Betrayal by Academia
I’ve been recently impressed as to how badly our culture has betrayed academia and scholarship. It’s hard to imagine what real exploration means anymore in a public sense. Teaching and exploring alternatives and oppositions would seem to be essential in every field. In fact, there would have to be hard-pressing study of the most repugnant materials with the most open mind if we’re to get any progress outside of a Voc Tech dynamic, where employers get the short-term progress they prefer. I asked an MBA friend if they taught critiques of TQM and corpo-think at business school when he attended. He said No, that it was all True Believer stuff. And this is Masters Degree work. It’s not study, it’s proselytizing, brainwashing, molding, shaping. Voc Tech. It really seems like every field needs to have its Questioners who would be obviously its most loyal adherents. A booth at a medical conference about the danger of drugs would be the most humane booth I could imagine. A booth at a bookshow about the abandonment of the Small Press movement and literature. That sort of thing.
