Science Friction

Robert Storey from the January 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Gross and Levitt make several recommendations for remedying the current situation (all of which involve scientific professionals taking a more responsible role in monitoring educational agendas), but they give only glancing attention to the publish-or-perish ethos of contemporary academia. Everyone knows that the way you get to Harvard is much like the way you get to Carnegie Hall: Publish, publish, publish.

In the hard sciences, where "good" research is either replicable or has an obvious instrumental application, this isn't necessarily a problem. But particularly in fields such as literary studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, where agreed-upon standards of scholarship are elusive and heavily informed by personal political predilections, the incentive structure of today's universities rewards high-visibility publications over less-sensationalistic scholarship, typically without regard for accuracy. And since serious scientists, as Gross and Levitt confess, have been unaffected by almost all of the attacks on their disciplines (only the feminists have made any kind of impact, mainly by policing the halls of metaphor), it's unlikely they'll acquire much of a conscience about an iniquity that seems to lie well beyond their doors. The upshot is a situation that is indeed "dangerous"--and difficult to remedy.

Gross and Levitt have written an important book, albeit one likely to be ignored by the academic left itself. Anybody who describes the techniques of deconstruction as "hermeneutic hootchy-koo" is beneath the notice of the theoretically hip, and part of the left's strength is in the solidarity of its postmodern hipness. Still, to the degree that Higher Superstition exemplifies the informed scholarship that is the best antidote to "postmodern theory," Gross and Levitt contribute to the eventual discrediting of the academic left.