Happy Monday FRians! Hope y’all had a good weekend and are ready for Monday. Today’s post is from Stephen. Thank you, as always.
A recent visitor to our blog site, while vainly touting his academic credentials, claimed the intellectual certainty of “white privilege” referencing other people asserting the same conclusion as evidence of the validity of the conclusion itself. It is not the foolishness of that self-concluded hypothesis which I want to discuss, but the nature of the decline of academic purpose and meaning.
To base one’s validation of their own opinions primarily if not solely upon the expressed opinion of another, particularly when that other carries with them public or academic prestige and esteem, is to abandon academic independence, the ability to reason, and intellectual honesty.
The essence of such an argument boils down to, “I must be right because so-and-so agrees with the conclusion I stated” or “I am correct not based on my own reasoning but because I rely upon the conclusions of so-and-so and everyone knows that he is smart and wise.”
It is the effective reasoning of precedence, upon which lawyers and courts so often rely. Of course, in theory at least, the attorney is relying not on the conclusions of the cited case law or law review article but upon the reasoning contained therein as a short-cut to reciting the same reasoning.
Further, in the practice of law there is value in consistency itself even if the conclusion is faulty because of the stability and predictability of the law for society even if the law is in some way flawed which favors keeping that which is imperfect rather than upsetting the apple-cart without a more clear and convincing reason to do so.
However, those consideration do not, and should not, exist in the fields of academia where truth is supposed to be valued far more than mere convenience and practicality. That unrelenting quest for the truth is what supposedly sets academia apart from more mundane practices such as law, medicine, politics, or commerce.
Delving deeper into the phenomena, modern academia, particularly in fields often labeled as social sciences or behavioral sciences or the many newly concocted “studies” programs we can see this is more than merely a reliance upon precedence but a resort to speculation and conjecture often connected to some loose statistical correlations to give it some extra undeserved boost of validity and credence.
The basis of academic rigor grows out of the mathematical concepts of proofs developed from axioms or postulates through the studious application of logic and reason to derive not merely conclusions but thus a new axiom to be incorporated into more complex reasoning, continually building from the known establishing new knowns.
The check and balance of this reasoned manifestation of mental exercise is the applied sciences, where real world observations are recorded and studied to both derive theories of explanation and compare results to theorized predictions, but always measured against the reality of results.
This two sided coin forms the backbone of true academics, but colleges and universities were traditionally home to far more than just academics. The collegiate experience sought to create “well rounded” individuals who could function well in society, not merely more academics to replace the previous academics. College was to develop a variety of useful arts and skills in addition to the academics, including humanities, arts, commerce, and even athletics but the real prestige was always with the academics.
As education came to be increasingly seen as something useful for advancement in society, colleges sought to exploit the increasing interest in their product by marketing it to, shall we say, less academically inclined persons with curricula not quite as rigorous as the classical education demanded.
Exacerbating the situation the government began to subsidize education in the belief that a more educated population would make the nation stronger, wealthier, and competitive, spurred on largely by those collegiate types selling them on this idea and marketing their product to the politicians rather than the parents to garner these subsidies.
After all, lobbying the government was all the rage for many industries of the time, from farm subsidies to railroad subsidies, every industry seemed to be trying to get a slice of that government pie as they learned that the politician was willing to pay taxpayer money to be seen “promoting” the economy of their constituents.
The education industry was undoubtedly successful in these lobbying endeavors, though it could be argued that the most successful was the military munitions and equipment suppliers. America was convinced that education was so essential to the health of the nation that states created public schools, and Congress increasingly funded student grants and loans.
For one thing, traditionally colleges would recruit from the top 5% of the IQ range, those with both the ability and the inclination for those rigorous academic subjects. The percentage of people attaining college degrees went from about 4.7% of the population in 1940 to about 35% of the population now.
Statistically speaking only about 16% of any population are more than one standard deviation above the normal range, or above average intelligence. That means that now, by numerical necessity, more than half of your college graduates are of average intelligence, or between the 85 to 115 IQ range.
But the real question was what to do with all of these new students? They needed teachers, but the schools also needed new and exciting subject matter to attract all of these new students to their institutions. After all, with everyone, particularly women, complaining that they hate math, offering academic courses in Euclidean Geometry and Calculus was not going to attract these new students.
Academically, of course, this means significantly lower standards for earning a college degree, but it also meant the creation of many new fields technically labeled “academic” but which had neither the rigor, depth, or historical context of the traditional academic fields.
This is where fields like sociology, psychology, environmental sciences, and various “studies” like ethnic studies or women’s studies, come into the academic fold, and you start seeing designations of them as “soft” sciences in contrast to the “hard” sciences of traditional academia.
And in the worst traditions of industrialized academia the phrase “publish or perish” takes on a whole new insidious meaning. In order for all of these “academics” to justify their teaching positions to this ever increasing influx of students they need to publish original works of a significant nature to earn their Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) degrees. You can’t manufacture more students to graduate through the system if you don’t have enough workers on the assembly line.
After all, just how many times to you need to prove 1 + 1 = 2? Encyclopedia Mathematica already did that. (Mind you it took them over 300 pages to do it.) Statistical analysis to the rescue. Correlation now effectively is causation, not in any real academic sense, but certainly in the justification of publication sense.
If you can establish a sufficient correlation between two things, you can speculate and conjecture as to some causal relationship between those things. It is upon this related speculation and conjecture that such concepts as “white privilege” or “institutional discrimination” are borne, live, and thrive.
Which brings us back to the beginning of this post that important reliance upon such “studies” citing a conjectured theory based upon a “causal” link which may be no more than a correlation interwoven with the author’s speculation. However, it gets the person published in one of those peer reviewed journals no one outside that particular field ever reads.
The next would be professor naturally cites these studies as a basis for their own conjecture, and so forth. Did you notice what happened? Conjecture built upon conjecture replaces the tradition of reasoned conclusion built upon logic and previous rigorous proofs. Academia has become a mere shadow of its former self in these new fields, and increasingly that attitude creeps into the traditional fields.
Society increasingly accepts made-up words and concepts, redefined words, non-sense phrases, and even blatant contradictions as not merely acceptable but “academic” truth. To many the mere pointing out that these phrases are contradictory, that these words don’t mean what they think, or so forth is a clear indication to the learned fools that their critics are simply uneducated dolts because they don’t believe the new buzzwords.
Industrial academia has stamped out a generation of people steeped and saturated in irrational fallacies convinced that they are correct on the sole basis that their academic professors told them it was true, often completely incapable of thinking or reasoning in any way other than to cite the opinions they have been fed.
“Between true science and false doctrine, ignorance is in the middle.” – Thomas Hobbes.
