People Who Can’t Understand The Written Word Probably Shouldn’t Be In Academia
Very strange words to have to write!
Recently on my podcast, I mentioned that I’ve noticed, with increasing frequency, that academics aren’t able to read and understand basic sentences.
The example I mentioned involved the historian David Austin Walsh, who, well, long story, but for our purposes, what matters is that he took a practice LSAT and was completely unable to understand the instructions.
In the section in question, Walsh was supposed to read passages and then answer multiple-choice questions about which conclusions they did or didn’t provide evidence for. I’m not saying this is easy, or that an academic who doesn’t do well on the LSAT is somehow unqualified — of course not! The LSAT is hard.
What I am saying is that for someone like David Austin Walsh, who has a PhD from Princeton University, to take this practice exam and come to the conclusion that the questions are “right-wing” to a “bonkers” extent, does suggest fairly significant deficits in his ability to read and understand arguments, and that these deficits do call into question his ability to do the work of an academic. He’s failing at a very simple task (again, not the test itself, but understanding the instructions).
Or take what happened to Michael Biggs recently. Biggs, you might recall if you read this newsletter often, is an Oxford professor of sociology who is a prolific and thoughtful critic of youth gender medicine.
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