New York Post Op-Ed (fwd)

Frances Bolton (PHI) fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Sun Dec 6 19:24:58 PST 1998


New York Post

COMMENTARY

CUNY REWARDS A LAUGHINGSTOCK

By MARK GOLDBLATT

______________________________________________________________

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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Copyright (c) 1998, N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express

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