The New Academic

(Drool.  Source.)

People would invest more in academia if people saw its value.

For the most of human history, historical artifacts and archives belonged to the rich and powerful. Today it's slightly better. I can walk into a natural history museum and look at prehistorical fossils, or extinct birds stuffed by taxidermists. But fossil are still sold like jackets on Rodeo Drive.

There were two valuable lessons that I learned from my classical Chinese class:

1) It's always tempting to impose your narrative about a subject, but be objective as possible or you lose truth.

2) Always know your source, or else anyone can impose their own narrative.

Science can recreate an experiment to examine if claims are true. If a word is smudged off a primary historical document, the word is lost to history, never to be seen again. Imagine if the word "people" was ripped out of the preamble of the US Constitution?

Data in the humanities is literally ink fading from old pieces of paper. It's inevitable that knowledge will be lost over time.

The internet is powerful enough store data through the ravages of time, but so far we've been poor at storing and disseminating academic work.

I don't want a PhD in the humanities because the process of getting one is prehistoric. For Chinese, I would have to study know English, Chinese and French/German. After 6 years of rigorous research, I would be in debt, unemployed knowing something that barely anyone can understand.

I don't want to belittle the work of graduate students. We need experts to be the gatekeepers of cultural knowledge, but this knowledge must be relevant to the public. The PhD in the humanities currently stores its knowledge in university libraries and locks academic work within paywalls. A person from the public can only access general factoids through Wikipedia and sift through disparate internet sources. There's no academic critique or analysis of cultural data that the public can ponder, and the general public has no medium to respond beyond the comment boards full of extremists and trolls.

I hope that the new generation of humanities PhD's finds a way to effectively distribute cultural data to everyone. I fear that if this doesn't happen, digital noise may drown the value of the humanities.

Until then I will keep blogging. Or as Haruki Murakami puts it:

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”