What is wrong with American academia?? I have here in centre of Europe some experience with German and Polish academic life. The German one is a bit close to the PC standards of US’s, but still there is no room for such absurds…

I think a big contributing factor to the nonsense being peddled in the high-degree level of the liberal arts is the requirement that a PhD dissertation must be original research.

The US has a big population, and we have a larger percentage of people pursuing doctorates than ever before. Given that, it’s no easy task for a grad student come up with something genuinely new to say about the works of Shakespeare, or the role of women in medieval France, or the life of Abraham Lincoln, or the ideas of Decartes. It seems so many of the truly useful (or at least relevant or intersting) subjects have been written about and analyzed to death by students’ academic predecessors.

When you combine this difficulty in finding new subjects or viewpoints to explore with the whacko-left orthodoxy of nearly every professor and administrator in academia, ridiculous crap like “Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet” is the inevitable result. And sadly, there’s only plenty more where that came from.

And since the folks who spend years to write these absurd dissertations to get their PhDs are, upon graduating, qualified to do nothing but remain in academia and become professors themselves, this trend will simply become replicated ad nauseum in future generations.