New York Post Op-Ed (fwd)

[Frances Bolton (PHI)]

                               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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