"it’s tempting to throw up your hands and just remind yourself that this is not your circus."
Sadly, if you are an American taxpayer, you are paying for it even though you have no voice in how it is run. The flow of money into the HE sector from all levels of government is truly staggering. Tax exemptions, research grants, tuition subsidies, state ownership and investments, etc., etc. & etc. are the life blood o the HE sector.
And the situation is going to get worse. The government is out of money, and population is out of adolescent children. The HE people are really good at not understanding their problem.
The claimed connection between research into ancient languages and colonialism is undermined by the tremendous prominence of German philologists at a time when Germany had no colonies. This is discussed in Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge", which I contrasted with Edward Said's "Orientalism" here:
I think you have spotted an important general point. The woke and postmodern approaches to literature are entirely contradictory.
The Woke are second rate and know it. They love to denounce authorial bias in the form of "servi erant laeti" (easy, taken from a textbook), but not difficult "odio humani generis" (an ambiguity in Tacitus). They regard themselves as the victims of social inequality and thereby entitled to lower scholarly standards.
The postmodernists see culture as an instrument of subversion and the more effective if detached from any kind of authorial, social or economic context. They are clever, lazy, cynical and in a weird way meritocratic. As long as they are paid for being intelligent why should they have to be right?
"it’s tempting to throw up your hands and just remind yourself that this is not your circus."
Sadly, if you are an American taxpayer, you are paying for it even though you have no voice in how it is run. The flow of money into the HE sector from all levels of government is truly staggering. Tax exemptions, research grants, tuition subsidies, state ownership and investments, etc., etc. & etc. are the life blood o the HE sector.
And the situation is going to get worse. The government is out of money, and population is out of adolescent children. The HE people are really good at not understanding their problem.
Things that cannot go on this way will stop.
The claimed connection between research into ancient languages and colonialism is undermined by the tremendous prominence of German philologists at a time when Germany had no colonies. This is discussed in Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge", which I contrasted with Edward Said's "Orientalism" here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/orientalism-vs-dangerous-knowledge/
I think you have spotted an important general point. The woke and postmodern approaches to literature are entirely contradictory.
The Woke are second rate and know it. They love to denounce authorial bias in the form of "servi erant laeti" (easy, taken from a textbook), but not difficult "odio humani generis" (an ambiguity in Tacitus). They regard themselves as the victims of social inequality and thereby entitled to lower scholarly standards.
The postmodernists see culture as an instrument of subversion and the more effective if detached from any kind of authorial, social or economic context. They are clever, lazy, cynical and in a weird way meritocratic. As long as they are paid for being intelligent why should they have to be right?
Does Ritchie refute Taleb’s argument on IQ?