Further to this, readers may be interested in Philosophy and Literature’s gone but not forgotten Annual Bad Writing Contest. The rules are simple enough:

The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.

The winning entries are, alas, not quite so clear. This, from 1997, is Professor Rob Wilson, writing in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, a collection of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Richard Burt:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

The publisher’s blurb informs us that the purpose of the book quoted above is to “seek a deeper understanding of what ‘censorship’, ‘criticism’ and the ‘public sphere’ really mean.”

There’s more, of course.  (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)

Over at Easily Distracted, Tim Burke highlights two recent academic news stories and finds a common theme.

This is what I call the porcupine strategy. Make yourself as pointy, sharp and inflated as you can, and hope that any predators will just go away. The problem with this particular porcupine act is that it’s not fooling anyone. Scholars who know something about the theories [Aliza] Shvartz is fumbling to deploy know full well that she’s said very little that makes sense in this passage, that it’s close to being a random assemblage of words. Observers who don’t know anything about those theories just see it as babble.

In fairness to casual readers, several, more seasoned, purveyors of postmodernist theory have also lapsed into random assemblages of words. Even those figures held in great esteem by other likeminded theorists have often proved no less impervious to comprehension. Oddly, this tendency hasn’t stopped many of their admirers from hailing the results as “skillfully poetic”.

Busy for much of today, but here are a few items of possible interest. Feel free to add your own.

Gail Heriot notes the fallout of affirmative action and enforced diversity. 

“It didn’t seem to matter that… students admitted with lower academic credentials would end up incurring heavy debt but never graduate.”

Mark Steyn runs his tongue over Michelle Obama.

“Mrs Obama regards state-mandated compensation for previous racism as a new form of [burden] to bear. In an early indication of post-modern narcissism… she arrived as a black woman at Princeton and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the problems of being a black woman at Princeton… [She] embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology.”

And Adam Platt encounters poison of a different kind.

“Tonight, I’ve been told, he’ll be serving that most prized portion of the fugu anatomy known as shira-ko, a.k.a. the engorged fugu sperm sac.”

Do try to keep the place tidy.   

In light of recent rumblings on bias in academia, Fabian Tassano has some not unrelated thoughts.

Imagine the following scenario. A bunch of intelligent people get together and create — using funding that is more or less unconditional — a system for generating intellectual output. However, this output does not have to pass any particular test except whether a majority of system insiders agree it is worthy. So the members of the system are entirely insulated from assessment other than their own. Like any social group, they create a hierarchy of rank, in which some are allowed to progress to the top of the ladder depending on criteria which the group as a whole decides on. What is the likely outcome? And what happens if there also starts to be an ideology which places pressure on them to produce results which fit with, rather than go against, that ideology?

Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.

Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women – but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…

[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.

Please, read it all.   

Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma – could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.

Update: Mary Jackson has more.