Academics Out of Touch With Today's Society

The university atmosphere is suffering a serious problem. This is a problem that has always been around, but it seems to be getting somewhat worse. It is that academics are out of touch with today's society. I consider myself a black sheep in this world. Not necessarily shunned but an outsider none the less. I've tried to write this blog in a simple language so everyday people can understand it, but are not being patronized. This doesn't come out of any comments directed at me, but is rather a critical examination of what is seriously wrong with education today, using the political science field as an example.

Drooling Idiot Syndrome: Academics (including students) tend to classify people into two camps. Those who attend/have attended university and those who have not. They tend to view those who have not attended as being very simple people digging in the manure pile. That belief is about as true as saying Liberache was strait. I think everyday people aren't given enough credit for what they actually know. Many academics in the political field think they won't understand politics unless its given to them in a watered down format like the Daily Show. My conversations with many people ranging from labourers to business people shows that this belief is simply not true. People are listening and they do know the issues well enough to have an engaging debate. Stop treating them as if they have downs syndrome.

"I'm Better than You" Disorder: One of the greatest delusions with academics is their elitist ego. They view themselves as society's upper crust. You must pay attention to them because they are the future and they know EVERYTHING. Simply put, it's impossible to argue with an academic because they view you as the drooling idiot while they consider themselves god's gift to mankind. Even if you know they're speaking complete rubbish, they'll keep insisting that they know more than you. After all, they've studied it. We all know how valuable studies are. Of course, them being the elites, they naturally view themselves as the world's future leaders and the only logical choice for those positions. Never mind the fact that some of the greatest men and women in history were not university educated. In this sense, academics amount to nothing more than snobs and busy-bodies. All they do is look down their noses at others. This whole notion started way back in high school while those who were not good with intellectual work were treated differently. Unfortunately, the real world does not function that way. Many of these academics, if they do leave the ivory towers of universities, may find themselves working for these shunned students. Then what will they do?

Libraganda: Libraganda (pronounced Lib-rah-gan-duh) is a word I made up to describe all the liberal, left wing propaganda being constantly directed at us by these people. Universities have been dominated by left thinkers since the 1960s. That's nothing new. However, combined with the two above states of mind, this makes things particularly irritating. Anyone who holds different views is thought of as a drooling idiot. Since the academics are the elite and they are left wing, then their ideology must be the only ideology. For a group of people who pretend to be tolerant to any and all, they are surprisingly intolerant of those who think differently. They like to group people based on labels, rather than the kind of person they are. This doesn't seem quite right to me, and is certainly counter to their own supposed belief system. I suppose though when you're safely protected within the walls of your ivory tower, you don't have to think about these things.

Keeping Knowledge from the Masses: My favorite website has to be Wikipedia. Why? Well I can get all the news and information on any subject I want for free. It's completely written by unpaid volunteers who want to share their knowledge. However, the site has become controversial in one circle. Yep, you guessed it. Academics hate Wikipedia. Why? Well, they cite plagiarism and inaccuracies. One news clipping that's been posted on a bulletin board at the University of Toronto since November claims that there are 150 articles containing plagiarism on the English version of the online encyclopedia. That's roughly 0.009% of the 1,585,000 articles on the site. Wikipedia maintains strict quality standards so it's likely these articles didn't stay that way for long. However, the academics make this sound like a huge issue. I have found that Wikipedia lives up to its claims as being just as good as any commercially available print encyclopedia. In many cases, its better since it can provide more information and web links.
So why all the fuss? Academics don't hate Wikipedia because they think it's providing false information, they hate it because they think people should be paying them (the academics) for the same information. If academics truly do have a problem with inaccuracies on the site, they could always edit articles to fix them. They purposely want to keep this stuff out of reach of ordinary people, since if people could learn online, this would make the academics obsolete. Indeed its already starting to.

So what to do? Well you can't stop this. For students in or going to go to university, I recommend do your best not to fall into this trap. You will catch yourself falling into this mindset. I know I have, but I've resisted. You must do the same. Trust me. You'll be more successful in the real world.