11 Comments

Haha, that reminds me: I knew a woman a few years ago who was a history professor at a small college in PA. She was writing a "Women's History" book at the time about how Betsy Ross was the first American intersectional feminist or something like that. She was a walking caricature of the miseducated American college professor, really. She was also one of the most unhappy people I've ever met. I always wondered which came first: was she depressed from having spent too long in academia, or did she opt into academia because its worldview validated her depression?

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I am at least encouraged that there are educators who push back against the postmodern approach to history. For example: https://voegelinview.com/history-forgotten-and-remembered/

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Let me add to my previous comment by pointing to the dilution of microbiology thanks to the many Tyler Cowens that have been writing in all places about how important their very little pieces of knowledge are to whatever is happening with Covid. A new example of this nonsense is this piece

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/health/coronavirus-omicron-next-pandemic.html

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The massification of education at all levels, including Ph.D. programs, has attracted all sorts of people willing to do anything but study to get a degree in X-studies. Massification always leads to dilution of whatever was supposed to have high market value. We can see it also in blogging, publishing, reporting, and anything related to communicating ideas. Sorry, Arnold, but people like Tayler Cowen have diluted the value of economics by throwing peanuts to get monkeys.

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If "woke" is to be a worthwhile derogatory, it needs more discipline. Studying women's history is not "intrinsically" woke and there's no such thing as one old fashioned way of doing history that is objectively best and in no need of improvement (history is not the one academic discipline exempt from possible improvement).

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And they're not just focusing on Woke research topics...

"Krug was denounced by other academics, among them C.V. Vitolo-Haddad, a black/Cuban graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, who accused her of ‘performing blackface’ and of being a ‘Kansas cracker’. And you’ll never guess what happened next! Yes, Vitolo-Haddad (pronouns: they/them) inevitably also turned out to be white, and it was reported that ‘C.V. has confirmed that they are Italian’."

https://edwest.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being

Krug was a Historian, Vitolo-Haddad was a PhD candidate in Journalism and Mass communications. Based on the latter's medium profile, she seemed well on her way to a successful career "studying" white nationalism and modern nazism.

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