4.0513 Social Scientists, Humanists, and Funding (1/31)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 20 Sep 90 00:27:42 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0513. Thursday, 20 Sep 1990.
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 90 12:48 PDT
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: 4.0497 Humanists Anti-Intellectual; Humanists Mad
Dear Norman Miller: A phillipic is scarcely what I mean to produce,not
against social scientists, among whom I have far more intelligent and
good friends than among the Anguish Profs. Really. But there is a
habit of thought that is ignorant of Humanistic concerns, and it has
been cultivated in the US by the Behavioral psychologists and the
cliometric sociologists, who have perhaps a phobia to literature, and are
untrained in it, as much as some of us, myself, alas, are unable to
focus on quadratic equations and such. The whole culture is
anti-intellectual, and I am misrepresenting myself, a lover of poetry and
philosophy, if I give the impression that I am anti-sociological/
-intellectual, which attitude is what I spend a lot of time, in reviews
and teaching, excoriating. When it comes to the university however, I
have always been able to spot the psych building or the sosh building,
whenever I have been led around to give a poetry readi ng. Newest,
tallest, bestest. Our society seems to need sociologists and therapists
and reflexologists an awful lot. You can always tell the social
science majors from their writings in English. These are commonplaces.
The camel I alluded to what to do with priorities for funding. A close
friend laughed in my face 4 years ago: You'll never get networked,
you'll never get pc'd. We the pcs came along as agifts over 5 years,
charity, and thenetworking...a decade's fighting . Perhaps lit people
dont deserve such considerations, but it is not a question of pro- or
anti-inty, as I call our crowd. I will of course gladly stand for the
knuckle rapping, but my hyperbolic jesting has to be taken as the humor
of someone who hopes to pass for "serious." What I meant to convey was
merely that the budgets of our big and little outfits have to be
scrutinized, and when they are pie-graphed, the truth of our situation
and our status leaps up from the page. I would hope that my fellow
Humanists (History is a social science at UCLA ) would concur in this
rough estimate of our measurable plight? Kessler at UCLA