New York Post
COMMENTARY
CUNY REWARDS A LAUGHINGSTOCK
By MARK GOLDBLATT
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IF being a national laughingstock cannot derail a career as a
university scholar, what can?
The City University graduate school just promoted Stanley Aronowitz
from plain old professor to distinguished professor of sociology.
Aronowitz's 15 minutes of fame came three years ago when his
left-wing journal, Social Text, fell prey to ''Sokal's Hoax.'' Six
ST editors read and accepted physicist Alan Sokal's ''Transgressing
the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity'' - without realizing it was a parody of academic
double-talk.
With mock seriousness, Sokal claimed to show how ''the space-time
manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality'' - in
other words, he set out to prove the world itself doesn't exist.
''The pi of Euclid and the g of Newton,'' Sokal wrote, ''formerly
thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their
ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally
de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time
point.''
Don't bother deciphering the sense: There is none.
The writing, Sokal explained, ''wasn't obliged to respect any
standards of evidence or logic.'' He simply strung together ''the
silliest quotes about mathematics and physics from the most
prominent academics'' - including Aronowitz himself.
That Aronowitz and his cronies accepted the paper strongly suggests
that their own thought processes had become so jargon-muddled that
they were unable to perceive Sokal's spoof of those thought
processes as a spoof - in other words, they accepted a paper based
on a scattershot of jargon alone.
In the non-academic world, Aronowitz was instantly recognized as a
charlatan. At CUNY, little more than an instant later, he is
''recognized.'' That's the problem - and it's larger than
Aronowitz. Absurdity - in a person or an idea - is no bar to
academic promotion. Stripped of the Darwinian control of a reality
check, humanities professors nationwide are now spinning out
invincibly ignorant, incandescently silly variations on the ancient
theme of Protagorean relativism - variations that go by resonant
names like ''poststructuralism,'' ''perspectivism'' and ''discourse
analysis.'' Their common features: baseless, shifting, virtually
impenetrable jargon, and a dogmatic insistence that there is no
independent reality beyond appearances, that knowledge is always a
tool of power.
The inevitable outcome of such theorizing is the denial that
''facts'' exist or that ''evidence'' can establish objective truth.
From this follows a generally unspoken corollary: the demotion of
truths such as the European slave trade, the Nazi Holocaust and the
Soviet Gulags to the status of well-received rumors.
Aronowitz, indeed, provoked Sokal's hoax by his commitment to the
relativist point of view - even in the realms of mathematics and
physical science. The resulting whiff of national humiliation does,
in a sense, distinguish Aronowitz from most of his peers. But he is
only one among hundreds of professors of gibberish currently
employed at American universities. It is up to the schools
themselves to stop perpetuating nonsense.
---
Marc Goldblatt teaches at SUNY's Fashion Institute of Technology.
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