Academe: October 2008 Archives
Was perusing a tongue-in-cheek blog (UPDATE: blog has vanished into the ether. Have removed link as result.) by an out-of work academic looking for a job, when I came across a reference to a webpage for the Lehigh Humanities Center. The blogger had excerpted the center's description, and wow! It was bad. Bulwer-Lytton bad. So bad that I was skeptical such writing could exist anywhere outside of a pretentious 20-something's literary Livejournal, so I followed his link. Nope, he wasn't making it up. Look upon this webpage, ye literate, and despair:
The Humanities Center is a non-vocational, un-combed approach to education and university be-ing. Mingling in the margins, it is an un-disciplinary place, playing in the puddles created by the discovery of the oozing boundaries that characterize the Humanities. Jumping on the trampolinic tension between the intensities of concentration and the intensities of connection, we invite you to find these spaces between the disciplines, the space where the sparks of intellectual excitement fly, igniting the pleasures and passions of university life.
With this in brain, the Humanities Center is anti-'work hard, play hard' because of its division of work and play, choosing to focus on play of work and the work of play, perhaps re-inventing the very meaning of intellectual work. At this, we focus on movement, action, fluidity, disheveledment and the mingling of bodies, minds, and ideas. Developing a continual re-orientation toward exploratory uncoothness in action, the Humanities Center is faculty, students, and staff cultivating the empowerment that is verb-izing the planet through rumination on connection and community, splashing in the messiness of the intellectual foolery that is academia, the turbulence that is engaged intellectuality.
I mean, what? "With this in brain?" WHAT? "Verb-izing?" WHAT?!?! And also, it's spelled "couth," for crying out loud, and I would just like to take a moment to point out that never in my academic experience have I ONCE "splashed" in "intellectual foolery," unless you count that one philosophy session with the existential fart, but I really don't think that was or should be representative of my experience in the humanities as a whole.
Good grief. Could you do a better job of driving a stake into the tattered remains of the humanities' self-respect and viability as a collection of actual intellectual disciplines?
As usual, I blame the post-modernists. Mainly because it's easy, and as the above description illustrates, easy is apparently what the humanities are all about nowadays.
In the time-honored tradition of academe, professors surge to support one of their own via--what else?--a petition!
Maybe it's just me, but after the whole Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the vaunted "Gang of 88," my only response to gestures such as these is a ginormous eyeroll of "whatever, dude." But not everyone shares my apathy - read the comments section and enjoy!
Gah. Enough of this. In keeping with my recently taken vow of cruel frivolity (yes, I am ripping off Ann Althouse's "vow of cruel neutrality," only my version is way easier on the blood pressure), I am taking the afternoon off to get my hair done. And to read People magazine while I do it! Hah! I may even indulge in a mocha.
Take that, Harbingers Of Serious Business on the Internet!
