eugyppius

Favourite things like Butt Sex in Beirut: 1972-1987. Faculty who teach their fields seriously and systematically are very hard to find, in most departments there is not a single person.

There is throughout a huge, unprecedented overemphasis on the modern era and even a lot of University remnants just research and teach diffuse cultural studies crap that in another era would've qualified as journalism, except it's vastly more boring and not as current.

As for learned societies, they Diversity has a hard hold on every last one of them. Productive scholars generally don't want to organise the next MLA, so these orgs were always vulnerable to vile opportunists and third-rate hacks. Diversity gave them a way in.

Same for journals and editorial boards. I am telling you, it is dead. All of it is dead. The most interesting thinkers and writers I know left academia a while ago, or were never a part of it. That's it for now.

A tangential note: In the 2250 words of these two threads you avoid touching on the role played by (what you call) The Diversity on the breakthrough of the Coronavirus Panic in 2020. Presumably you intentionally avoid the subject but the two seem related in important ways...

...The Corona-Panic begins emerging on fringes in the weeks before start of US Spring 2020 academic semester (US spring semester generally being late Jan to early May); CoronaPanic really gets rolling in the early weeks of semester; Panic mass breakthrough at semester midpoint...

... Besides the dumbing-down process of supposed thought-leaders (and the cultural cowardice/entitlement feeling that accompanies it), the Corona-Panic breakthrough and all that's followed it has an interesting chronological alignment to the US academic semester calendar: ...

...The big Corona-Panic breakthrough (the crazy-in-retrospect overreaction of mid-March 2020 with the tidal wave of shutdowns) aligns precisely with colleges' (dreaded) return-from-"Spring-Break"-week (Spring Break being most often the second week of March, or an adjacent week).