{"id":2374,"date":"2017-04-27T10:51:56","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T18:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2374"},"modified":"2017-11-08T21:42:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:42:57","slug":"scholars-shouldnt-read-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/04\/27\/scholars-shouldnt-read-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholars shouldn&#8217;t read the New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If Noam Chomsky had done nothing else, he would have given us one of the strongest\u00a0critique of the <em>New York Times<\/em> as the guarantor of\u00a0nationalist ideology\u00a0for the U.S.&#8217;s professional-managerial classes. But there&#8217;s another good reason to not read the\u00a0<em>Times<\/em> besides\u00a0its obvious ideological problems.\u00a0Namely: that it promotes an intellectual monoculture. Too many scholars and\u00a0academics read it to the exclusion of anything else.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve long had a memory of having seen this complaint\u00a0crop up in earlier decades, and I just stumbled back across its source in a 1969 paper by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Donald_T._Campbell\">Donald Campbell<\/a>\u00a0(in which he critiques the &#8220;ethnocentrism of disciplines&#8221; and advocates a &#8220;fish scale model of omniscience,&#8221; but that&#8217;s another story). Here&#8217;s Campbell critiquing the &#8220;scholarly ego ideal&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\">While on the theme of recreational reading and the duplication of fish scales, it seems appropriate to deplore the tendency of social scientists to feel that they all should read current newspapers, particularly the <i>New York Times<\/i>. Certainly the collective perspective would be better if most spent the equivalent time with newspapers of other epochs or with historical, anthropological, archaeological, or literary descriptions of quite other samples of social milieus. Rather than the ego ideal of keeping up with the current worldwide social developments, the young scholar should hold the ideal of foregoing current informedness for some infrequently sampled descriptive recreational literature. Too often our ego-ideals settle for uniform omniscience, knowledge of both past and present, of both here and there, and too often we settle for the same pattern of compromise all our colleagues are settling for. Compromise from the Leonardesque aspiration there must be, but even in leisure reading, one can hold as ideal the achieving of unique compromises.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=Ktx4AgAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PA3&amp;ots=d6_niNL9Qt&amp;lr&amp;pg=PA16#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\">Source\u00a0in Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If Noam Chomsky had done nothing else, he would have given us one of the strongest\u00a0critique of the New York Times as the guarantor of\u00a0nationalist ideology\u00a0for the U.S.&#8217;s professional-managerial classes. But there&#8217;s another good reason to not read the\u00a0Times besides\u00a0its obvious ideological problems.\u00a0Namely: that it promotes an intellectual monoculture. Too many scholars and\u00a0academics read it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[502,485,729],"tags":[778,597,777,738],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2374"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2500,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions\/2500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}