Look, don’t worry about it. A few lefties hiding amongst the ivy in our sandstone academic castles is nothing to get paranoid about – although right-wingers still manage to do so in spades.

The right is doing very nicely, thank you very much. It has the entire western media in its pocket, plus the publishing world, advertising, cinema and much of the arts. And of course, it goes without saying that the entire global business and financial sectors are totally in bed with the right and joined at the hip. It was ever thus.

And take heart from the fact that, globally, one lefty-type regime … oh, sorry – brutal dictatorship … after another is being brought down and their countries are being laid to waste by a cabal of pathologically right-wing spook agencies in order to make those countries more comfortably exploitable to western right-wing interests.

But if all the left-wing lecturing staff of Humanities departments across all the universities of the western world have to be swept out the door so that students with a right-wing worldview don’t have to think before they write, then so be it.

any studies on humanities that fail to acknowledge the corrupt nature of man just leads to idiotic outcomes. More problems are created than solved by the social engineers who have little answers for problems that their doctrines demanded. The public education system is one of the finest examples of this. Failure to see their own corruption blinds them to any reason.

As long ago as 1956 in his Rede Lecture, CP Snow suggested that “Two Cultures of Scientific and Humanities studies we failing to communicate”.

The process of “socialization” of subjects by Humanities Academia has been accelerating ever since. These include the sciences, history, geography, literature, maths and modern languages which have all been subjected to equally drastic socialization or dumbing down.

There is also evidence that “socialization” is occurring in many other domains including but not limited to; journalism, politics, environment, industrialization and food production.

“The process of socializing these subjects adopts a strategy of “narrative theory” which treats the sciences, economics, philosophy, literature etc., as simply a different mode of story telling and therefore opened up many subjects by rhetoric to “interpretation” or the creation of objective truth”. (Tallis)

“For good or ill, the major intellectual and social events of recent centuries, has been the progress of science and the transformation of the world. This has produced much anxiety and possibly some vocational envy amongst the humanities academia and the products of their doctrine, the political elites”. (Tallis)

In a comprehensive series of essays called “The Corruption of the Curriculum” written during 2007 by authors such as Frank Furedi, Shirley Laws, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, Alex Standish, Robert Whelan and David Perks. The conclusion of these authors, all of whom are experienced teachers, “is that the curriculum is being drained of intellectual content in favor of promoting political issues such racism, the environment and gender”.

In his essay, The Eunuch at The Orgy, Raymond Tallis observes, “Humanities academia is naturally unhappy to recognize the centrality of mathematicisation of nature to our culture, to be reminded of the importance of the unattainably different level of rigor and sophistication prevailing in subjects they don’t understand”.

It is perhaps now more important to recognize “what” has been done to our education systems and the negative effect this has had on our socio-economic fortunes. Beyond this it is blindingly simple to identify the “ideological culprit”. Which is the “progressive collective”.

Runner - great point
Killarney - I am not wearing right wing capitalist rose glasses. However, what remains of the humanities today is but a shadow of itself. I don't think either chris or myself are wanting the humanities student to be indoctrinated with economic rationalism, that already pervades virtually every discipline - as you rightly state.

Rather, we need to see comparative economic studies together with comparative policitical studies. Unless, humanities students can atleast understand and articulate some coherency in economics they will too readily be dismissed as irrational dreamers.

This is not to delegitimise the postmodern schools or the literary theorist but on the contrary to enable these schools to become relevant not only at the margins but to strike fear into the very heart of the capitalist illusion.

In other words, revealing hidden oppressions whilst ignoring the overt only serves to legitimise the status quo.

Yebiga,

Yes, that is right. You understand what I am saying.

While I may be more a supporter of liberalism than others, and oppose collective ideologies, I am saying that good scholarship must have a greater grasp of the issues that count (especially the economy).

I remember being despised by some in my environmental class when I challenged one student’s assumption we could live well on industries much less exploitive of the environment. Given that the wealth from forestry was a tiny amount of global trade, I was merely asking are you prepared to accept a much lower standard of living. In other words, don’t just say something for something’s sake based on idealism, work hard to learn all the evidence needed to convince readers of the need to change or temper our ways.

All I am saying is that the left needs to lift its game by mastering as much evidence as possible. When the environmental lecturer, now some sort of professor, also admitted she knew almost nothing about economics, I wondered how this could this be the case in a university in the 1990s. With such weaknesses in teaching, given she had no basic awareness even of political economy, how could humanities students be expected to provide some sort of intellectual expertise on issues if they only discussed half the story.

As a liberal democrat, which for myself means support for limited but effective govt and support for freer trade within reason, that does not mean that good scholarship cannot emerge from the left or right to provide analysis and ideas that can be taken up by both sides of politics. As I observe, there is evidence of positive and negative aspects of recent trends.

When I have a dig at the humanities, I am merely saying you are not good enough. Lift your game.

I would also say that centre-right think tanks can also lift their game.

We all can

You're a good man Chris; too fair to the lefties but then its instinctive to be more patient with screaming kids.

The left, now revamped as progressive:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/progressive_is_the_new_label_of_the_ashamed_left/

The progressive is not interested in unbiased, objective teaching or science, the hallmarks of good teaching; the progressive, to hell with that, leftie, is only interested in advocacy of its position.

Any method will be sufficient for the leftie because they are infused with Noble Cause syndrome where the end justifies the means; we saw the corruption of science in the AGW scam with the revelations of the emails and the blatant admission by leading AGW 'scientists' that it was acceptable to lie and exaggerate; a couple of quotes well illustrate this:

“We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
- Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts
on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
- Al Gore,
Climate Change activist

Lefties do not teach; I have direct experience of this; I have 4 degrees and diplomas and the bias coming from the lecturers had nothing to do with actual disputes with the evidence; the bias came from the application of ideology to the data and facts.

I despise the left; they are inherently oppressive, I believe because they simply think they're better than everyone else.