eugyppius

An enormous oddity, about life on elite American campuses, is the constant construction. The administrators need something to do, I guess. Buildings erected just a few decades ago are torn down and replaced by new ones.

New pointless buildings are constantly being thrown up. Huge multimillion dollar ugly glass & steel projects that pollute bright fluorescent light every evening, themselves an architectural expression of the Diversity cancer.

Diversity has encroached so far, even into traditional departments like History and English, that there is total curricular chaos. Nothing is taught systematically at all. Even what is left of the University teaches stupid disconnected courses on pet projects or favourite things.

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.

The question of why these people are so effective at taking over institutions when they are less competent and likeable than those they push out has been bugging me lately. Do you think you have any insight on this? Do you think academia was uniquely vulnerable?