Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
. . . success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
In attempting to understand 911, the first question asked by the world's elites - as exemplified by leading media and academics - was, 'What did America do to provoke such hatred?' Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with 'What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans? Or 'What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?'
Academics were not a challenge when I was fifteen in college. The challenge was figuring out how to fit in socially.
It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed. " As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.
Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing.
It's quite scary when academics start dictating to artists that they should be politically correct or follow certain rules of behavior - which means we have to start making dishonest work, which means it becomes didactic and propaganda in nature.
It's so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs. We should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics.
Academics are, on average, pussies.
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
The science world has no such coherence, cohesion or cooperation. It's a bunch of academics who were raised on the idea of communication being a frivolous add-on.
I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.
Academics are not necessarily nice people.
You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.
Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.
I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.
Academics act like they are important, but when something is academic it is meaningless. People say, 'It's academic, now let's get work done.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
