Heh, welcome to Ithica the next target of the divine wrath.
hee hee...
Some day I am going to shock him...
These were stone age people whose "writing" consisted of pictures on rocks and teepees! You could probably cover the whole subject in half an hour. On the other hand, if you could get 3 units of credit with only 30 minutes of class time....
Are they supposing Degenerates exist, like mathematicians theorize about other dimensions?
Wow. Everyone is an "expert" in "Marxist deconstructivist lesbian post-modernism and queer theory." If it ever gets to the point where they have mathematics professors who are "experts" in "Marxian critical theory and statistics" or "deconstructivism and prime numbers" or "queer theory and fractions," it will be time to burn the whole institution down and replace it with something relatively healthy like a toxic waste dump.
Homosexual Agenda Ping - Wow, Ithaca the City of Evil is just wound up like a top, isn't it?
The deluge of sewage won't stop.
Note: Parents and Grandparents, think VERY VERY carefully before you send your younguns off to college or university. You may not recognize them when they return.
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this very busy pinglist.
This article is almost beyond belief. You just keeping thinking, This has GOT to be the Onion. But it isn't.
bflr
My M.A. adviser was a lesbian, but it played no part in her academic work. She's a leading expert in Chinese rhetoric (and she's not Chinese or even Asian), and was remarkably tolerant of my outspoken conservatism (we're still friends and have stayed in touch).
If 90% of the state universities in the country were shut down and the enormous revenue savings rebated to the taxpayers, wouldn't that be a good thing? And what if state and federal support for private universities were slashed to the bone? And who would seriously contend that any "dumbing down" whatsoever would be detectable in the population? The football and basketball teams would support themselves and isn't that the best part of any university?
The university is a social and cultural phenomenon which has outlived its usefulness.
I followed the link. The author is not making this up.
I counted 73 profs in the English department. This article notes 28 who provided some description of the area of expertise. I counted 53 profs with some description of their area of expertise.
I was an Engineering student at Cornell from 1979-1983. I don't recall this level of lunacy.
I took my required freshman English courses and never looked back. There were "Black Studies" and "Women's Studies" classes available for me to take as electives, but I chose "Physics", "Chemistry" and "Astronomy" instead.
"...expert in critical (that means Marxist) theory."
I don't follow when you state that critical theory = marxist theory. When did the 2 become the same, and what is marxist theory - communism? What did Plato & Co. do, was it not critical thinking? I really have no degree of expertise in these areas - just curious (George).
I had the misfortune of being a student of one of the professors on this list. Before Hortense Spillers taught at Cornell, she taught where I went to college.
I began college in the fall of 1984. I was assigned to Professor Spillers for freshman English. Professor Spillers would routinely show up at least 20 minutes late to class. Her approach to English was heavily influenced by politics.
We began the semester by reading "Moby Dick." She used the book as a critique of the Reagan administration. She said the main point of the book was that Captain Ahab was leading the crew to destruction, while First Mate Starbuck and the rest of the crew just stood by. In the same way, she argued, we are letting Reagan lead us to nuclear destruction while the rest of us just stand by. She harped on this point repeatedly.
She also gave a required lecture to all 300 freshmen that centered on feminist themes in Moby Dick. There's not a significant female character in the entire book, of course, but that didn't stop Professor Spillers. She pointed out that the sea was a feminine symbol, and the men had to go down to the sea to get the whales. They therefore were getting in touch with their feminine natures. Well, that's one explanation, I suppose.
On election day in 1984, Reagan trounced Mondale. Spillers wandered into class in a sad mood. She asked the students to think about what it means when people say that young people today are of a conservative generation. In deep sadness, she cancelled class and left. Never mind how much we were paying to take her class.
In a sane world, Professor Spillers would have been barred from ever teaching a class again. But in the world of academia, she was apparently welcomed into the ivy league.
Lest anyone thinks this is sour grapes, Professor Spillers gave me a fair grade. (I think I got a B minus, which was probably generous given my lazy freshman ways.) However, she robbed me and my parents of hard-earned money with her incompetent teaching.
Index bump.
What, exactly, is an expert in visions of women?
I open the floor for discussion. < heh heh >
This ridiculous debasement of an English department is just par for the course these days in academia. However, I can predict that a much more insidious anti-Semitism (the Nazi kind) centered in these universities is just around the corner (following another 9-11 style attack or a heated outbreak between the Israelis and arabs). When the full "Stockholm syndrome" + crypto-Communist agenda takes hold, the academic world will switch into classic Jew-hating as their number one obsession, just like what is happening today in Europe. The ultimate war against the Islamofacists is going to look very much like WWII in this regard.
Already in the 1960s, French theorists were spinning ever stranger theories to keep the "quality lit crit biz" going, but that well is going dry as well, and people are beginning to ask what the point of some of the wilder theories was. Another answer is to look at second-rate works in terms of sociological categories: race, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, colonialism, etc. Now one can't expect this to go on forever. It's certainly not cutting edge today. Your kids aren't shocked or much impressed by it, and one can't imagine their kids taking much interest in it. So what happens next? What is the next wave? Will there even be one? And what becomes of today's radical feminists and queer theorists when their time is passed?
A lot of the problem lies in the university system. It probably works alright in the sciences. Big problems are divided up into smaller pieces and each scientist works at his own specific aspect of his field. But in the humanities it doesn't seem to work that way. Scientists add to some body of truth or test their hypotheses against reality. In the humanities one can do that for a decade or a generation, but then increased efforts yield ever less of real value. People get bored and frustrated and move on to "the next new thing." You can see it as a kind of "paradigm shift." In contrast to the sciences, though, when the "paradigm" changes, there's much less continuity, and there's no sense that one is getting anywhere. The older work appears to be just thrown away It could be, that however important art and literature and philosophy are, academic study in the humanities isn't as important or substantial or fundamental as scientific work is.
In fact, though, in reading on our own, we do make use of past achievements in literary criticism, and much more use than anyone will ever make of today's more narrowly restricted fields of work in literature departments. Just as old science lives on in technology, older achievements in the humanities can live on in our own understanding of the world, while what's done in the universities becomes ever more remote from everyday life.
datum.
I knew all this, of course. It wasn't this bad at Tulane in the early '90's, but the trend was evident.