Posted on 01/12/2017 5:24:20 PM PST by DeweyCA
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a window on the sometimes weird world of academia, revisited a hilarious intellectual hoax from 20 years ago.
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described academic leftist, composed an essay that was a word salad of solemn academic jargon. He said he strove to be especially egregious, by maundering on about the dialectical emphases of catastrophe theory becoming a concrete tool of progressive political praxis. His essays gaudy title was: Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
He sent it to the left-leaning cultural studies journal Social Text, which swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists emancipatory mathematics, demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge, the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. Soon after Social Text published his faux scholarship, Sokal revealed in another journal, Lingua Franca, that it was a parody.
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Sokals point, however, was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open. The humanities, he today tells the Chronicle, had become a subculture that was ingrained and self-referential and mostly disdained critiques from outsiders, so that an ordinary type of intellectual critique was precluded.
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Today, Sokal, who seems eager to make amends for his good deed, claims a small amount of credit for what he says is diminished ardor for radical epistemological relativism. But he says the main credit belongs to wait for it George W. Bush, who discredited science bashing. Sokal and kindred spirits he seems to be safely back in the bubble tell the Chronicle that the real problem is anti-intellectualism off campus: Academic expertise is under attack, epistemological skepticism by the Right is abetting climate change, etc.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443731/alan-sokal-hoax-exposed-academic-left-radical-relativism
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Will also mentions Randall Jarrells Pictures from an Institution.
Academia’s idiocy is to the point where it’s becoming criminal.
I got my last of three diplomas in 2012. In the time I was in school, my observation of higher ed is that it’s populated by pretentious, pompous, self serving losers who couldn’t do anything worthwhile, so they went into education.
Universities are replete with professional predators.
Academia bump for later....
Sokal should not have lost his nerve.
Never apologize for being right.
All of academia? Medicine including all the health professions? Engineering? Science? Languages? Should there be athletic programs? Anything good anywhere?
Diplomas? Interesting word choice. A high school grants a diploma. Community colleges grant Associates degrees and we call them diplomas. Perhaps you meant you had received Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral diplomas from some fine institutions of higher education.
Having put all this effort into your education (and one wonders why considering what you have written) do you hold any gratitude for any educator? Is any discipline "populated" by people capable of anything worthwhile? Medicine including all the health professions? Engineering? Science? Languages? Should there be athletic programs?
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