. Everything from global warming denialism to birtherism.

zardo• 10 years ago

where the public at large cares nothing about truth, or anything requiring an attention span.

Nothing new about that.

qntty• 10 years ago

I recommend reading Amusing Ourselves to Death. The Lincoln-Douglas debates consisted of a series of hour+ long speeches by each candidate, all in a single sitting, and people went to them and listened.

jccalhoun• 10 years ago

For the last year or so I've been really thinking about how to deal with this. Why are people responding positively to bluster and lies? Why do they believe them? How can I, as an educator, help people develop critical thinking skills?

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer. I'm still hashing out in my mind how to best integrate critical literacy skills into my courses for the spring semester.

I am really trying not to make my thinking about specific politics but more about logic and reasoning. If someone suggests something that is blatantly unconstitutional or impossible to accomplish, I want them to recognize that and call it out whether or not I think it would be bad or good.

ocschwar5• 10 years ago

My feeling is that since Facebook has a monopoly on being Facebook, and Twitter has a monopoly on being Twitter, and since these companies have an interest in not being gamed by the KGB, Macedonian teenagers or anything else, they should keep up research on using data science to identify disinformation and rank it accordingly in the feeds they serve.

It would be a good start.

tnecniv2• 10 years ago

What do you teach?

devoply2• 10 years ago

The only good reason to think critically is that it's empowering. If you can convey this to your students you can get them to think critically. If not, then not.

tnecniv2• 10 years ago

This stuff was never written for the public at large. It was written for the (upper-)middle class. Particularly those who already know something about the subject or enough about the academic/cultural sphere that they can wade through it. A ten page article in N+1 about the decline of orchestras is not targeted at people who don't have some exposure to classical music.

bhewes• 10 years ago

It is good to see Rachael and crew get some hard earned recognition.

Moshe_Silnorin• 10 years ago

When the economy nearly collapsed, in 2008, they embraced Marxist and structuralist critiques.

This will end well.

leurfete2• 10 years ago

Every leftist revolutionary thinks that they'll be the one to finally achieve "real communism" and create an egalitarian paradise. It always seems to end up in pogroms though. I think it's because, at its base, Marxism is an appeal to jealousy -- "you have three mules and I only have one, you're an opppressor who must be punished!"[1] :{

Here's some fine reading for anyone on the fence about Marxist doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak

obstacle1• 10 years ago

Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist joke. Marxist doctrine wouldn't even recognize the legitimacy of ownership in the way you are describing, so the notion of striving for equal individual ownership of goods as a spark to action is nonsense.

Your link to The Gulag Archipelago as an expository on Marxist doctrine also reveals a complete ignorance of what Marxism even is, on a very basic level. The Gulag system was a pure product of Stalinism, which was an implementation of communism that directly rejected Marxist doctrine. Explicitly and directly. Communism is not stalinism is not bolshevisim is not marxism.

The turn to marxist criticism in humanities academia really has nothing to do with anyone wanting to lead a revolution or thinking they will overthrow capitalism or whatever. It is a reaction to lived experience that expresses itself in a particular mode of analysis.

"In the world around me, the economy is imploding and everyone is anxious and on edge and complaining about inequality. I think I'll interpret this novel through the lens of Marxist cultural criticism as a reflection of how I experience the world right now" is all that is going on.

jseliger• 10 years ago

I went to grad school in English Lit and this resonated with me:

"By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation, I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect." He found more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world.

I wrote more about the issue here: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-... and here: https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-researc..., but academics in the humanities act like their peer-reviewed work doesn't matter at all. There are no pre-print services and no sense of urgency. Whether an article is published today or five years from today seems to be of no importance. The whole system is wildly dispiriting from an intellectual perspective.

Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching.

sndean• 10 years ago

Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching.

This was pretty eye opening for me in grad school when I saw that, after certain professors received a windfall of grant money, they would buy their way out of teaching. (This was in a biochemistry dept.)

It seemed very backwards to me that the professors that were doing some of the best work of their careers would pay to avoid interacting with students. The ones that had to teach classes to grad students were the ones who haven't published anything in 10 years.

aaron-lebo3• 10 years ago

The flip side of that is the almost predatory nature of professors looking for the best student that they can co-opt to work on their own research.

Sometimes it seems like the only reason undergraduate and graduate classes exist are as a place to gather herds of students and pick the best.The others fall through the cracks.

throwaway3h09ha• 10 years ago

I know this isn't a popular view, but why would you want to distract yourself when you're doing real impactful work? If you were working at a startup would people accuse you of neglecting students, as if doing the best work in the field, like a startup, doesn't use up most of your time?

I talked to a former academic who did amazing research, got multiple best paper awards, and then because of some personality conflicts in her department she got forced out over her teaching philosophy (in part because she was making people look bad by comparison). It seems like the teaching thing is mainly orthogonal to doing good work, other than for recruiting, and it's something that people can use against you when your research speaks for itself so strongly they don't have anything on you.

Jun8• 10 years ago

I got a PhD in EE and wanted to say that this feeling is by no means unique to humanities (modulo, of course, some differences between disciplines, e.g. https://xkcd.com/451/): I remember the first time (many more such moments followed), while hunting down relevant references for a paper I was writing through stacks, and stacks of volumes of IEEE Transactions on PAMI, Information Theory and what have you at Purdue's Potter Engineering Library (pre-XPlore days) and suddenly being struck with the understanding that 99.9% of these articles would not be read by anyone and my painstakingly polished paper will be among these, if it's accepted, that is.

Years later, toward graduation, I heard of a practice that empirically tested this assertion: Colleagues putting $20 bills into the bound version of their theses that were placed in the library to see if they were consulted by students.

rubidium• 10 years ago

It worked well until one enterprising undergrad heard of that practice and went through the entire thesis stacks shaking out the books for cash.

40acres• 10 years ago

We need to bring these folks into government as policy makers and decision makers. Right now we lack serious critical thinking in govt. Everyone is worried about getting reelected and appealing to the worst in people to get votes.

bbctol• 10 years ago

But is this because of the academic jobs crisis? As pretentious and/or divisive as public intellectuals can be, I do ultimately agree that high-level public discourse is good to have, and a liberal arts education is not a bad thing. But I'd much rather have lots of people with a broad education who were also working in sustainable jobs than a large class of highly-educated people with no other options than being a public intellectual. The n+1 class is sustained at the whims of a smaller group of funders and spenders, who can exert as much influence over how they publish as an academic body could. It's cool that lots of people are expressing political views, but I think they'd do so publicly (on blogs and such) even without an academic jobs crisis, and damage to academia can have long-term, less positive effects.

Balgair2• 10 years ago

Answer: No.

I hate to invoke it, as it ends up not adding anything to the discussion, but Betteridge's law of headlines comes screaming out of this article [0].

I know this was only published ~6 days after the election, but I don't see how any editor could have let this one out after Trump's win. Like, guys, even in your own little sphere of Marxism and leftyism, you have to recognize that the large majority of elected representatives in the US federal, state, and local govs are very red. Let alone the rightward swings Europe and East Asia are taking. Like, nothing you are saying is getting out there to the people in the democracies that are actually voting. If you are claiming to be more public then how do you reconcile these rightward swings, are you then causing them with the increased leftish talk? This article made no sense with what is happening and felt like there are fingers in their ears.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

gipp• 10 years ago

That's a little simplistic, don't you think? The article was more about the resurgence of a particular subculture than about culture at large. "Intellectual discourse," however you define it, is something that affects larger society only on the timescale of many years. The article was much more about optimism for the future (in a very restricted way) than for the present.

aaron-lebo3• 10 years ago

The problem with "intellectuals" is people assume because you are educated you are smart.

I've met far too many people who knew a lot about topic x but lacked basic critical thinking skills. Academia only compounds this because the entire system is built around getting tenure. How do you do that? By spending years (with no money doing grunt work) learning what the last wave of research taught and regurgitating it for the professors who already have tenure. The only way you get tenure is by pumping out peer reviewed research which is just as much about agreeing with existing preconceptions and personalities as it is about science. Even the professors who want to be effective teachers have to follow this treadmill. And follow this treadmill you will - if you want to succeed. It's very self-selecting. Who's the biggest masochist? Who is best at navigating the system?

If you actually look at paper after paper the core data is horrible or there are simple lapses in judgement about how their research is structured. You sit in graduate class criticizing and laughing at some of this but that's the research that makes the world go round. A lot of our core assumptions are less about data and more about intuitive arguments.

The whole system is lacking, so you'll forgive me if the idea of "new intellectuals" spawning a boon to public culture is a sham. The real issue is there is nobody but the intellectuals to criticize this bad research...the average journalist isn't trained in these methods and they seem to be less and less interested in truth as opposed to interesting headlines.

snrplfth2• 10 years ago

If you actually look at paper after paper the core data is horrible or there are simple lapses in judgement about how their research is structured. You sit in graduate class criticizing and laughing at some of this but that's the research that makes the world go round. A lot of our core assumptions are less about data and more about intuitive arguments[....]The real issue is there is nobody but the intellectuals to criticize this bad research...

Which is why, I think, most people outside of the intellectual/journalistic class are just tuning out and losing trust. So much research (especially in this day of internet-powered independent investigators) is so obviously meaningless guff, that people are justifiably apathetic about anything the academic intellectual class thinks.

And they're quite right to do so, in most cases. Not that others necessarily have all the answers, but at least most people don't pretend to the kind of nonsense expertise in evidence at the universities.

kafkaesq2• 10 years ago

I recall in my younger (pre-college) days benefiting substantially from rubbing shoulders with kids whose parents were academics (not at any big-name schools -- just regular, decent-enough state universities), and the substantial cross-pollination effect that had on my own development. And the idea that I myself, just might, if I really worked my ass off, be able to pursue their path -- was actually really incredibly inspiring.

The wholesale evisceration of this group of professionals, as a class, as we have witnessed in the U.S. -- combined with the near-total demolishng of any genuine sense of hope for anyone seriously considering a career path in academia (even the best and brightest) -- cannot possibly bode well for society.

sid-kap• 10 years ago

If you don't mind, could you elaborate a bit? How was being around academics/children of academics beneficial to you? Did you end up going into academia, and did your experience with academia differ from the other experiences presented in this thread?

kafkaesq2• 10 years ago

The one parent of mine who did have a degree got theirs in a STEM field, so exposure to the parents of some friends who had PhDs in the humanities (with books floor-to-ceiling, reading newspapers in languages with alphabets I had neither seen nor dreamt of -- this was pre-internet, and "middle America", to a first-order approximation, mind you) was quite an eye-opener. It was like they were just on different plane, intellectually (though also very grounded, and nothing at all like the detached, academic stereotype).

I can imagine it might have mattered even more if they were math or science PhDs -- again, this was pre-internet; so I never heard of the International Math Olympiads until my later years of college, actually (way past the age when it would have mattered).

I ended up not going into academia, but it was a serious consideration for quite a while (and yes, the early role models definitely helped).

twblalock• 10 years ago

Based on my experience in academia, I don't think there will be a significant boon to public culture because of this. Most academics are very specialized within their fields and are not used to having to explain, or justify, the fundamental theories of their fields to the general public. They work within a community in which everyone already accepts those things as the default position, and they assume that their audience has a deep background in the field.

In other words, most academics spend their careers preaching to the choir, and making little tweaks to their field in very specialized areas within an established framework -- what Kuhn refers to as "normal science." Successful engagement as a public intellectual requires a different set of practices.

qwrusz• 10 years ago

I occasionally read these small culture publications like the LA Review of Books and have a couple friends from college who write for them.

It's great this article made it to Hacker News too. The "renaissance in cultural journalism" this article talks about has similarities to what's been happening in the tech world over the past few years - with a "renaissance" in entrepreneurship (or a bubble depending on who you talk to).

I think both these communities, the young writers aspiring to become intellectuals that further the public discourse and the entrepreneurs aspiring to build the next "Googbookazon", have a ton of important potential within them. Who knows what big ideas and innovations might emerge.

But...I can't help feel both communities suffer from a level of bullshit right now that's gotten out of control and is hurting their potential.

I don't need to go into details on the downsides to the tech world when it festered a pervasive talk of a tech bubble. It doesn't even matter if a bubble is true. The positive feedback loop of bullshit that attracted anyone and their grandma to start a startup and call themselves an entrepreneur has made things messy and noisy and more difficult for everyone.

How much time and energy of VCs, talented developers and early-adopting customers has been wasted in recent years by all the Uber of Vomit startups and founders claiming they are disrupting solar-powered diapers who were able to raise money, get real press and fawningly invited to talk on panels only to then never be heard about again...

I think the best founders, ideas and companies eventually stand out and do fine. Most of them hopefully. But it's been harder, more expensive and taken longer than it could have. And what even greater things might have been built if these best startups who do eventually succeed had been able to recruit more of the best developers as they grew.

As for the linked article on intellectuals, what this article should really have said is: technology today has made it really easy to start a niche-topic blog and make it look nice and call it an online journal.

One group of people creating such blogs/online journals come from the community of recent literary arts PhDs and graduate students whose numbers now exceed the supply of tenure-track positions in academia they had originally trained for.

Their blogs resemble the style, design and content of the small run, left-leaning culture journals that were popular among the public intellectual writers of the last century (and whose writing is now taught to these literary arts grad students today).

Of course, like most blogs/niche writing sites like these, there's been a few creative and talented bloggers who have have been able to find ways to get paid a bit of money to do it. Most have not and they are funding their websites themselves until they find a real job.

Those who are really talented enough to really stand out and who have ideas good enough for the writers to become public intellectuals will be discovered and invited to write books and articles for the larger newspapers/magazines more well-known to the general public.

These best writers whose writing gets read by the public and who develop some fame for it may likely end up invited to and on the payroll of a university anyway later in their career. Until then there is no news here. The time to write an article is when someone has an accomplishment or idea from these blogs worth reporting on. Too much hype and noise is not helping find the better writers.

TL;DR literary arts grad students and Phds who have not been able to go into tenured academia have started several fancy looking blogs that resemble the left-leaning culture studies journals of last century. While this doesn't make them enough money to live on a few are hoping they have ideas good enough to be discovered and lead to more opportunities.

The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?

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