
The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture? - lermontov
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Intellectuals/238354?key=dCUViR9a-EOigReN8KYScIihtePPbbZQqhqYiy7iOHA8Hz3LH5C1xjtKFu4h1LrMN2N2N1hfZm85akpmempEb0VHcHVIeVNBT3ZPbEtrMkRJSTY2RzhMVW9iMA
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jseliger
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-...](https://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-
what-im-doing-and-the-meaning-of-real-work-reading-for-phd-comprehensive-
exams/) and here: [https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-
researc...](https://jakeseliger.com/2013/02/12/a-lot-of-academic-research-may-
barely-count-as-research-by-many-definitions/), 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
> 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.

~~~
throwaway3h09ha
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.

------
ocschwar
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.

~~~
jccalhoun
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.

~~~
devoply
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.

------
aaron-lebo
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.

~~~
snrplfth
> 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.

------
bbctol
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.

------
twblalock
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.

------
kafkaesq
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
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?

~~~
kafkaesq
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).

------
rm_-rf_slash
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.

~~~
aaron-lebo
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.

------
Balgair
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
gipp
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.

------
40acres
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.

------
qwrusz
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.

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

This will end well.

~~~
leurfete
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago)

1.) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak)

~~~
obstacle1
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.

~~~
leurfete
> Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist
> joke.

It's common sense. At best, people will support a system where wealth is
distributed without regard to individual productivity if they think that they
will get more out of it than they put in.

At worst, it's crab mentality: [https://fee.org/articles/crabs-and-communists-
how-envy-polit...](https://fee.org/articles/crabs-and-communists-how-envy-
politics-drags-us-all-down/)

I'm no Marxist scholar but looking at Marxism's core ideals, particularly the
idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," I can see that attempts to
implement them will always result in atrocity.

Even Marx admitted that his new society would be born in blood and terror.

"The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the
tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism
of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way
in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth
throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and
that way is revolutionary terror."

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm)

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

