Posted on 10/18/2009 8:26:33 AM PDT by Stayfree
In the public humanities we are fortunate to have a network of humanities councils in every state and territorial jurisdiction... In recent years, for instance, utilizing a rigorous peer review process in a manner similar to decision-making at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, we have funded nearly a hundred projects relating to the Islamic world. ...exacerbated by the acts of a score of Muslim terrorists on 9/11, poll after poll indicates that American attitudes toward Muslims are exceptionally disrespectful... Governmental policy is shifting. We at NEH, like so many in the non-profit community represented here, are prepared to re-center attention and underpin a new Muslim-American relationship. This President has articulated a call to action that none of us can ignore.
(Excerpt) Read more at neh.gov ...
“exacerbated by the acts of a score of Muslim terrorists on 9/11, poll after poll indicates that American attitudes toward Muslims are exceptionally disrespectful”
Uh, yeah, killing 3000 civilians (not counting the soldiers killed in the subsequent wars), then dancing in the streets and crowing about roosting chickens tends to prompt just a bit of “disrespect.” Of course, 1400 years of deceit, terrorism, oppression, rape, and honor killings doesn’t help.
I believe this “Jim Leach” writer is the former republican congressman from Iowa:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/981332/former_iowa_republican_rep_james_leach.html
yup
Islam is a death cult...I dont respect death cults..
I can’t remember which big-deal hearings during the klinton admin he chaired and allowed the dems to run away with, but I wanted to slap him then.....they called “his” gavel a velvet hammer
Kill the humanities!
The wussmanities and socialist sciences should be defunded, not just the endowments but across academia.
There are no intellectual or academic standards, it is possible, indeed preferable, to publish one’s wastebasket.
They exist almost exclusively to give people of privileged background, high ambition and middling intellect the opportunity to be educated beyond their intelligence by avoiding mathematics and any other endeavor that requires the brainpower sufficient to tie one’s shoes.
The goal of the humanities professor is to use rhetoric to mask the simplicity and downright stupidity of one’s ideas so as to impress the weak-minded and uncritical.
Because of the lack of standards and the fact that the humanities are by their nature untested by real life (experimental sciences) or by the rigors of proof (mathematics and theoretical sciences), peer review is exactly the WRONG approach to the NEH and NEA. If these endowments must exist, then they should be reviewed by people not in the field.
It is not like science. We can all understand underwater basketweaving sufficiently. You don’t need to be an expert in it. In fact, it is better not to be an expert in any part of the humanities, as it suggests the higher probability of a triple-digit IQ.
Furthermore, the attempt at Muslim outreach is exactly the wrong lesson. The only reason that there is any outreach at all is that (1) some strains of Islam preach psychopathic murder and (2) the rest of Islam feels no need to be critical of it.
There is no Buddhist outreach. There is no Hindu outreach. There is no Zoroastrian outreach.
The lesson is simple: If you saw people’s heads off, they will kowtow to you.
You clearly don’t know anything about the real workings of humanities scholarship. Do you honestly think this Republic would exist if Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, et al had decided that they were only interested in “experimental sciences” rather than in history, government, and literature?
But hey, if you don’t like something, what better solution than to kill it? Seems you have something in common with the Muslims after all.
I think the experimental sciences are wussy too. The real world is a convenient crutch.
I am not saying that what people in the humanities do is useless, I am saying that it is easy.
I can understand every word that Jefferson, et al. said. Every word. That’s the point. You don’t need a Ph.D. to do what a layman can do without any specialized education or training.
There is more thought put into a single Steyn column than in the whole of the previous years’ collected published works from academic philosophers.
Moreover, the liberal arts were created to establish a canon that would determine the basis of what truly educated people should know. Since the zeitgeist in the humanities is to explicitly reject such a canon, what good are they?
The humanities are why God gave us high school. You don’t need a college class to read a book. You don’t need a college class to understand history, government and literature. You can understand these things even if you find long division to be scary.
We can no longer indulge in this pseudointellectual tripe. The universities are already overburdened, tuition is skyrocketing and these weak areas reproduce like rabbits.
We don’t even have the classics anymore. The humanities has given rise to ethnic studies, wymyns stydys and every other kind of nonsense that has infested the schools, providing an opportunity for imbeciles to get a degree.
Maybe our kids won’t rank at the bottom internationally. Maybe they will compete in the future against other children who are taught that math is not something to be avoided. Indeed in those countries, lawyers aren’t overpaid and so it is quite difficult for people to succeed without mathematics.
There is no stopping it without killing it. Killing the humanities is not the optimal solution, but it is better than what we have. We might as well throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the poor kid has already drowned.
And did you go to college, at all? I’ve been teaching college literature for three years, and can personally guarantee you that high school (and even college) does not teach you everything you need to know to read a book. And I can also testify to the fact that what you consider “understand[ing] every word that Jefferson et al said” is nowhere near what’s expected and accomplished by highly trained professionals in the humanities, no matter what their political stripes. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s easy.
The point is that I do understand it.
It ain’t like we’re talking about partial differential equations and how the boundary effects the solution. Literature interpretation is easy. Sorry. That’s the way it is. Any reasonably intelligent person can do it if they choose to do so.
I’m sure you enjoy it, but not every pleasurable or useful activity is an academic subject. We do not have departments of sudoku puzzle solving and we do not have departments of plumbing.
You can be “highly trained” in a lot of things: Tiddly winks, map reading, knot tying. We simply can’t indulge in it anymore. All that it does is continue to provide an opportunity for a 4- (or 5- or 6-...) year party.
bttt
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