We all know PhD students are communists. Below is typical of the tripe from one such student studying a PhD in, of all things, videogames! I kid you not. This commie kiddy complains that academics write crap. In my experience the only truthful writing comes from research funded by the Heritage Foundation, which is a foundation that funds research to prove that we Men have higher IQs than girlies, or we White Westerners are smarter than all other non-Westerners. As I'm sure you'll agree, if academics don't prove these things to be the Truth then they're rubbish.
Here is the blog from the video PhD commie geek Ben Hourigan. His post is pulled apart by another commie named Jess, which I have included at the end. Looks like playing video games does affect your intelligence:
Ben Hourigan wrote on his blog
http://benhourigan.com/archives/2005/12/03/humanities-academics-poor-communication-skills/#comments:
Academia has its own dialect, and it is able to do so because academics aren’t, as a rule, forced to have much contact with the world outside academia. It’s incredibly destructive, because the more time academics spend with each other, reinforcing their curious use of language, the more they ensure no-one in the world at large will be interested in what they have to say.
Why did academics start using this language to begin with? Why do they tolerate speech that often verges on nonsensical? The answer, I believe, is in the emergence of literary modernism in the early 20th century. Experimental writers of prose from Ezra Pound to James Joyce attempted to reinvent literary style according to the idea that new times demanded new language, and they produced some famously unreadable pieces like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
The “make it new” idea of modernism seems to mesh rather well with the need for humanities scholars to write something “original” to get their doctorate. Rather than talking about something new, you can talk about something old using new words that you made up yourself, or by taking an old, incomprehensible study of something and making it incomprehensible in a slightly different way. The experimental techniques of the literary modernists made their way into the academy, where they slowly infected almost all of the humanities, throughout the world.
These days, to get a doctorate in the humanities, you usually have to emulate your peers’ incomprehensible style. This is called being scholarly. Sadly, the people you think are unenthusiastic on stage probably are very passionate about what they’re trying so unsuccessfully to talk about, but they’re labouring under the extraordinary effort of producing convoluted sentences.
To get a doctorate, you also have to cite “previous scholarship.” If there isn’t much in your field (as there usually isn’t in game studies), you have to choose some from another field. Which explains why you might be hearing people going on about literary hypertexts, political theory, or psychoanalysis when it seems they really ought to be telling you about a game they played. It’s also, sadly, part of what they have to do to convince other academics that studying videogames is a worthwhile activity.
It was the entrenched poverty of communication in academia that made my time as a PhD student in Melbourne, Australia, very unhappy. At DAC 2003, I put forth the same tripe that seems to have been boring you for the last day or so. But I got tired of it, I spoke against it, and I tried to stop doing it. It earned me no love, but now I’m living in Japan, thousands of kilometres away from my university, I feel much more at home in my intellectual life. I can think more clearly about my PhD thesis when I don’t have to spend time with my colleagues.
Comment by Jess:
You demonstrate little learning in relation to how PhD theses are assessed. Your assertions that ‘These days, to get a doctorate in the humanities, you usually have to emulate your peers’ incomprehensible style’ is incorrect. PhD theses have to follow specific requirements, which include making arguments and meaning clearly understandable. A PhD thesis written in incomprehensible language will receive either a 4 or 5, requiring the candidate to make major changes to the thesis before resubmission, or in the case of a 5, prohibiting the candidate from resubmitting altogether. You support your proposition with no evidence. If you do have evidence, could you supply a list the studies you’ve read that demonstrate that humanities PhD candidates have to ‘emulate’ the style of humanities academics. Also could you cite the people (and the referencing from which you obtained this information) who have called the emulation of incomprehensible style as ‘being scholarly’?
Your proposition that ‘To get a doctorate, you also have to cite “previous scholarship”’ is correct. Knowledge of previous research and results, and the ability to analyze and identify the limitations of those results, are necessary to understand and develop specific knowledges and work within specific disciplines. Requiring candidates to complete a doctorate is one (limited) method to ensure that candidates demonstrate a minimum standard of scholarship. It also prevents candidates making up their own methodology.
Your proposition that ‘Academia has its own dialect’ is incorrect. There is no such thing as an ‘academic dialect’. If your statement is metaphoric, then it lacks the skill of proficient writing. Academic writing guides recommend that writers construct sentences that contain literal and concrete words. If you are talking about jargon, then jargon is perfectly legitimate; it’s evident in all academic disciplines and many non-academic institutions. Popular news publications even support the use of jargon (see The Bulletin July 23 2002).
Your statement that ‘academics aren’t, as a rule, forced to have much contact with the world outside academia’ is nonsensical. Some problems include:
1. Your use of general and abstract notions creates logical fallacies.
2. Why should academics be ‘forced’ to do something, especially to have contact with a completely abstract notion (‘the world outside academia’).
3. Firstly, what is this so-called outside world? Much research involves fieldwork, which involves direct contact with people and situations outside academic institutions. Finally, I don’t know of any academics who actually live in academic institutions 24 hours a day seven days a week.
4. You don’t support your statement with evidence. Could you cite the academic sources that support your argument.
Your proposition that ‘It’s incredibly destructive, because the more time academics spend with each other, reinforcing their curious use of language, the more they ensure no-one in the world at large will be interested in what they have to say’ is based on invalid reasoning.
1. If your proposition were true, for argument sake, why and how is it (incredibly) destructive?
2. You demonstrate very limited knowledge of academic research in the vastly varied areas of the humanities. Academics write in very different styles from one another and the majority of published academic writing in the humanities is clear and concise.
Your proposition that this ‘curious use of language’ is the result of ‘the emergence of literary modernism in the early 20th century’ is completely absurd. Firstly, there were numerous ‘experimental writers of prose’ before the modernist, for example the eighteenth century Laurence Stern and his ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’, which several critics have described as a forrunner to postmodernism. Secondly, academics’, or intellectuals’, writing styles were difficult before modernism. The writing of the sixteenth/seventeenth Thomas Hobbs ‘often verges on nonsensical’. Thirdly, critics (both conservative and Marxist) of contemporary ‘obscure’ language in academic writing, which certain intellectuals use for specific reasons, claim that this style of writing came to prominence in the 1960s, which saw the move to so-called textuality or the advent of postmodernism.
You base your assertion that ‘The experimental techniques of the literary modernists made their way into the academy, where they slowly infected almost all of the humanities, throughout the world’ on a false cause. In addition, could you list the academic studies you’ve read that demonstrate the ‘slow infection’ of ‘almost all of the humanities’ ‘throughout the world’.
Your statement that ‘If there isn’t much in your field (as there usually isn’t in game studies), you have to choose some from another field’ is incorrect. Firstly, there are volumes of research available in game theory. Secondly, one reason why there isn’t much research in relation to videogames is that both conservatives and Marxists consider videogames unimportant to the politics of life. Videogames, especially from a conservative political perspective, are nothing more than entertainment. It’s not academics, especially in the area of cultural studies, you have to convince that studying videogames is worthwhile; rather, you have to convince people from outside the academy, especially conservatives and Marxists. You’re lucky that you’ll complete your PhD before Brendan Nelson puts a stop to what he would describe as complete nonsense.
Using the logic that underlines your arguments, one could argue that the lowering of academic standards occurs when someone is allowed to complete a PhD on videogames, which is evident in your statement that calls for pure textual relativism: ‘they really ought to be telling you about a game they played’.
In the end, your arguments and propositions demonstrate the academic standards of a primary school student.
