The Storm Over the University

1. Alarmism in higher education, real popular nowadays. Since no one can agree what success in education would be, someone always sees some disaster. Like taxes on gender, it’s essentially a constant contest; or the boy who cried wolf with intellectual crises. Alan Bloom wrote a tome of this hodge-podge on American academia’s ‘cult-ure’ in its debts to Weber and Nietzsche (yay, nihilistic socialism!), kind of alarmist; a spawn of extended titular confusion. The books state universities are in a bad way, & no one agrees on a cure. And they get all bent out of shape like a co-ed. Postructuralism is a joke, but at least takes itself serious. Something’s going on, but hard to sort out with an eye to the long-term. Ends up as canon fodder for critics. Professor Searle of my alma pinche mater looks now at two books from this trend. First’s on the continuity of literature in the “Western…tradition.” Applying criteria for non-discrimination in college admission to the representative selections from our collective tradition: Like objecting to a non-sequitur. It’s a book of conference proceedings, not exactly a new cultural bible; the “cultural left” here attempts to assay the idea that educators can or shouldn’t expose the hidden ‘ideology’ of western tradition. For some reason dead and white guys just wrote to leave us more books. To an extent they’re correct this ought to be done. But increasingly it’s turning into using ideologies to assault the texts, rather than the converse is subversive. Some guy named “Ed” (nudge-nudge) thinks ‘cultural literacy’ can be taught as if dogeball—jargon junkies disapprove. Getting rid of standards won’t make everyone do well: Sooner or later you have to make a decision and trust you’ve been right. Do you want your engineers reading gender-sensitive, “representative” selections? Philosophers can’t afford that crap (if you love wisdom you can read past the masculine source-idiom/t). For some, an illogical reason, ‘Doctors’ of literature need to doctor their lists using arguments from the tradition they want to assuage guilt of attacks. Just because it can be discussed in political terms does not follow that it always, ever should in any one or each case. 2. Humans get strange when their job can’t, fired. Book Number Two is by an intellectual who reads too. His objection is to recent assaults on the standards of culture by academic extremists. He overstates the autonomy of an idealized ‘western’ tradition by claiming we must return to it or perish. Professor Searle believes the tradition was a set of contingent assumptions, rather than fetishized list. Undergraduates shouldn’t have to deal with this; it is, at heart, a matter of what goes on in classrooms. Defenders of the tradition are too simplistic and their detractors are irrelevant. If you were all doped out in the Sixties and got tenured, you’d act like kind of a pill, too. Interestingly, most of the people they cite were at the library back then. Humanities and literature departments have become the staging ground for these tensions because formerly insular and sheltered societies, when linked up to a bunch of foreign places globally, tend to have a number of issues to work out. (Do get your “Big Game” tick’s.) Reading great books won’t necessarily make one a good person; reading and thinking about them, if perhaps also in inclusive debate,—should you keep doing it well—will make one a great thinker. 3. Tyranny of relativism comes from when binary thinking gets applied to who you think is not lying. Just saying you’re right because you have been whole time, not innately convincing. …that Heidegger thing sure warped people’s brain: Just looking into it doesn’t make your conclusion true. Words don’t mean things, people making statements with them do. Science is a contingent form of rational discourse, but to supercede that meaningfully you’d better be as smarter than Einstein and cooler like Hawking. As for actually non-referential foundations of philosophy, well… that’s what happens when you read too much literary. Metaphysical realism is a bit reciprocal, since it seeks to prove itself true. But can’t also be verified like individual facts: It’s what makes verfication possible. Similarly with languages, just think of money; bills we can agree what they’re worth is, but when they get exchanged for houses or bank digits, there’s a bit of fluidity to their value. Belief in reality’s existence apart from how you feel about it, since it actually implies its non- and own contradiction, has to be accepted as condition of truth. 4. There’s an awful lot here, but if one reads John The Professor Searle and recalls that information’s not knowledge, books are not all of culture and school is never purely sufficient to imply “education,” you’ll prob’ly end up thinking straight; and highly controversial.

http://www.ditext.com/searle/searle1.html