Does “critical thinking” make you “krill” for “too-big-to-fail [academic] leviathans” (arts and sciences graduate schools) instead? Yet again: if you claim to believe something, you should think about what it means. Would you discourage people from attending graduate school? Would you launch jeremiads against Swarthmore and Oberlin? (Why) is the corporation named “Academia” better than the one named “Goldman Sachs?” I think academia far more dangerous. I note that this post is addressed to many posters, not only the two that I quoted.
I met Professor Deresiewicz once, and I overheard someone asking him if schools that feed many of their graduates to such graduate schools are likewise dens of sheep. He replied to this effect: “to an extent, yes, but graduate schools don’t feed students to the professoriate, to a specific profession.” I regret that I cannot recall the whole response. I will only rejoin that whatever profession a graduate degree leads you too is likely longer than transitory, if not because of student loans and obligations then the endurance one needs to survive graduate school in the first place, for which a transient job will likely not suffice, and among the jobs that one can perform for the longest is teaching, and I would contend that academia and its offspring are the most pernicious sheep-breeders of all, of those sheep of whom Raphael Hythloday said, “They devour human beings themselves, as I hear.” Academia creates krill who think they are not krill. I confess that I would much rather be a (virtuous) sheep than whatever I am now, because the fire of martyrdom burns within my head, and I must needs end up a holy fool or an Alonso Quixano, or perchance a Tom O’Bedlam or King Lear, if I continue, “pathless on all paths” as is said of Oedipus and Hadji Murad, raising my sword against the world and ending as Raskolnikov, Pozdnyshev, Bazarov, and Eugene Onegin do. Nothing for it: I must fight or retreat from this depraved world, and if I retreat, I will not cease from likening myself to Saint Augustine, perhaps an unpleasanter hell than anything I have seen in Homer or Vergil, even in Dante. Then I will become as an explorer and combatant Sir Newton (who, with Hume, purported to chart all of experience with his mere inductions).
It’s curious that you used those rankings you cited for one end and ignored half of the results. Curious, but not unsurprising. Hypocrisy (irony?) is the ugliest and subtlest of monsters, in fact the singular monster–this, I presume, the intimate relation between hypocrisy and treason, was in Dante’s head when he placed Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius, and Judas Iscariot with weepy Lucifer in the bowels of Hell.
I am almost ready, having drunk of the life of St. Teresa’s ecstasies, to fight all of these
Rabelaisian tripes and tropes
Montaignian peripatetic periphrases
monsters
rogues
scurrilities
farces
travesties
demons
devils
fiends
paranoid schizophrenic prolIxities
deliria
reflexive reciprocalities
reciprocal reflexivities
insouciant desiderata
crepuscular and dilucular incongruities
farcical irrelevancies
transcendental and sublunary indeterminacies
the first and the last, the honored one and the scorned one, the whore and the holy one, the wife and the virgin, the mother and the daughter, the members of my mother, the barren one
and many are her sons, she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband, the midwife and she who does not bear, the solace of my labor pains, the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me
at once.
Edit: No, the automatic spellchecker is the most loathsome thing of all.
