I do not know where this goes, but it goes as well here as elsewhere.
First issue is the decay of academia (which, I think, for purposes here, is defined as college plus the professoriate, not high schools (that's a different system with a different set pathologies).
A paper calling for "feminist glaciology" (
Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jaclyn Rushing, "Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research," 2016) actually got published in
Progress in Human Geography in 2016. The abstract says, “The feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power and epistemologies and dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
Two "authors," Jamie Lindsay and "Peter Boyle" (Peter Bohossian), developed ludicrous papers for publication just to see if they could get published. A few of their papers were accepted for publication. One was "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" in
Cogent Social Sciences It argues, "Anatomical penises may exist (
sic), but as preoperative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ, but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity."
Gender, Place, and Culture ("the journal of feminist geography") published “
Human Reactions to Rape Culture, and ***** Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” That article won an award but was so over the top, it got the spoof writers exposed by the
WSJ.
I have a few observations on this.
1. Obviously, we as a society, are producing too many PhDs in too many disciplines of dubious intellectual rigor. I would not suggest we stick only to the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) but the further afield one gets, the thinner the ice gets. While people are free to study whatever they want, it seems government funding enables some studies that do not make the United States better.
2.
Julien Benda in the 1920s book La Trahison des Clercs (
The Treason of the Intellectuals or The
Betrayal of the Intellectuals) and
Niall Ferguson today speak of the "treason of the intellectuals." Academics are supposed to be thinking rigorously about important issues and sharing their knowledge with each other and society at large. Instead, often we have sloppy thinking and esoteric or even ridiculous topics that do not advance society much at all. And the professoriate too often seems bent on radicalizing their students by telling them how irredeemably awful their society is and that it deserves to be overthrown.
Which leads the filmmaker to his next point: the neo Red Brigades. Brett Weinstein a professor at Portland's Evergreen State College was given the Red Brigade treatment. We could pass that off as an embarrassing one-off, but we have seen the pattern continue in the summer of 2020 and recently in Minneapolis. While protesting against harsh or indiscriminate enforcement of immigration law, there are some who want the entire system overthrown. What comes next is not likely to be as just or respectful of human rights (as "Western") as what we now have.
