The New York Times - FEB. 15, 2014
SOME
of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are
university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s
great debates.
The
most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In
other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.
One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.
“All
the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more
quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general
public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson
School at Princeton and now the president of the New America
Foundation.
Read more....
No comments:
Post a Comment