Notes on The Vanishing Big Thinker in The Chronicle for Higher Education 7/28/2016
“The academic job market focuses ever more intently on contributions to scholarship over participation in public discussion.”
Focuses on humanistic social science as a way to be a public intellectual…”subject matter under study deals with what might be called the eternal questions faced by human beings and the worlds in which they live, such as wealth and poverty, good and evil, the individual and the collective, religion, power, leadership, war, and peace”.
Writing for the average person as opposed to engaging in scholarly publishing circuit.Little technical jargon, clarity in language. However this is not common in academia nor is it rewarded (along with teaching).
Highlights book The Academic Revolution (1968) by Reisman and Jencks which focused on “two emerging trends that were transforming the contemporary university: the rise of the meritocracy in faculty appointments and student admissions and the solidification of faculty control over what it taught and studied…the more America became a modern and cosmopolitan society, the authors argued, the greater the likelihood that the center of the university would lie with graduate schools and the research they produced.”
- Book unlikely to get published in today’s academic market – personal reflections, unsubstantiated (yet insightful) hypotheses, lack of graphs/charts, picked up by non-academic publisher
“The modern research university has become increasingly susceptible to the belief that there is only one correct form of knowledge.”
