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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i do look forward to the day when the humanities are sane again. holy fuck, where is the new auerbach or the new george steiner-- probably unable to get tenure because he/she didn't present in 6 conferences a year.
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You highlight a real problem there. Academics are (as you say) evaluated on the amount of essays and books they publish and conferences they attend, rather than the quality of their teaching. This has led to a saturation of half-baked ideas being pushed by often half-baked intellects.
Where I agree with Glice is that it always seems to be the humanities that gets the majority of criticism for this, despite the fact that it's an institution-wide epidemic rather than anything remotely discipline specific.
This is compounded by the increasing pressures put upon the humanities in general to justify themselves as a viable area of study. Funding for the humanities is being decimated (in the UK at least) to such an extent that subjects like philosophy, history of art and literature studies are in grave danger of disappearing from university prospectuses altogether. It's a vicious circle in which departments rush to publish in a bid to secure funding fully aware that what they're publishing hardly bolsters their academic credibility. My point is that it's not a problem with Derrida, or the humanities but with funding. And for Sokal to attack it from the relatively secure position of a university science department is to (i believe willfully) ignore the real causes of the problem.
The sorry fact is that a George Steiner simply wouldn't survive in a humanities programme right now and that this won't change until the people who allocate funding re-think their criteria for doing so.