You may have had the difficulty of trying to think up a neat, precise, pithy, and headline-catching expression for something – you need a “from left field” or a “whatever”, and you haven’t got one.
We’ve been needing for some time such a bon mot for the sad and dangerous malaise in much of academia in our sorts of nations, how real scholarship seems to have been overwhelmed by today’s clones of brain-dead old monks in the Late Middle Ages arguing how there are more angels on my pin-head than on yours.
Or how so many of today’s academics “justify themselves in terms of critique, deconstruction, contextualism, discourse analysis and other approaches that don’t add very much to the total sum of knowledge a society or civilisation possesses about itself.”
Even the jargon makes one’s brain hurt. Or makes one suspect that not only do we have here a failure to communicate, but that what’s being communicated is trash.
Impressively and cleverly packaged trash, but still trash. Or, who steals my ‘Studies’, steals trash.
Like the sandwich in that saying.
And like a White Knight, the SAS, the 7th Cavalry, or the Tenth Legion, along comes Monash University’s Eduardo de la Fuente^ with his Vampire Disciplines.
“ONE of the many things ailing the present university – and the list is long – is the emergence of what we might term vampire disciplines.
“Originally, vampire disciplines found their homes within the humanities and social sciences. But they are quickly spreading to areas as diverse as law and architecture, terrorism studies and geography. Indeed, any discipline with some version of the critical studies in [X, Y or Z]’ genre has probably been infected by the vampire virus. And, if your discipline is still a vampire-free zone, expect the vampire advanced guard to come knocking on your door to convince you that your students majoring in transport logistics need to take a unit in ‘transport and society’ or in ‘transport cultural identities’.
“The presence of the word ‘and’ in a unit title should alert you the possibility that the unit being proposed is a vampire unit.”
As in most subjects titled ‘- – – Studies’.
Anyone, and surely that ought include every TT contributor, reader and poster,
~ interested in,
~ wondering about,
~ concerned by,
~ dismissive of, and especially
~ contemptuous of,
what’s happening in our universities, ought to read –
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/vampires-latch-on-to-learning/story-e6frgcko-1225871243920
Find out –
~ WHY a once-loved subject now seems to be run by morons;
~ WHETHER your rock-solid, sensible, practical subject is susceptible to the vampire virus;
~ HOW to fight and destroy this academic version of Golden Staph;
~ AND LOTS, LOTS MORE !!!
PS: wonderful it is that the notion of ‘vampire disciplines’ and ‘the academic undead’ were inspired by one of the most academically despised genres of contemporary teenage fiction and movies.
^ http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/communications/staff/eduardo-de-la-fuente/
