Dear CornFuzed,
(One speculates upon the appropriateness of chosen noms-de-net.
While I don’t disagree with you on all points, your apology for the academic world appears to be founded mostly on its formal presentation. The reasoning is in many cases circular, and in other cases based on assumptions that are unstated and undefended.
(But thanks for taking the time to marshal your thoughts! I’m not so much attacking you as trying to digest what you’ve said, chew it up, test, and examine it in relation to my experience and research. Nothin’ personal.)
To reference your points:
(1) You are right in several particulars: The universities do not have a monopoly on the indoctrination business. The indoctrination is manifold, including the so-called “mainstream news” organizations and the “entertainment” industry, and certain parts of the government already fully in thrall to the doctrinaire Marxist Left. This indoctrination (“teaching the students to accept uncriticallya value system”) is by definition conservative, but only in the sense that it is desperate to perpetuate the Marxist Leftist dogma that inspires it.
(2) My experience teaching at several universities (as both part time and full time faculty) that their accountability to external supervisory (especially accrediting) bodies is mostly limited to showing that their faculty have advanced degrees from other accredited universities.
On the face of it, that speaks of an ingrown, incestuous, and insular system extremely vulnerable to corruption and misappropriation.
(3) Your assertion that “ALL FIELDS are technical” is not proven by mere capitalization. The assertion is only valid to the extent that all the so-called “soft” sciences attempt to co-opt the clothing of the hard sciences by (1) creating a set of hypotheses and fundamental self-definitions couched in terminology that has been “borrowed” and given exclusive new meaning known only to the initiated ones — i.e., “jargon”— (2) by asserting that the hypotheses and assumptions generated within the bounds of the field are testable and provable by the scientific method, which to a very great degree depends on the quantifiability of data. The whole thing falls down as the underlying criteria by which data might be quantified, are irretrievably flawed, subjective, murky, and vague. (See item 4)
(4) You state, “The heart of English is writing and critical methods-both technical fields.”
This is only true in relation to the grammar of the language (subject-verb agreement, understanding the parts of speech, sentence diagramming, etc., all of which should be disposed of prior to high school) or the logical validity of arguments and conclusions embedded in the ideational content of the writing, which are on one hand, the domain of logic and philosophy at least as much as of English, but in any case are also undeniably subject to the imposition of political dogma, as is seen throughout U.S. high schools and universities. Historiography — the study of the methods of gathering and analysis of historical data — can be a very disciplined art, but it, too, is subjective and vulnerable to political distortion, particularly within an undergraduate regime. And your statement that “The heart of political science is statistics” fails to acknowledge the plasticity of statistical data. Data may be objective. The presentation of data can powerfully distort their interpretation. Even before that, the gathering of statistical data is entirely determined by subjective decisions and criteria selected by the researchers.
(6) “Recruiters…report that above all they need graduates sensitive to multicultural environment…etc.” — While in an ideal world this would be true, the politically correct version of multiculturalism which is thumped into the minds of students in U.S. institutions is an insulting parody of actual sensitivity. It is a catechism of thou-shalt-not’s designed less to open students’ minds to diversity, than to stifle any actual thought and replace it with reflexive obedience to the pronouncements of fearless leader.
Universities emerged in the middle ages as centers of learning which the local city-states recognized needed guarantees of independence. Many of the institutions and traditions of universities — especially self-government and tenure — survive from that period. While it is arguable that there is value in having some guarantee of academic freedom and independence, the system of tenure as practiced does not necessarily produce the results originally intended, when the candidates for that tenure are selected by dogmatic Marxist dunderheads who have come to dominate many universities.
