Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Academic corruption

While looking up the word credulity, Google directed me to the homepage of a professor of Religious Studies at a Catholic university. Religious Studies, ok?

Here is the prof's self-description:
As a professor, his primary goals for teaching are, first, to demonstrate to students that societies are never set up in ways that serve everyone's interests equally, and, second, to give them the skills to identify who benefits and who does not and how disproportionate social structures are legitimated and maintained.
Reminds me of the waves of liberal arts teachers who are supposed to teach English or History or Literature but whose real purpose is Leftist political indoctrination. Aside from the Victim Studies programs (Women, Queers, Chicano, Black, etc.) we have "Cultural Studies", all of which serve the same "post-modern" program of dismantling and pathologizing Western civilization. And all using, I might add, the same excruciating pomo jargon and writing style.

But this guy's "primary goals for teaching"...Religious Studies. It's just an excuse to rant.

That's what blogs are for, not classrooms.

==

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Religion was always an excuse to rant; why do you think only marginal cultures give it prominence? How many men with real options to do something with their lives choose to be clergy in the developed world?
Within fifty years, Mainline Protestantism will have clergy nearly as female-dominant as nursing and teaching and secretarial pools.

Anonymous said...

"As a professor, his primary goals for teaching are, first, to demonstrate to students that societies are never set up in ways that serve everyone's interests equally, and, second, to give them the skills to identify who benefits and who does not and how disproportionate social structures are legitimated and maintained."

This sounds like what has long been taught in the United States, except until the 1950s it was a positive lesson and after the 1950s it was a negative lesson. Before the 1950s they also knew things weren't equal and you needed to know how that system was maintained... they just knew that as something to be endured rather than magically wished away.

But, yes, as a primary goal for a religious studies professor, I knit my brow at this nonsense. Mark 14:7, anyone?

- The Bishop of Portland

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