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May 8, 2006
i don't read the conservative magazines much these days but I thumbed through an old copy of Quadrant tooday and came across this editorial on academic research funding written by P.P. McGuiness. It's a shocker in terms of its bigotry and prejudice.
McGuiness is strong on the intellectual rigor of the natural sciences. Then we have this:
Bluntly, the intellectual rigour of the sciences is increasingly absent from the humanities and social sciences. In a university system where pop songs are studied along with (or instead of) genuine culture, where low-grade “political economy” is taught along with economics, where entry requirements are constantly being debased along with the schools and where “cross-disciplinary” has come to mean the same as jack of all trades--at best superficial knowledge, at worst none—it is increasingly the case that non-scientists simply cannot be trusted to supervise the sciences nor operate a managerial system designed to produce experts.
And:
The reality is that the humanities are being, and largely have been, destroyed in the name of the meaningless subject of “cultural studies” and corrupted by “postmodernism”, which has become a substitute for thought and scholarship. Little of value is produced by the adherents or fellow travellers of this school, who are more concerned with political fashion amongst the lumpen intelligentsia than any analysis. Much of what they produce is propaganda or worse. Absurd subjects like “gender studies” or, even worse, “queer studies” are solemnly treated as worthy of respect, and projects of research are proposed which add precisely nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
It is these who have contrribnuted to the debasement of intellectual and academic standards and contributed to a climate of intolerance and retribution for unorthodoxy.
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Gary, There is/was a similar article posted on Online Opinion today by Gregory Melleuish.
The philosophy and "culture" of one dimensional scientific man rules OK.