When I was an undergraduate at Hampshire (1990-1993), I didn’t really understand what “the culture wars” were. I just thought it was a hassle that I had to go over to UMass to take a Shakespeare course, since the only offering we had was “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Women.”
I ended up with plenty of academic horror stories that I share with the incredulous from time to time, especially when they think they went to a far-left, theory-laden school. Trust me: you had nothing on Hampshire.
That’s not to say that the school only churned out jargon-spouters and bitter rejects. My buddy Mark considers his Hampshire experience entirely worthwhile and definitely doesn’t fall into the pomo camp.
Ron Rosenbaum recently posted about a particularly theory-focused Shakespeare professor, whom he called The Relic:
It’s not about him, but about a sadly obsolete, discredited vision of literature he shares with all too many in academia who committed to it without much skepticism when they were graduate students and lack the intellectual independence to question it now. The Relic was the embodiment of two generations of pseudo-scientific sophistry that gave itself the shorthand name Theory in literary studies. It was based on the work of a French theorists, notably Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, whose transmittal by gullible relics continues. Continues even despite the recent revelation that Foucault had, in his recently translated late works, repudiated the sophistry upon which most academic literary criticism is founded (I wrote about this in an earlier blog post citing the distinguished philosopher Richard Wolin writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education last fall).
Now, as long as this stuff “only” affects literary studies, I guess we could recover. After all, I went on to St. John’s, where we throw out the critics and dive into the books themselves. (Early on, most of the graduate students face the moment in seminar when they cite a critic or theorist’s take on one of the books and get asked, “Yes, but what do you think about the book?”)
But according to Ron’s followup post, this trend has walloped the study of physics, too. Ron included a long comment by Professor Frank Tipler of Tulane (coincidentally enough, my other undergraduate institution):
At the overwhelming majority of physics departments at American elite universities, the importance of gravity is denied. I am aware of no American university that requires, for an undergraduate degree in physics, a course in general relativity, which is Einstein’s theory of gravity. At the overwhelming majority of American elite universities, one is not even required to take a course in general relativity even to get a Ph.D. in physics! As a consequence, the overwhelming majority of American Ph.D.’s in physics do notunderstand general relativity. If a problem arises that requires knowledge of Einstein’s theory of gravity, almost all American physicists can only look blank. This is in spite of the fact that general relativity has been known to be the correct theory of gravity for almost a century.
And it gets worse. The greatest achievement of physics since the Second World War has been the discovery of the Standard Model of particle physics, a unified theory of all forces and matter not including gravity. The Standard Model has been experimentally confirmed, and some dozen and more Nobel Prizes in physics have been awarded for the discovery and experimental confirmation of the Standard Model. Yet I am aware of no physics department in the United States that requires a course in the Standard Model for an undergraduate degree in physics. Very few, if any, require a course in the Standard Model even for a Ph.D. in physics.
So one can get an undergraduate degree in physics and even a Ph.D. in physics, without knowing anything at all about the fundamental forces that control the universe at the most basic level. Since our entire civilization requires at least somebody knows basic physics, requires that at least people who have Ph.D.’s in physics know basic physics, this is a disaster.
In the Mathematics and Natural Science segment at St. John’s, some students took issue with the definitions at the beginning of Euclid’s Elements. The first two gave them fits: A point is that which has no part, and a line is breadthless length.
They kept trying to deny the validity of the rest of the geometry by denying the truth of the definitions (when we studied Lobachevsky, things really went off the rails: ha-ha). All of this bickering came to a head on the first day of the semester. My buddy Mitch got up from the table, stormed to the blackboard, hit the chalk against it once, then dragged it across the board, and said, “There! That’s a point! And that’s a line! The only people who really need to get them right are NASA and they can’t and that’s why the Mars Observer vanished!”
This shut everyone up. Except the incoming graduate student who happened to work for NASA.
The moral? Get yer basics down, and worry about denying reality later.
