Meghna Sridhar for The Amherst Student
When I read through my first draft of this article, incomplete, written over a month ago and forgotten in the crevices of one of my many draft article ideas folders, I nearly threw up my tea in my mouth. “On the dialectic of intellectual elitism and egalitarian accessibility” was my working title, and it just got worse from there on in. It was written in vague, hazy academese, with liberal arts college major words like “paradigmatic,” “praxis” and everyone’s favorite, “problematic”, cushioned in every single sentence. Worse still, it was an article that was supposed to be about journalism, academic elitism and accessibility.
Accessibility and intellectualism are hotly contested terms amongst the political left, and I often find myself torn between two very valid arguments regarding them. The ivory tower of leftist academia is well known and rigorously criticized: what does it mean to have a political philosophy that is all about “empowering the masses” (a very condescending term in and of itself) that is written in language that is ostensibly inaccessible to the people it is writing in support of? What does it mean to write in a language, in obtuse terms and in lofty, complex syntax, about theories meant to be emancipate precisely the people who will never have access to them? Further, writing in academic terminology is often — there is no other word for it — masturbatory. Academic writing often seems to serve no purpose but to be a self-congratulatory, self-contained discourse where academics talk with themselves and nobody else, and celebrate their own complex ideas without looking outside their bubble. What is the use of academic leftism that has the same intellectual rigour, but also same intellectual inaccessibility, as graduate level mathematics? Youngist.org recently had a good article that explained it in much clearer terms that I could. Entitled “The Revolution will not be cited,” the article claimed that, “[the goals of leftist activism] were met in conflict with a desire in academia to concentrate knowledge among groups of specialized elites, instead of a focus on popularizing this knowledge for the greater good. Try reading any academic text from your local women’s studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies or anthropology department. The texts are almost always written so that only academics can understand.”
Read more @: http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2014/02/18/elitism-academia-and-journalism
Meghna Sridhar for The Amherst Student
When I read through my first draft of this article, incomplete, written over a month ago and forgotten in the crevices of one of my many draft article ideas folders, I nearly threw up my tea in my mouth. “On the dialectic of intellectual elitism and egalitarian accessibility” was my working title, and it just got worse from there on in. It was written in vague, hazy academese, with liberal arts college major words like “paradigmatic,” “praxis” and everyone’s favorite, “problematic”, cushioned in every single sentence. Worse still, it was an article that was supposed to be about journalism, academic elitism and accessibility.
Accessibility and intellectualism are hotly contested terms amongst the political left, and I often find myself torn between two very valid arguments regarding them. The ivory tower of leftist academia is well known and rigorously criticized: what does it mean to have a political philosophy that is all about “empowering the masses” (a very condescending term in and of itself) that is written in language that is ostensibly inaccessible to the people it is writing in support of? What does it mean to write in a language, in obtuse terms and in lofty, complex syntax, about theories meant to be emancipate precisely the people who will never have access to them? Further, writing in academic terminology is often — there is no other word for it — masturbatory. Academic writing often seems to serve no purpose but to be a self-congratulatory, self-contained discourse where academics talk with themselves and nobody else, and celebrate their own complex ideas without looking outside their bubble. What is the use of academic leftism that has the same intellectual rigour, but also same intellectual inaccessibility, as graduate level mathematics? Youngist.org recently had a good article that explained it in much clearer terms that I could. Entitled “The Revolution will not be cited,” the article claimed that, “[the goals of leftist activism] were met in conflict with a desire in academia to concentrate knowledge among groups of specialized elites, instead of a focus on popularizing this knowledge for the greater good. Try reading any academic text from your local women’s studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies or anthropology department. The texts are almost always written so that only academics can understand.”
Read more @: http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2014/02/18/elitism-academia-and-journalism
