Academia is Stupid Part II: Institootions

Since at least 1990s, Anglophone Unis, together with learned societies etc, have been eaten alive by a leftist cultural & intellectual cancer, such that they no longer serve any purpose beyond that of political indoctrination. https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1384146274786545665

On the one hand, there is the remnants of the old University. On the other hand, there is the foul, parodically ridiculous, ever growing, unstoppable Diversity.

The Diversity are Gender Studies departments, every last deanlet in charge of Equity and Inclusion ...

Every dullard pseudointellectual in anything within 100 miles of a politicised topic like postcolonialism or Gender Studies. This is the Diversity.

The Diversity has its tentacles all over the University and is strangling it to death. Everyone still a member of the old traditional University – ordinary profs of Greek & Latin, historians of Renaissance Italy, people doing cognitive Psychology – they are under siege.

All of that rank stupidity I catalogued earlier – all that is happening in remnants of the University. Standards are really low. A lot of people there are deeply, deeply stupid, because there's very little demand that they be any good. https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1384147525863501833?s=20

But the Diversity that has taken over, is at an entirely different level. It is not even stupid.

It is cargo-cult scholarship. It is here-I-put-some-books-on-my-shelves-I-am-intellectual scholarship. It is I-wear-problem-glasses-that-makes-my-opinion-matter scholarship.

It is I-use-big-words-I'm-smart scholarship.

The Diversity cannot function within the ordinary intellectual forms of the University, so it has formed a parallel pseudointellectual world.

They have a whole range of parallel journals and parallel societes and parallel erdited series and in some cases even parallel presses where they can publish their bizarre pseudoscholarship.

Journals like Fat Studies and Sex Roles:

Places that James Lindsay and the people at New Discourses punked with a bunch of fake papers back in 2018 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

... in a rerun of the Sokal hoax from 1996. Nobody familiar with the intellectual standards (lmao) of Diversity was remotely amazed at the so-called Grievance Studies Affair, because these people publish errant nonsense every five minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

I had Diversity colleagues who taught entire seminars on television shows they liked. I had Diversity colleagues who did not know what Persia was. I had Diversity colleagues who appeared to be barely literate. These people taught writing seminars.

Whatever the precise field of anyone from Diversity, hardly matters. They all teach the same bioleninist sludge. Students who take a lot of Diversity courses end up reading the same cooky authors over and over again.

Diversity Faculty and Diversity Administration and Diversity Student Organisations are constantly protesting against what remains of the University. They are responsible for an unending series of hoax bias incidents that disrupt campus life once a semester or so.

[ ... to be continued in maybe a half hour. must deal with A Thing]

The standard script for such an incident is that someone will find a racial slur chalked or carved or painted onto some surface or other. The entire campus will then be subjected to weeks of antiracist sermons. Sometimes the mass media turns up to report on this shit.

There are also various Racist Incident Committees, that primarily have jurisdiction over students. Faculty are somewhat better protected, but there's a way of getting them too.

There is a feeling that one is always on the verge of being denounced. It is honestly a fairly extreme world.

Every time somebody from the University retires, there is pressure from the administration to redefine their position in terms of Diversity. Often this is only way to get new line approved. So the University shrinks, Diversity grows, & everything just gets crazier and stupider.

When I first started as an assistant prof, most of my colleagues were sane. Years later, after they tenured me, most of the older guard had retired and been replaced by raving dangerous lunatics with disturbing hair.

Diversity is nowhere so bloated as in the administration, which was the first to succumb to Diversity. Today administrators command about as much of the budget as faculty, if not more.

They are orders of magnitude more woke and more stupid than the faculty in general. Many of them are especially dumb failed Diversity faculty from lesser schools.

Whole schools run by hostile fleets of DMV ladies, think of it like that.

An enormous oddity, about life on elite American campuses, is the constant construction. The administrators need something to do, I guess. Buildings erected just a few decades ago are torn down and replaced by new ones.

New pointless buildings are constantly being thrown up. Huge multimillion dollar ugly glass & steel projects that pollute bright fluorescent light every evening, themselves an architectural expression of the Diversity cancer.

Diversity has encroached so far, even into traditional departments like History and English, that there is total curricular chaos. Nothing is taught systematically at all. Even what is left of the University teaches stupid disconnected courses on pet projects or favourite things.

Favourite things like Butt Sex in Beirut: 1972-1987. Faculty who teach their fields seriously and systematically are very hard to find, in most departments there is not a single person.

There is throughout a huge, unprecedented overemphasis on the modern era and even a lot of University remnants just research and teach diffuse cultural studies crap that in another era would've qualified as journalism, except it's vastly more boring and not as current.

As for learned societies, they Diversity has a hard hold on every last one of them. Productive scholars generally don't want to organise the next MLA, so these orgs were always vulnerable to vile opportunists and third-rate hacks. Diversity gave them a way in.

Same for journals and editorial boards.

I am telling you, it is dead. All of it is dead. The most interesting thinkers and writers I know left academia a while ago, or were never a part of it.

That's it for now.