Nonsense At The Academy

Saturday, August 8, 2026

Corrosives are funny things.  In some circumstances they can simply melt an entire structure.  In others they attack only a few molecules in the structural matrix, weakening the structure just enough to let other forces destroy it, even though the structure looks quite healthy from the outside.  We talked about hatred as a corrosive for our culture and our souls yesterday.  Watching this corrosive work its way through us right now is both fascinating and horrifying.  Let’s look at the latest.

Hasan Piker is an unquestionable hater in lover’s disguise.  But he is also as obvious as a coyote in sheep’s clothing.  Yeah, this is highly corrosive, but again, easily spotable.  We can defend against what we can see.  It’s what we can’t see that really worries me.

The scary kind of corrosion is what is happening in academia.  A place where most of us never bother to look because it is just a bunch of nerds being nerdy.  There was a big scandal this week at Cambridge where some guy was discovered to be a complete fraud.  In the post just linked, David Strom uses the scandal as a jumping off point to demonstrate, in a rather ranting fashion, that pretty much all of academia in certain fields is purely fraudulent.  He puts it rather graphicly:

And that’s saying something, since the field itself is nothing but gibberish. As is much of what passes for “scholarship” these days. Much of it is intellectual, and often enough descriptions of literal, physical onanism that a normal person might wonder how billions of dollars get poured into institutions that churn out scholars who write about their onanistic practices.

(Don’t worry, I had to look up that word too and it is too crude for me to define here.)  Sadly he is right.  The academy, which is supposed to first preserve knowledge, secondly pass that preserved knowledge on and finally, expand knowledge has long sense become a bunch of navel gazing and indulgence.

Nowhere is that more apparent to me than in this story.

Students at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, are required to complete a theology course that assigns a book interpreting the New Testament through themes including “racial justice,” “antiracist allyship,” and “cultural assimilation.”

WOW!, just WOW!  Long ago and far away I attended seminary for a while and had to study hermeneutics – (“the study of the methodological principles of interpretation (as of the Bible)”)  The first text in the study was “How to Read A Book” by Mortimer Adler.   Adler says the point of reading is to understand what the author is trying to tell you.  And yet here, at Mount St. Mary’s they are forcing students to take a course where an interpretation is brought to the text rather than trying to understand what the text is saying – it is the exact opposite of standard traditional scholarship.

The structure of academics seems quite sound.  Most colleges and universities are growing massively.  But if we look just a bit deeper the corrosion seems most evident.  How long before the structure collapses?

And now, what’s left in the pile

More of that corrosion born of hatred.

Iran’s military may be in shambles and not much of an external threat anymore, but they can still kill their own in large numbers.  They are evil and a scourge on the planet.  They need killin’.

It’s never about systems or organizations.  It is always about people.  That link suffers from a trumpian level of uncomfortable bluntness, but it is nonetheless full of truth.