Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem
This essay seems like it was largely written to make the author feel smart while doing very little to illuminate or clarify their ideas and insights (which seem to boil down to basically calling Donald Trump Hitler and suggesting his voters are uneducated imbeciles who must be stopped by academia, which is among the least original thoughts possible to express).<p>To disguise what is really a bland central point and weak call to action at the end (hey, let’s try harder people is how the essay ends), the author dresses up the language to obscure what he really thinks and vomits forth a labyrinth of self referential jibberish which does little to enlighten anyone of anything while wasting the reader’s time.<p>It is a singularly academic trait to believe that bullying one’s readers into submission by attempting to cudgel them with their lack of knowledge in your particular domain is an effective persuasive strategy. Dominance games of this sort make these people generally unemployable in the real world.<p>Reading this sort of reminds me of listening to the rapper “The Game.” Most of his records consist of name dropping of other rappers and quoting the words of others. There is a reason The Game had a short career.<p>Likewise, here we have a piece of writing which is a network of references to authors few have read, unnecessary deployment of $10 vocabulary words which would best be replaced by shorter words which are more generally known. Orson Wells, Kurt Vonnegut  and Ernest Hemingway perfected writing. This guy and his kind ruined it for the rest of us for their own benefit.<p>A great way to determine if someone really knows something is the clarity of their writing. By this metric, the author has very little to communicate.<p>If Richard Feynman can explain quantum physics to a 3 year old, this writer can call Trump Hitler and suggest his voters are uneducated morons without wasting everyone’s time with the unnecessary and obfuscatory language porn.<p>The reason people don’t respect these academics? There is no penalty for them to be wrong and their ideas are not provable. They are effectively employed via tax dollars by the state to disseminate fundamentally political ideas to their students while feigning impartiality. They never read outside of their own domains, resulting in a permanent state of educated ignorance.<p>Being obligated to pay 1&#x2F;4th of our already overly expensive college funds to sustain the employment of people like this makes little sense anymore, Fire them and get your education from YouTube.<p>Don’t pay for it anymore.