Academic Drivel Report

[Zinhead]

A funny story about an academic hoax by a professor at Occidental College.

http://prospect.org/article/academic-drivel-report

Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

I am sure that the other people who were on the “Absence of Absences” panel in Tokyo are serious scholars who care deeply about their research and can explain it in plain language if asked to do so. But as long as academics write primarily for tiny niches of other academics in language that obscures more than it enlightens, the general public will justifiably continue to question the value of higher education and whether their hard-earned tax dollars should be invested in the work of scholars who seem to have little interest in making their ideas accessible to the general public or useful to society.

Indeed.

[snarlatron]

Funny! Reminds me of this 1990 sendup of a post-structuralist critique of Gilligan’s Island.
http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/Gilligan

[circuitrider]

The idea that what professional academics do should be “useful” or easily accessible to the general public is a fairly recent idea and a peculiarly American one. Ironically, I think it derives primarily from the fact that higher education in this country is so accessible.

[Zinhead]

The idea that what professional academics do should be “useful” or easily accessible to the general public is a fairly recent idea and a peculiarly American one.

That is likely because up until fairly recently, most of the research that academics did had some practical purpose. It was only after the explosion of Phd students in the 1970’s that you started to see increasing numbers of scholars who specialized in some minutia only a handfull of other academics cared about.

Speaking about obscuring rather than enlightening, here is an abstract from an article in Feminist Theory. I have no idea what he or she is writing about.

http://fty.sagepub.com/content/16/2/153.abstract

The unruly queer figure’s phallic seductions and the re/production of sexual (in)difference

Corie Hammers - Macalester College, Saint Paul, USA

This article interrogates a psychoanalytically inflected strain of anti-social queer theory that in privileging refusal and negation, views as paradigmatic of ‘queerness’ the destructive, annihilative aspects in (queer) sex. In this view, sexuality is a product of the unconscious, thus irreducible to gender, such that gender is irrelevant to (and indeed hinders) understandings of desire. Informed by feminism, which views gender as crucial to any theory on sexuality, I expose that which ‘sexual negation’ masks through this very disavowal – that of gender and the body itself. I argue that subtending the figural representation of queer/ness is a deep-seated, albeit disguised, masculinism that, through negation, works to re-centre and re-virilise (gay) men’s sexual economies. I take up Butler’s lesbian phallus to de-idealise and thus challenge this privileging of the penis operating within this strain of queer – as only phallic sexual economies can, it seems, deliver the very annihilation we (all) seek.

[circuitrider]

“The idea that what professional academics do should be “useful” or easily accessible to the general public is a fairly recent idea and a peculiarly American one.”

That is likely because up until fairly recently, most of the research that academics did had some practical purpose

Like Einstein’s General Theory?

[Zinhead]

Einstein’s original theories were published while he was working in a patent office after being unable to find an academic position. His research led to the eventual development of atomic power and the atomic bomb, not to mention tremendously advancing the study of physics. Those are pretty practical results compared to writing about phallic seductions.

[circuitrider]

And, of course, highly understood by the general public. It’s interesting that in both examples we’re still talking about major cases made by two Central European Jews over a hundred years ago.