Two Items

You don’t see this every day: A professor openly hammering away at the College’s postmodern lilt. Meir Kohn may be an econ prof, but he has some bristling words for the humanities:

However, in the humanities and in other parts of the social sciences, an increasing proportion of what passes for research is not reality-based but socially constructed. “Research” does not mean discovering or understanding anything: it merely means writing stuff that your peers like. The result increasingly is post-modernist, neo-Marxist claptrap. Those doing “research” of this type are unlikely to be good teachers in terms of what they teach. They have no truth or knowledge to impart — only attitude. Indeed they deny there is such a thing as truth or knowledge.

On the other hand, you do see this every day: The Dartmouth (Stuart A. Reid) takes a complicated issue, in this case a retrospective on the trustee election that was, and not only misses most every important point of the story, but also makes some outlandish suppositions. My favorite is this, regarding the influence of national political ideology on the petition candidates’ stances:

And the petition candidates’ stance against big government perhaps manifested itself in skepticism of Dartmouth’s plethora of deans.

Sheesh, Stuart, you gotta try harder than that.

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