Boyd in The American Scholar has a fine critique of what they call "Theory" in the humanities. Somehow in the 60s, the humanities got terribly excited about having a world-debunking Theory - or a theory at all, without realizing that in all other disciplines theories are a dime a dozen. I think it made them feel rigorous and scientific to have a theory, but I don't think most of them ever took Physical Chemistry or Statistics, so they don't know much about the rigor and the self-criticism which are essential to serious theory-play. A quote:
The position you represent has neither the intellectual nor the moral high ground you are so sure it occupies. Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
It's not exactly light reading, but it's good. Here.
A reader sent us a piece by Victor Hanson, a long-time prof himself, From the Classroom to the War. A quote:
Why when academia is so critical of other American institutions, from the Republican party and corporations to churches and the military, does it ignore its own colossal failures? The level of knowledge of today’s graduate is the stuff of jokes, exactly what one would expect once a common shared instruction in science, history, literature, languages, and mathematics largely disappeared, replaced by a General Education potpourri of specialized classes in gender, race, class, and politics masquerading as knowledge-based?
Whole thing here.
