"Articles in non-peer-refereed journals and books published by non-university presses not only do not count as 'work' but actually get chalked up as negatives that they (= administrative evildoers and colleagues who hate your guts) can potentially use against you ..."
and
"Most of those who publish "unintelligible bullshit" are probably not really left-wingers (in practice) but merely trendy liberals who are not really smart but who do know how to ornament their publications with references to Marx and the like ..."
I write:
Regarding Yoshie's claims, too true, too true, sadly. I took a tenure-track job at a major state university (University of Tennessee) with no illusions about all the inane bullshit that goes on in mainstream academia, but nonetheless have been astonished by the degree to which my putatively left and left-liberal colleagues succumb to the aforementioned pressures and publish potentially intriguing and useful stuff in sterile journals read only by their orthodox peers (if at all). Back when I was a grad student in oh-so-trendy Santa Cruz, I thought pomo was the ruination of radical scholarship. I have since learned that, at least in the social sciences, pomo is a drop in the bucket. A far bigger problem is the skewed reward structure outlined by Yoshie -- and the desultory fact that so many talented, creative intellectuals internalize external discipline and morph into pathetic number-crunchers and hollow jargon-users (and most of said jargon is _not_ pomo jargon).
John Gulick
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