> The Louks research is under embargo, so I can’t comment on what it actually does - but my gut feeling is that people are unimpressed because they recognise the underlying truth in its abstract - that your sense of smell overrides conscious thought to create profiles which are subconsciously linked to class, race and sex. (This is neither niche nor ‘woke’!!).
So... what's wrong with writing a thesis on that concept in literature? Literature often explores ideas and themes that people widely recognise as true. This isn't generally considered a problem, or something unworthy of exploration.
> I’ve read some of the books mentioned in the abstract and think her specific observations were already overt
Am I misunderstanding, or did you say right above this that you were only able to read the abstract? How do you know what her "specific observations" were?
In any case, I highly doubt that the ways in which "smell can be used to indicate class antipathies" in in Orwell, Sinclair and Bong, or the "utopic thinking [...] that presents smell as fundamentally non-human" in various texts, is anywhere nearly so perfectly obvious to every reader as to be unworthy of exploration and comment. I even more strongly doubt that you can justifiably conclude as much, on the basis merely of having "read some of the books mentioned in the abstract".
You even say that you would be "really impressed if she managed to pick things out that were hidden to the common reader in that impossibly wide variety of texts, or to situate the texts themselves within a historical framework that somehow related to smell". So given that that's pretty much explicitly what she is trying to do, and you admit that the paper itself is "under embargo, so [you] can't comment on what it actually does"... why are you calling it an "an Emperor's New Clothes moment [...] literally just a vehicle for a series of sociopolitical truisms that are already the institutional status quo"? Why are you placing it in the context of academic attempts "to shoehorn 2014 politics into past work rather than actually discovering or doing anything interesting", and scholars who "dedicate a week each to the completely obvious overlaps of your subject with queerness or disability or feminism, and rejoice in the completely obvious readings and Google Scholar keywords that come up after a quick search?" In other words, why are you making up inflammatory bullshit about a paper you literally have not read, except perhaps to foment outrage and generate engagement? Why not wait to actually read it, and see if you're impressed?
And yet, this is the nonetheless the closest I've encountered to a reasonable argument for the prosecution.
And that only strengthens my belief that this controversy, such as it is, is simply what you strenuously insist it is not: people getting annoyed with academic jargon and the language of social justice. Especially so here, to answer one of your framing questions, where those things are combined with the topic of smell in literature, which seems sort of fluffy and trivial to most people and therefore perfectly designed to inflame people's grievances with and prejudices about the humanities generally.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this as a thesis in English literature, as far as I can tell, even if it's not the most interesting topic to me personally. And the fact that the very idea of it has inspired 2,000 (very well-written) words about how humanities degrees are "virtually interchangeable" frivolities where "structural oppression in its various forms *is* the degree", without even having read the paper in question... well, yes, it is anti-intellectualism, really.
I don't usually weigh in on public discourse like this, but I really feel like I want to speak up on this one.
I’m in the same PhD cohort as Dr. Louks, at the same college, in the same uni, in the same subject (School of Literature – although I’m an art historian). She is a personal friend, and one of the hardest-working, most impressive, most conscientious PhD students I’ve ever met. Her knowledge is deep, insightful, and high-level. Very different from what I do, so I couldn’t even begin to purport to speak on her research. And, from what I can understand, nor should you, because you haven’t read it! Remember: thesis abstracts are only the most basic of basic summaries, synthesising 80,000 words into one page.
What I can tell you is that Dr. Louks passed her PhD WITHOUT CORRECTIONS. Which means that her research absolutely DID contribute original knowledge to her discipline, and did so in such a professional way that her examiners didn’t have any substantial criticism. Wow!
The only thing I really want to point out here is that a PhD is actually just an exercise in learning how to put together a large academic project. It does not need to change the world, nor is it designed to be scrutinised by lots of people. It can be about literally anything — whether or not you (reader) personally find it interesting, or whether the sources are niche, that’s not important.
Instead, it is a long, gruelling process of coming up with and refining an argument. At the end, you then have to sit a viva voce to justify your methodology. Dr. Louks’ methodology is clearly critical and political theory focused (as opposed to, like, historical, archival, or formalist). Where’s the issue?
With respect, what kind of argument is "she's my friend and she worked really really hard on it and her supervisors loved it and also she's such a nice person"?
You aren't actually making a case for the academic value of her research. You're just making people feel bad for not thinking highly of her PhD.
And after a decade of woke I'm dead tired of 'why do you have to be meeeaan, just agree with me :(' being used as a discursive weapon.
My Argument is simply that a PhD is a scholarly process. It is a training program to BECOME an academic. Ally executed hers really well, which sets her up brilliantly for a great and impactful career.
Look, I'm sure she's nice and hard-working and deserves happiness. But I'm not holding my breath (pun intended) on her writing something original in the future. I'm in academia. I know too many people like this. They're comfortable in their ideological frame and don't produce anything that deviates from it. They're more like priests than scientists.
Maybe your friend will prove me wrong - you're right about one thing, she has definitely set herself up for an impactful career in terms of public outreach. It'd be nice if I was wrong.
As someone with fancy pieces of paper from fancy schools, including a doctorate, in the humanities, I think you need to think inductively, even when the conclusion is painful. “This scholar’s work seems ridiculous, but logically it follows it must be serious because this institution and this field both signed off on it, therefore…” And then you have two options--either your initial intuition was wrong and you logicked your way out of it, or you say: “My logic was bad, and this institution and field must be much more unserious than I initially thought.” The latter requires a deep and disturbing correction.
Thanks for your comment! I think part of what makes the PhD process interesting is that it’s more about the scholarly method than the topic itself - so, theoretically, it could be about something that seems ridiculous and still be valid if it's been executed well. That said, I don’t think Dr. Louks' project falls into the ridiculous category at all.
And for the record, no fancy pieces of paper for me yet - still waiting to sit my viva!
I really can't agree that a process that ends in silly outcomes isn't necessarily a silly process--but my guess is that this is too fundamental a disagreement for the comments section.
I don't know - I think a successful doctoral student might go on to produce some revolutionary projects, even if you think their topic is silly. A PhD is just the start of a career :)
I have no ill will towards Dr. Louks, but the question her story provokes is, ‘is this really how we want graduate education to be structured?’
The view of academics, when confronted with the claim that their research doesn't intersect with anything in the real world or provide things of value to normal human beings, seems to be the condescending take that you just lack understanding, and we aren't going to take your views into account.
This position does not seem to be financially sustainable in an aging society, and I welcome a debate on what academic research should prioritize more highly than ‘you must do something no one else has done before, no matter how esoteric it is.’
I’m far more concerned about the structure of school and undergraduate education. In general, I think we (society) should just get out of the way of postgraduate research and let them get on with it.
> They are angry because its abstract reveals that it is literally just a vehicle for a series of sociopolitical truisms that are already the institutional status quo, and have been for over forty years.
> And these theories of structural oppression and difference are not difficult to understand. I got it when I was a teenage girl on Tumblr in 2014 (remember the all-caps Arial infographics about ‘intersectionality’?), and so did many of my friends, who eventually became sick of it and then began to populate the Dirtbag Left, a group now sliding quickly and cynically to the right. Their simplicity helps explain why they’ve grown so popular on underfunded university courses - if you’re stuck for ideas on module content, why not dedicate a week each to the completely obvious overlaps of your subject with queerness or disability or feminism, and rejoice in the completely obvious readings and Google Scholar keywords that come up after a quick search?
From the abstract, Louks contributed what appears to be another application of the dominant discourse within humanities. That it is 'critical' reveals nothing when that is what is dominant. Have you tried to pursue research methodologies and aims that actively oppose this discourse?
Ella also states this:
> I hope it is actually insightful in some way and that the abstract was just unusually boring.
I don't believe it's constructive to call critics morons, but I do agree with you Tony that people really do misunderstand what a PhD is for, and what it's like to write one.
I think I'm a bit confused and I'd really love to have a dialogue on this to clear things up for me a bit. I agree with several points you made, particularly on how so many words are being beaten to a pulp in academia.
> "...but instead of exposed bulbs and weathered wooden stools you get the shared doctrine of Foucault and Butler and Said and Crenshawe et al. They are telling you the same things you already get from diversity training and feminist-lite social media, just in multisyllabic words."
I'm a bit confused by the point you're making here. Foucault, Butler, Said (these I can speak for from experience)—are they not important to read first hand? Yes, you learn the same concepts in diversity training (where do you think diversity training got the concepts from? Foucault, Butler, Said...), but isn't it important to learn from the source material in order to develop your own thoughts and opinions on their work and ideas?
I relate to you—I grew up on Tumblr. I'm intimately familiar with feminism in all of it's waves. I've read all of the infographics. Recently, I read De Beauvoir for an Anthropological Theory class feeling that everything she said was obvious, but understanding that I think it's so obvious now because she wrote it. When I got to class, I was extremely surprised to find that I was the only person who had anything to say about the reading, and when asking my (intelligent!) friends what they thought about what we read, they told me that they had trouble understanding what she was talking about. I think you're wrongfully assuming (as I often do) that everybody has the same experiences as you. They do not. People outside of your circle have not been inundated with infographics explaining terms that are taught in undergraduate classes.
>"...the study of structural oppression in its various forms is the degree, and primary texts and historical context and linguistic and subject knowledge become ‘nice-to-haves.’"
Again, something that confused me. In talking to a professor, she explained to me that she uses these kinds of theories to make the class more applicable to the students (it was a Greek Art and Archaeology class where we briefly talked about decolonization). In another class we discussed Said to understand the basis of Orientalism so that we could read things that built on it (Nuclear Orientalism, if you were interested). Yes, we discuss structural oppression in these classes, but in ways that are relevant. And if I'm being honest, I can't think of a time where it would be irrelevant, especially in humanities, especially in the UK. I'm aware of my country's colonial atrocities because we discuss them in our classes. Is this not what is being discussed in yours?
I'm Canadian, so I don't have a full grasp of the UK humanities undergrad experience. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that both countries' universities are going through similar budget cuts, which in turn have an effect on how syllabi are created.
And, unfortunately, I have to disagree with your thesis as a whole. It is an anti-intellectual problem. I don't know anything about you, but given what you mentioned in the essay, I'm presuming that you're not in school right now. I'm in the final year of my undergrad, and I see a huge anti-intellectual problem in both the students and in the university admin. Through the students it's apathy—AI is reading their readings and writing their papers. I was in an upper year class of ~50 people this semester, and by one month in it was the same 20 people showing up. Professors have a difficult time facilitating discussion because of this and aren't getting help from administration. Admin wants to switch to a "customer-based" approach, meaning humanities programs are being put on the chopping block. There is a massive anti-intellectual wave driven by greed.
Like I said, I think I was a bit confused and would like clarification. I tried not to repeat anything that was mentioned in other comments. I think I'm just wondering who you're angry at? Is it academia as a whole? Humanities? People who think they're saying profound things but actually aren't? Pretentious people? Funded PhD students? Dr. Louks? All of the above? I understand being angry at any of these, but I think they all require further inspection. Like, okay, the enemy is academia, yes. Who in academia? The older generations who refuse to retire, the same ones taking on these PhD students who you say don't produce anything of worth? Or is it the administration, who requires departments to increase the amount of grad students they take on in order to increase the university's prestige?
Again, I would love to have a dialogue about this as I genuinely want to understand where you're coming from with this.
> Again, something that confused me. In talking to a professor, she explained to me that she uses these kinds of theories to make the class more applicable to the students (it was a Greek Art and Archaeology class where we briefly talked about decolonization). In another class we discussed Said to understand the basis of Orientalism so that we could read things that built on it (Nuclear Orientalism, if you were interested). Yes, we discuss structural oppression in these classes, but in ways that are relevant. And if I'm being honest, I can't think of a time where it would be irrelevant, especially in humanities, especially in the UK. I'm aware of my country's colonial atrocities because we discuss them in our classes. Is this not what is being discussed in yours?
Have you read any responses to Said noting that his attitude to the west is the same as that which he states was western attitudes to the east? Do you know that slave-owning First-nations in Canada justified slavery through polygenism? Or how the Lakota conquered the Black Hills?
What about how the Inca Mitma, or Assyrian resettlement policy?
Have you read any rebuttals to the idea of structural oppression? What is the social impact within academia of supporting vs disputing that construct?
I think the easiest way for me to respond is to go question by question. I do want to note, however, that the thesis of my response was regarding anti-intellectualism, which was literally the title of OP's essay.
1. No I have not. Can you please provide me with some resources? I would love to read them. However, what I have read of Said (which is very little, I will admit!) allowed me to understand what I needed for the base concept of Orientalism and the West's view of the East. But I do know people who repeat similar rhetoric and fall into what you are describing, which is pasting the same attitudes onto the West as the East. I truly would love to read more about this if you can send me something.
2. No I did not. Would you mind providing resources? I was not able to find very much on this. To my knowledge, slavery based in polygenism was extremely popular in Europe (et al) due to the idea of an 'original sin' and that races are on a sort of hierarchy. I'm an anthropology major and I'm well aware of my discipline's extremely problematic history :). If you'd want to read racist nonsense on this, I'd direct you to Henry Lewis Morgan. However, in a surface-level google search, I was not able to find specifically what you were referring to, but I was able to find references of peoples in the Pacific Northwest owning slaves.
3/4. These, like the above point, are very interesting and I did not know about these. However, I am wondering why exactly you brought these up. Is it to counter something I said about decolonization as a sort of 'gotcha'? Yes, these cultures participated in their own kind of colonization. Yes, I believe it should be talked about. However, priority should be placed on the colonization that is actively effecting people today. If you disagree with this, I would love to know why. I do believe, though, that learning about colonization in other times and areas is very important. It helps to understand cultures that may have been oppressed in the past. Also, if you wanted to mention colonizing powers that aren't considered a part of the 'West', why not mention China and Japan's atrocities against Korea? I'm genuinely curious.
5. No, I have not. Would you mind providing resources? I feel that it is unfair to bring up a topic that you presume I don't know about and not explain it any further than mentioning the broad concept. Asking me if I have read something and not providing the names of authors or papers is not productive for either of us. This goes for all of your other questions. You may or may not have intended to come off as hostile, but the way you have worded your responses feel that way.
6. I do not know the social impact, Conner. I am an undergraduate. I do not even know if I fully understand the question. There would likely have to be a study or survey done. Maybe there is already a study! I don't know! If you're asking for my opinion, I believe that everything in academia should be disputed to a point—it is an institution after all. However, as I stated in my response to OP, I believe classes should provide an unbiased basis of theory (granted the discipline is related in some way) to allow students to develop in their academic or professional journeys. It should help them to establish a basis of knowledge so that they know what they agree and disagree with. Clearly you disagree with some things, and have done further research as to WHY and HOW you disagree with, as well as WHO. So, it seems this basis of knowledge is doing its job.
I would have loved to know your own opinion on these topics, rather than you asking me questions :)
I enjoyed this essay. Laypeople surely should be able to criticize scholarship if it's thin or poorly considered or badly argued or whatever, and I don't think they should be imperiously commanded to bend the knee and profess the value of a piece of writing just because it's a PhD thesis from a brand-name school. It's very possible that the thesis is bad! But none of us really know because we haven't read it; maybe the author wrote the abstract in a great hurry and it doesn't reflect the quality of the dissertation itself; maybe some of the jargon was put in there to please a committee member or to make the dissertation suitable for a grant application; etc., etc...
At the same time, there were plenty of comments in response to this thesis--setting aside the plainly repugnant ones--suggesting not only that this particular thesis was bad but that its badness is just one more piece of evidence proving that literature is fundamentally not worth studying. The sense I get is that many of these comment writers would also see as similarly nonsensical and worthless the kinds of research that you describe as desirable. This attitude strikes me as actually anti-intellectual. (And dismissing the quality of a work without having read it is not exactly anti-intellectual, I suppose, but it is intellectually careless.)
Finishing my masters in English. I can never quite articulate to people that half of English scholarship will show you some profound connection, and half is connecting dots just because it can. You're getting at some of the reasons here
This entire piece has a deep disdain for any anthropological, sociological, or political creativity. It’s reactionary and the fact that you don’t see yourself trying to spin academic conservatism back into the zeitgeist without any contextual explanation of the fact that you are doing politics in this piece whilst also critiquing politics in academia is telling to who you are worthy of studying and what you think can be tossed aside as “tangential”w That plus your acceptance of “woke” as a valid descriptor rather than the weird dog whistle it manifests as is …definitely a choice. And to act as if “woke” humanities is somehow an unjust and unproductive pursuit unless it is groundbreaking work —yet the point of academia is to create a groundswell of work that is thorough, curious, and yes—repetitive. Iteration is an important academic process. Even intersectionality as a concept is rather young and if you’re sick of hearing about it —that’s too fucking bad —but it doesn’t mean that the subject is anywhere near exhausted just because you’re exhausted with it.
I see the point you’re trying to make about actually connecting to the literature and source material before using it as the landscape for your sociopolitical analysis. Yet, that’s exactly what you’ve done here and you’ve managed to say uninteresting nothings in the process. Congrats!
1. The tradition to which Ally Louks belongs is quite good at not just theological capture, but also getting its natural target demographic to fall in line. How did you avoid such capture, given the fact that you're a prime candidate for its ranks? You allude to it in the bit about how you encountered this phenomenon as a teenager on Tumblr, I'd love to read more. Not that there necessarily needs to be some story, could well be that you were just too smart
2. Among your friends and in your circles, how heterodox is the view you've articulated here?
I did *feel* an inclination towards reflexive niceness after I saw the death/rape threats. And more broadly, while I am happy to deny this kind of humanities dissertation any claim to being truth-seeking academic work, I'm not opposed to it existing. Academia as a leisure class recreational pursuit is fine, maybe even good, as long as the taxpayer isn't billed for it.
1. I don’t think it IS that good at getting its target demo in line - it’s different in academia where there are presentations and job incentives, but on Tumblr it worked via. repetitive slogans, cancellations, and callouts - all of which infuriate people who fall onto the wrong side for whatever reason. I honestly think 70(ish)% of it is just aesthetics - I had brushes with various dissident feminist parts of Tumblr in my teens via algorithms/mutual followers + it’s funny how quickly young women feel able to totally disown their past beliefs when something feels more convincing to them, as long as it’s couched in the same pink pastel visual schema/non-threatening writing style as the rest of the website.
That is probably a major factor in the popularity of the ‘dirtbag left’ among my demographic (early 20s, mostly liberal arts-educated women) - the early stars were the Red Scare podcast hosts, who criticised ‘bodies and spaces’ academia and parts of Me Too, but are young, attractive, well-read, fashion-forward, have very refined cultural tastes and lots of high-profile friends in the arts etc. They’ve fallen out of favour recently but were lifestyle icons for loads of girls. It’s part ‘the cutting edge in New York are saying this in an ironic way so I can too,‘ part ‘maybe I can say what I’m actually thinking and still have a dream life, like theirs…‘. It seems like there’s been a sudden cultural change after the Trump win, but I think they kickstarted a gradual turn against the prototypical Tumblr thought model from 2018-ish on
2. I’ve graduated and currently work with a company who organise public debates with a libertarian/contrarian bent, so my current circle are basically aligned with if not to the right of me (they are reposting this article for their newsletter at some point). The university I went to is famous for being politically radical + has been for ages, but there’s a cultural split between their more traditionally-intensive Asian language degrees and stuff like IR, history, law, postcolonial studies, etc. My coursemates are generally casually on the left (as am I) but many (not all) reacted negatively to our degree reforms and I think they worsened opinions of the faculty in general.
...negatively to our degree reforms and I think they worsened opinions of the faculty in general.
+ I've noticed international students (mostly from developing countries) tend to be way more 'into' stuff like queer and postcolonial theory than home students, especially compared to around 2019-2020 on the same campus... multiple theories as to why. Perhaps credentialism and heightened awareness of a rat race for jobs afterwards
Fascinated by the remark about the power of pastel aesthetics and affect. Someone more sympathetic than me to the Louise Perry/Mary Harrington types should tell them to employ some fresh lit grads who know the hexcode for French Fuchsia immediately.
When I was getting started with postgraduate research I used to fulminate a lot about the grievance studies wing of academia. Look how they steal and preen about in the vestments of worthier office, how they tar and taint the noble vocation of truth-seeking! But I've mellowed out; I now find it kind of funny, and also, I think you can't have such a nice castle and act precious about the fact that some scoundrels might want to connive their way inside it -- it would be surprising if there weren't any word salad grifters scurrying about building nests. What's necessary is some good-humoured population control.
I would not have suspected international students being more into World Salad Theory than locals. I wonder if it's a SOAS-specific thing? I did my first two degrees at King's and the international students were the Chinese or clearly-pretty-affluent crypto-right-wing continental Europeans.
People are outraged about “woke” humanities, but it’s really just a mechanical system of production i.e. capitalism. Here’s a big bucket of jargon-y words, grab a handful and place it on the dissertation conveyer belt. I don’t think this incident says anything at all about the inherent value of such words and concepts. Foucault at least put them together in a meaningful way. It’s not his fault that concepts he and other actual thinkers came up with have been turned into a bucket of slop for the humanities academic industrial complex. The real question we should be asking is, what does the slop PhD actually signify, what purpose does it actually serve in the network of institutions in modern society? Does it just signal your slop-processing capabilities which is useful for NGOs or wherever humanities majors are employed? Does it signal the attitudes of humanities professors who are resentful of a world dominated by capitalist value production, so they shove their students out there equipped with the exact opposite skills of what they need? Or is a humanities degree simply a luxury good to adorn the walls of the economically comfortable, to signal how much they care? We could be asking deeper questions, that’s my only point.
My issue isn’t with jargon itself, it’s with the fact that the jargon is being used as a smokescreen for scattered, simplistic and dated thinking about art - that’s what people are able to see through and why they are so angry. The Louks abstract clearly does mean something, just not at a level of originality/complexity/rigour one would ordinarily associate with PhD-level study (purporting to ‘trace olfactory prejudice’ through literally 15 mostly-unconnected works by wildly different authors over 90ish years and not via a focused corpus is MAD, for starters. The latter would have been really interesting).
Writers need to develop and define specialist terms to create granular arguments - this requires extra literature and a (sometimes-)necessary split with the general populace. If you are writing about smell, then ‘olfactory’ is undoubtedly a useful word - ‘affective,’ ‘reflexivity,’ and ‘sublimation’ are also useful in that specific mode of literary studies. I just don’t want these words to exist as pure shibboleths, made to catch people out as unsuitable for ‘genteel’ academia (as appears to be the case on Twitter) - I’d like a bridge of mutual understanding to exist between cultural studies PhDs and the general population.
I brought up the other Cambridge PhDs because I want people to get that there still is some really good work happening in that sphere with meaningful implications for art and cognition - it isn’t a ‘mechanical system of production.’ Those abstracts use ‘jargon’ but also clearly test their theories, and come to conclusions (after years of work) that might be unreachable to eg. a layperson with an Atlantic subscription who has read Lolita for fun
It should not be completely transparent to the general populace that you are invoking words and concepts in a formulaic manner to reach a trite and entirely expected conclusion. The issue is not that the abstract is meaningless, it’s that it is far too obvious, not Phd level as you say. The fancy words are there to conceal the lack of original thought. To me, as an economics major who works in tech, this appears as a mechanical system of production. You have a series of inputs and outputs, not unlike an AI neural network. This kind of abstract is not far from what I would expect AI to create, which because it only has the most superficial “understanding” it can only generate the semblance of depth. Even someone in the general public who has actual read a single work of genuine literature can spot the difference between actual insight and pure slop, and this is a case of the latter. Again not that it is meaningless, slop is not necessarily meaningless. But it is entirely superficial and formulaic. It’s the kind of thing that can be easily reproduced by AI.
What people seem to be missing is the fact that rigorous academic scholarship is about arguments, not conclusions. It's about how things work. Does diversity training do that?
"Gender is a social construct"—how? "Social norms"—how? What makes great thinkers great has always been the process of figuring out why their conclusions may be right. Anybody can come up with a free-floating thesis. Neither are these theses difficult to understand, as you rightly point out. Class struggle, exploitation, iron law of wages, blah blah blah. We all "know" it. But it takes at least a few weeks to be able to explain Marx's entire system from the ground up. It'll take a lifetime to read through the rest of the literature discussing all the places Marx went wrong.
Maybe it's high quality work being turned into sociopolitical truisms that is the problem here.
From what I see, people are angry that our academics aren't producing novel, thought-provoking conclusions. It's all oppression, oppression, oppression. But surely we can agree that oppression—or let's use a more neutral term, power—is an incredibly complex phenomenon which can be explored in so many ways? If a random PhD candidate wants to investigate the underlying dynamics between smell and power, it seems really disingenuous to mock it saying "haha no shit smell and power are linked in some ways". In what ways??
"If you express any antipathy towards this sort of research, people who are still deep in humanities academia will assume that you are simply too ignorant to understand it. This air of condescension always makes matters worse - and it makes academics seem terribly naive." I think this line is really spot-on in terms of what's frustrating about academia to a lot of people outside of it. It's one thing if you're saying something new and another if you're just saying what everyone already knows in language that's harder to decipher.
I honestly think the issues with academia start from primary/secondary education when so much focus is on getting the "right" answer—people don't see intelligence as relating to coming up with something new but rather being able to say what's already been said in a way that's hard to comprehend.
> The Louks research is under embargo, so I can’t comment on what it actually does - but my gut feeling is that people are unimpressed because they recognise the underlying truth in its abstract - that your sense of smell overrides conscious thought to create profiles which are subconsciously linked to class, race and sex. (This is neither niche nor ‘woke’!!).
So... what's wrong with writing a thesis on that concept in literature? Literature often explores ideas and themes that people widely recognise as true. This isn't generally considered a problem, or something unworthy of exploration.
> I’ve read some of the books mentioned in the abstract and think her specific observations were already overt
Am I misunderstanding, or did you say right above this that you were only able to read the abstract? How do you know what her "specific observations" were?
In any case, I highly doubt that the ways in which "smell can be used to indicate class antipathies" in in Orwell, Sinclair and Bong, or the "utopic thinking [...] that presents smell as fundamentally non-human" in various texts, is anywhere nearly so perfectly obvious to every reader as to be unworthy of exploration and comment. I even more strongly doubt that you can justifiably conclude as much, on the basis merely of having "read some of the books mentioned in the abstract".
You even say that you would be "really impressed if she managed to pick things out that were hidden to the common reader in that impossibly wide variety of texts, or to situate the texts themselves within a historical framework that somehow related to smell". So given that that's pretty much explicitly what she is trying to do, and you admit that the paper itself is "under embargo, so [you] can't comment on what it actually does"... why are you calling it an "an Emperor's New Clothes moment [...] literally just a vehicle for a series of sociopolitical truisms that are already the institutional status quo"? Why are you placing it in the context of academic attempts "to shoehorn 2014 politics into past work rather than actually discovering or doing anything interesting", and scholars who "dedicate a week each to the completely obvious overlaps of your subject with queerness or disability or feminism, and rejoice in the completely obvious readings and Google Scholar keywords that come up after a quick search?" In other words, why are you making up inflammatory bullshit about a paper you literally have not read, except perhaps to foment outrage and generate engagement? Why not wait to actually read it, and see if you're impressed?
And yet, this is the nonetheless the closest I've encountered to a reasonable argument for the prosecution.
And that only strengthens my belief that this controversy, such as it is, is simply what you strenuously insist it is not: people getting annoyed with academic jargon and the language of social justice. Especially so here, to answer one of your framing questions, where those things are combined with the topic of smell in literature, which seems sort of fluffy and trivial to most people and therefore perfectly designed to inflame people's grievances with and prejudices about the humanities generally.
There's nothing particularly wrong with this as a thesis in English literature, as far as I can tell, even if it's not the most interesting topic to me personally. And the fact that the very idea of it has inspired 2,000 (very well-written) words about how humanities degrees are "virtually interchangeable" frivolities where "structural oppression in its various forms *is* the degree", without even having read the paper in question... well, yes, it is anti-intellectualism, really.
absolutely spot on
I love you , wish I could repost a comment, my exact thoughts reading this
Thanks, I love you too x
amen to this
I don't usually weigh in on public discourse like this, but I really feel like I want to speak up on this one.
I’m in the same PhD cohort as Dr. Louks, at the same college, in the same uni, in the same subject (School of Literature – although I’m an art historian). She is a personal friend, and one of the hardest-working, most impressive, most conscientious PhD students I’ve ever met. Her knowledge is deep, insightful, and high-level. Very different from what I do, so I couldn’t even begin to purport to speak on her research. And, from what I can understand, nor should you, because you haven’t read it! Remember: thesis abstracts are only the most basic of basic summaries, synthesising 80,000 words into one page.
What I can tell you is that Dr. Louks passed her PhD WITHOUT CORRECTIONS. Which means that her research absolutely DID contribute original knowledge to her discipline, and did so in such a professional way that her examiners didn’t have any substantial criticism. Wow!
The only thing I really want to point out here is that a PhD is actually just an exercise in learning how to put together a large academic project. It does not need to change the world, nor is it designed to be scrutinised by lots of people. It can be about literally anything — whether or not you (reader) personally find it interesting, or whether the sources are niche, that’s not important.
Instead, it is a long, gruelling process of coming up with and refining an argument. At the end, you then have to sit a viva voce to justify your methodology. Dr. Louks’ methodology is clearly critical and political theory focused (as opposed to, like, historical, archival, or formalist). Where’s the issue?
With respect, what kind of argument is "she's my friend and she worked really really hard on it and her supervisors loved it and also she's such a nice person"?
You aren't actually making a case for the academic value of her research. You're just making people feel bad for not thinking highly of her PhD.
And after a decade of woke I'm dead tired of 'why do you have to be meeeaan, just agree with me :(' being used as a discursive weapon.
My Argument is simply that a PhD is a scholarly process. It is a training program to BECOME an academic. Ally executed hers really well, which sets her up brilliantly for a great and impactful career.
Look, I'm sure she's nice and hard-working and deserves happiness. But I'm not holding my breath (pun intended) on her writing something original in the future. I'm in academia. I know too many people like this. They're comfortable in their ideological frame and don't produce anything that deviates from it. They're more like priests than scientists.
Maybe your friend will prove me wrong - you're right about one thing, she has definitely set herself up for an impactful career in terms of public outreach. It'd be nice if I was wrong.
Well, if her work ethic is anything to go by — I’m pretty confident she’s gonna make a big impact 🙌
As someone with fancy pieces of paper from fancy schools, including a doctorate, in the humanities, I think you need to think inductively, even when the conclusion is painful. “This scholar’s work seems ridiculous, but logically it follows it must be serious because this institution and this field both signed off on it, therefore…” And then you have two options--either your initial intuition was wrong and you logicked your way out of it, or you say: “My logic was bad, and this institution and field must be much more unserious than I initially thought.” The latter requires a deep and disturbing correction.
Thanks for your comment! I think part of what makes the PhD process interesting is that it’s more about the scholarly method than the topic itself - so, theoretically, it could be about something that seems ridiculous and still be valid if it's been executed well. That said, I don’t think Dr. Louks' project falls into the ridiculous category at all.
And for the record, no fancy pieces of paper for me yet - still waiting to sit my viva!
I really can't agree that a process that ends in silly outcomes isn't necessarily a silly process--but my guess is that this is too fundamental a disagreement for the comments section.
I don't know - I think a successful doctoral student might go on to produce some revolutionary projects, even if you think their topic is silly. A PhD is just the start of a career :)
I have no ill will towards Dr. Louks, but the question her story provokes is, ‘is this really how we want graduate education to be structured?’
The view of academics, when confronted with the claim that their research doesn't intersect with anything in the real world or provide things of value to normal human beings, seems to be the condescending take that you just lack understanding, and we aren't going to take your views into account.
This position does not seem to be financially sustainable in an aging society, and I welcome a debate on what academic research should prioritize more highly than ‘you must do something no one else has done before, no matter how esoteric it is.’
I’m far more concerned about the structure of school and undergraduate education. In general, I think we (society) should just get out of the way of postgraduate research and let them get on with it.
Perhaps re-read some of Ella's statements
> They are angry because its abstract reveals that it is literally just a vehicle for a series of sociopolitical truisms that are already the institutional status quo, and have been for over forty years.
> And these theories of structural oppression and difference are not difficult to understand. I got it when I was a teenage girl on Tumblr in 2014 (remember the all-caps Arial infographics about ‘intersectionality’?), and so did many of my friends, who eventually became sick of it and then began to populate the Dirtbag Left, a group now sliding quickly and cynically to the right. Their simplicity helps explain why they’ve grown so popular on underfunded university courses - if you’re stuck for ideas on module content, why not dedicate a week each to the completely obvious overlaps of your subject with queerness or disability or feminism, and rejoice in the completely obvious readings and Google Scholar keywords that come up after a quick search?
From the abstract, Louks contributed what appears to be another application of the dominant discourse within humanities. That it is 'critical' reveals nothing when that is what is dominant. Have you tried to pursue research methodologies and aims that actively oppose this discourse?
Ella also states this:
> I hope it is actually insightful in some way and that the abstract was just unusually boring.
I don't believe it's constructive to call critics morons, but I do agree with you Tony that people really do misunderstand what a PhD is for, and what it's like to write one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103116305509
I think I'm a bit confused and I'd really love to have a dialogue on this to clear things up for me a bit. I agree with several points you made, particularly on how so many words are being beaten to a pulp in academia.
> "...but instead of exposed bulbs and weathered wooden stools you get the shared doctrine of Foucault and Butler and Said and Crenshawe et al. They are telling you the same things you already get from diversity training and feminist-lite social media, just in multisyllabic words."
I'm a bit confused by the point you're making here. Foucault, Butler, Said (these I can speak for from experience)—are they not important to read first hand? Yes, you learn the same concepts in diversity training (where do you think diversity training got the concepts from? Foucault, Butler, Said...), but isn't it important to learn from the source material in order to develop your own thoughts and opinions on their work and ideas?
I relate to you—I grew up on Tumblr. I'm intimately familiar with feminism in all of it's waves. I've read all of the infographics. Recently, I read De Beauvoir for an Anthropological Theory class feeling that everything she said was obvious, but understanding that I think it's so obvious now because she wrote it. When I got to class, I was extremely surprised to find that I was the only person who had anything to say about the reading, and when asking my (intelligent!) friends what they thought about what we read, they told me that they had trouble understanding what she was talking about. I think you're wrongfully assuming (as I often do) that everybody has the same experiences as you. They do not. People outside of your circle have not been inundated with infographics explaining terms that are taught in undergraduate classes.
>"...the study of structural oppression in its various forms is the degree, and primary texts and historical context and linguistic and subject knowledge become ‘nice-to-haves.’"
Again, something that confused me. In talking to a professor, she explained to me that she uses these kinds of theories to make the class more applicable to the students (it was a Greek Art and Archaeology class where we briefly talked about decolonization). In another class we discussed Said to understand the basis of Orientalism so that we could read things that built on it (Nuclear Orientalism, if you were interested). Yes, we discuss structural oppression in these classes, but in ways that are relevant. And if I'm being honest, I can't think of a time where it would be irrelevant, especially in humanities, especially in the UK. I'm aware of my country's colonial atrocities because we discuss them in our classes. Is this not what is being discussed in yours?
I'm Canadian, so I don't have a full grasp of the UK humanities undergrad experience. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that both countries' universities are going through similar budget cuts, which in turn have an effect on how syllabi are created.
And, unfortunately, I have to disagree with your thesis as a whole. It is an anti-intellectual problem. I don't know anything about you, but given what you mentioned in the essay, I'm presuming that you're not in school right now. I'm in the final year of my undergrad, and I see a huge anti-intellectual problem in both the students and in the university admin. Through the students it's apathy—AI is reading their readings and writing their papers. I was in an upper year class of ~50 people this semester, and by one month in it was the same 20 people showing up. Professors have a difficult time facilitating discussion because of this and aren't getting help from administration. Admin wants to switch to a "customer-based" approach, meaning humanities programs are being put on the chopping block. There is a massive anti-intellectual wave driven by greed.
Like I said, I think I was a bit confused and would like clarification. I tried not to repeat anything that was mentioned in other comments. I think I'm just wondering who you're angry at? Is it academia as a whole? Humanities? People who think they're saying profound things but actually aren't? Pretentious people? Funded PhD students? Dr. Louks? All of the above? I understand being angry at any of these, but I think they all require further inspection. Like, okay, the enemy is academia, yes. Who in academia? The older generations who refuse to retire, the same ones taking on these PhD students who you say don't produce anything of worth? Or is it the administration, who requires departments to increase the amount of grad students they take on in order to increase the university's prestige?
Again, I would love to have a dialogue about this as I genuinely want to understand where you're coming from with this.
> Again, something that confused me. In talking to a professor, she explained to me that she uses these kinds of theories to make the class more applicable to the students (it was a Greek Art and Archaeology class where we briefly talked about decolonization). In another class we discussed Said to understand the basis of Orientalism so that we could read things that built on it (Nuclear Orientalism, if you were interested). Yes, we discuss structural oppression in these classes, but in ways that are relevant. And if I'm being honest, I can't think of a time where it would be irrelevant, especially in humanities, especially in the UK. I'm aware of my country's colonial atrocities because we discuss them in our classes. Is this not what is being discussed in yours?
Have you read any responses to Said noting that his attitude to the west is the same as that which he states was western attitudes to the east? Do you know that slave-owning First-nations in Canada justified slavery through polygenism? Or how the Lakota conquered the Black Hills?
What about how the Inca Mitma, or Assyrian resettlement policy?
Have you read any rebuttals to the idea of structural oppression? What is the social impact within academia of supporting vs disputing that construct?
I think the easiest way for me to respond is to go question by question. I do want to note, however, that the thesis of my response was regarding anti-intellectualism, which was literally the title of OP's essay.
1. No I have not. Can you please provide me with some resources? I would love to read them. However, what I have read of Said (which is very little, I will admit!) allowed me to understand what I needed for the base concept of Orientalism and the West's view of the East. But I do know people who repeat similar rhetoric and fall into what you are describing, which is pasting the same attitudes onto the West as the East. I truly would love to read more about this if you can send me something.
2. No I did not. Would you mind providing resources? I was not able to find very much on this. To my knowledge, slavery based in polygenism was extremely popular in Europe (et al) due to the idea of an 'original sin' and that races are on a sort of hierarchy. I'm an anthropology major and I'm well aware of my discipline's extremely problematic history :). If you'd want to read racist nonsense on this, I'd direct you to Henry Lewis Morgan. However, in a surface-level google search, I was not able to find specifically what you were referring to, but I was able to find references of peoples in the Pacific Northwest owning slaves.
3/4. These, like the above point, are very interesting and I did not know about these. However, I am wondering why exactly you brought these up. Is it to counter something I said about decolonization as a sort of 'gotcha'? Yes, these cultures participated in their own kind of colonization. Yes, I believe it should be talked about. However, priority should be placed on the colonization that is actively effecting people today. If you disagree with this, I would love to know why. I do believe, though, that learning about colonization in other times and areas is very important. It helps to understand cultures that may have been oppressed in the past. Also, if you wanted to mention colonizing powers that aren't considered a part of the 'West', why not mention China and Japan's atrocities against Korea? I'm genuinely curious.
5. No, I have not. Would you mind providing resources? I feel that it is unfair to bring up a topic that you presume I don't know about and not explain it any further than mentioning the broad concept. Asking me if I have read something and not providing the names of authors or papers is not productive for either of us. This goes for all of your other questions. You may or may not have intended to come off as hostile, but the way you have worded your responses feel that way.
6. I do not know the social impact, Conner. I am an undergraduate. I do not even know if I fully understand the question. There would likely have to be a study or survey done. Maybe there is already a study! I don't know! If you're asking for my opinion, I believe that everything in academia should be disputed to a point—it is an institution after all. However, as I stated in my response to OP, I believe classes should provide an unbiased basis of theory (granted the discipline is related in some way) to allow students to develop in their academic or professional journeys. It should help them to establish a basis of knowledge so that they know what they agree and disagree with. Clearly you disagree with some things, and have done further research as to WHY and HOW you disagree with, as well as WHO. So, it seems this basis of knowledge is doing its job.
I would have loved to know your own opinion on these topics, rather than you asking me questions :)
I look forward to receiving your sources :)
I enjoyed this essay. Laypeople surely should be able to criticize scholarship if it's thin or poorly considered or badly argued or whatever, and I don't think they should be imperiously commanded to bend the knee and profess the value of a piece of writing just because it's a PhD thesis from a brand-name school. It's very possible that the thesis is bad! But none of us really know because we haven't read it; maybe the author wrote the abstract in a great hurry and it doesn't reflect the quality of the dissertation itself; maybe some of the jargon was put in there to please a committee member or to make the dissertation suitable for a grant application; etc., etc...
At the same time, there were plenty of comments in response to this thesis--setting aside the plainly repugnant ones--suggesting not only that this particular thesis was bad but that its badness is just one more piece of evidence proving that literature is fundamentally not worth studying. The sense I get is that many of these comment writers would also see as similarly nonsensical and worthless the kinds of research that you describe as desirable. This attitude strikes me as actually anti-intellectual. (And dismissing the quality of a work without having read it is not exactly anti-intellectual, I suppose, but it is intellectually careless.)
Finishing my masters in English. I can never quite articulate to people that half of English scholarship will show you some profound connection, and half is connecting dots just because it can. You're getting at some of the reasons here
This entire piece has a deep disdain for any anthropological, sociological, or political creativity. It’s reactionary and the fact that you don’t see yourself trying to spin academic conservatism back into the zeitgeist without any contextual explanation of the fact that you are doing politics in this piece whilst also critiquing politics in academia is telling to who you are worthy of studying and what you think can be tossed aside as “tangential”w That plus your acceptance of “woke” as a valid descriptor rather than the weird dog whistle it manifests as is …definitely a choice. And to act as if “woke” humanities is somehow an unjust and unproductive pursuit unless it is groundbreaking work —yet the point of academia is to create a groundswell of work that is thorough, curious, and yes—repetitive. Iteration is an important academic process. Even intersectionality as a concept is rather young and if you’re sick of hearing about it —that’s too fucking bad —but it doesn’t mean that the subject is anywhere near exhausted just because you’re exhausted with it.
I see the point you’re trying to make about actually connecting to the literature and source material before using it as the landscape for your sociopolitical analysis. Yet, that’s exactly what you’ve done here and you’ve managed to say uninteresting nothings in the process. Congrats!
it quite literally is anti-intellectualism
you are the best young social commentator of our times
Excellent work here. I have two questions for you
1. The tradition to which Ally Louks belongs is quite good at not just theological capture, but also getting its natural target demographic to fall in line. How did you avoid such capture, given the fact that you're a prime candidate for its ranks? You allude to it in the bit about how you encountered this phenomenon as a teenager on Tumblr, I'd love to read more. Not that there necessarily needs to be some story, could well be that you were just too smart
2. Among your friends and in your circles, how heterodox is the view you've articulated here?
I did *feel* an inclination towards reflexive niceness after I saw the death/rape threats. And more broadly, while I am happy to deny this kind of humanities dissertation any claim to being truth-seeking academic work, I'm not opposed to it existing. Academia as a leisure class recreational pursuit is fine, maybe even good, as long as the taxpayer isn't billed for it.
thank you!!
1. I don’t think it IS that good at getting its target demo in line - it’s different in academia where there are presentations and job incentives, but on Tumblr it worked via. repetitive slogans, cancellations, and callouts - all of which infuriate people who fall onto the wrong side for whatever reason. I honestly think 70(ish)% of it is just aesthetics - I had brushes with various dissident feminist parts of Tumblr in my teens via algorithms/mutual followers + it’s funny how quickly young women feel able to totally disown their past beliefs when something feels more convincing to them, as long as it’s couched in the same pink pastel visual schema/non-threatening writing style as the rest of the website.
That is probably a major factor in the popularity of the ‘dirtbag left’ among my demographic (early 20s, mostly liberal arts-educated women) - the early stars were the Red Scare podcast hosts, who criticised ‘bodies and spaces’ academia and parts of Me Too, but are young, attractive, well-read, fashion-forward, have very refined cultural tastes and lots of high-profile friends in the arts etc. They’ve fallen out of favour recently but were lifestyle icons for loads of girls. It’s part ‘the cutting edge in New York are saying this in an ironic way so I can too,‘ part ‘maybe I can say what I’m actually thinking and still have a dream life, like theirs…‘. It seems like there’s been a sudden cultural change after the Trump win, but I think they kickstarted a gradual turn against the prototypical Tumblr thought model from 2018-ish on
2. I’ve graduated and currently work with a company who organise public debates with a libertarian/contrarian bent, so my current circle are basically aligned with if not to the right of me (they are reposting this article for their newsletter at some point). The university I went to is famous for being politically radical + has been for ages, but there’s a cultural split between their more traditionally-intensive Asian language degrees and stuff like IR, history, law, postcolonial studies, etc. My coursemates are generally casually on the left (as am I) but many (not all) reacted negatively to our degree reforms and I think they worsened opinions of the faculty in general.
...negatively to our degree reforms and I think they worsened opinions of the faculty in general.
+ I've noticed international students (mostly from developing countries) tend to be way more 'into' stuff like queer and postcolonial theory than home students, especially compared to around 2019-2020 on the same campus... multiple theories as to why. Perhaps credentialism and heightened awareness of a rat race for jobs afterwards
(Not sure why first one cut off)
Fascinated by the remark about the power of pastel aesthetics and affect. Someone more sympathetic than me to the Louise Perry/Mary Harrington types should tell them to employ some fresh lit grads who know the hexcode for French Fuchsia immediately.
When I was getting started with postgraduate research I used to fulminate a lot about the grievance studies wing of academia. Look how they steal and preen about in the vestments of worthier office, how they tar and taint the noble vocation of truth-seeking! But I've mellowed out; I now find it kind of funny, and also, I think you can't have such a nice castle and act precious about the fact that some scoundrels might want to connive their way inside it -- it would be surprising if there weren't any word salad grifters scurrying about building nests. What's necessary is some good-humoured population control.
I would not have suspected international students being more into World Salad Theory than locals. I wonder if it's a SOAS-specific thing? I did my first two degrees at King's and the international students were the Chinese or clearly-pretty-affluent crypto-right-wing continental Europeans.
Best to bathe in the classics!
Articulated beautifully - reading this I felt my intuition be organised into argument. Thank you!
Loving the music picks of your newsletter, and thanks for the further reading! <3
Great article! Sums up how I felt perfectly.
People are outraged about “woke” humanities, but it’s really just a mechanical system of production i.e. capitalism. Here’s a big bucket of jargon-y words, grab a handful and place it on the dissertation conveyer belt. I don’t think this incident says anything at all about the inherent value of such words and concepts. Foucault at least put them together in a meaningful way. It’s not his fault that concepts he and other actual thinkers came up with have been turned into a bucket of slop for the humanities academic industrial complex. The real question we should be asking is, what does the slop PhD actually signify, what purpose does it actually serve in the network of institutions in modern society? Does it just signal your slop-processing capabilities which is useful for NGOs or wherever humanities majors are employed? Does it signal the attitudes of humanities professors who are resentful of a world dominated by capitalist value production, so they shove their students out there equipped with the exact opposite skills of what they need? Or is a humanities degree simply a luxury good to adorn the walls of the economically comfortable, to signal how much they care? We could be asking deeper questions, that’s my only point.
My issue isn’t with jargon itself, it’s with the fact that the jargon is being used as a smokescreen for scattered, simplistic and dated thinking about art - that’s what people are able to see through and why they are so angry. The Louks abstract clearly does mean something, just not at a level of originality/complexity/rigour one would ordinarily associate with PhD-level study (purporting to ‘trace olfactory prejudice’ through literally 15 mostly-unconnected works by wildly different authors over 90ish years and not via a focused corpus is MAD, for starters. The latter would have been really interesting).
Writers need to develop and define specialist terms to create granular arguments - this requires extra literature and a (sometimes-)necessary split with the general populace. If you are writing about smell, then ‘olfactory’ is undoubtedly a useful word - ‘affective,’ ‘reflexivity,’ and ‘sublimation’ are also useful in that specific mode of literary studies. I just don’t want these words to exist as pure shibboleths, made to catch people out as unsuitable for ‘genteel’ academia (as appears to be the case on Twitter) - I’d like a bridge of mutual understanding to exist between cultural studies PhDs and the general population.
I brought up the other Cambridge PhDs because I want people to get that there still is some really good work happening in that sphere with meaningful implications for art and cognition - it isn’t a ‘mechanical system of production.’ Those abstracts use ‘jargon’ but also clearly test their theories, and come to conclusions (after years of work) that might be unreachable to eg. a layperson with an Atlantic subscription who has read Lolita for fun
It should not be completely transparent to the general populace that you are invoking words and concepts in a formulaic manner to reach a trite and entirely expected conclusion. The issue is not that the abstract is meaningless, it’s that it is far too obvious, not Phd level as you say. The fancy words are there to conceal the lack of original thought. To me, as an economics major who works in tech, this appears as a mechanical system of production. You have a series of inputs and outputs, not unlike an AI neural network. This kind of abstract is not far from what I would expect AI to create, which because it only has the most superficial “understanding” it can only generate the semblance of depth. Even someone in the general public who has actual read a single work of genuine literature can spot the difference between actual insight and pure slop, and this is a case of the latter. Again not that it is meaningless, slop is not necessarily meaningless. But it is entirely superficial and formulaic. It’s the kind of thing that can be easily reproduced by AI.
What people seem to be missing is the fact that rigorous academic scholarship is about arguments, not conclusions. It's about how things work. Does diversity training do that?
"Gender is a social construct"—how? "Social norms"—how? What makes great thinkers great has always been the process of figuring out why their conclusions may be right. Anybody can come up with a free-floating thesis. Neither are these theses difficult to understand, as you rightly point out. Class struggle, exploitation, iron law of wages, blah blah blah. We all "know" it. But it takes at least a few weeks to be able to explain Marx's entire system from the ground up. It'll take a lifetime to read through the rest of the literature discussing all the places Marx went wrong.
Maybe it's high quality work being turned into sociopolitical truisms that is the problem here.
From what I see, people are angry that our academics aren't producing novel, thought-provoking conclusions. It's all oppression, oppression, oppression. But surely we can agree that oppression—or let's use a more neutral term, power—is an incredibly complex phenomenon which can be explored in so many ways? If a random PhD candidate wants to investigate the underlying dynamics between smell and power, it seems really disingenuous to mock it saying "haha no shit smell and power are linked in some ways". In what ways??
"If you express any antipathy towards this sort of research, people who are still deep in humanities academia will assume that you are simply too ignorant to understand it. This air of condescension always makes matters worse - and it makes academics seem terribly naive." I think this line is really spot-on in terms of what's frustrating about academia to a lot of people outside of it. It's one thing if you're saying something new and another if you're just saying what everyone already knows in language that's harder to decipher.
I honestly think the issues with academia start from primary/secondary education when so much focus is on getting the "right" answer—people don't see intelligence as relating to coming up with something new but rather being able to say what's already been said in a way that's hard to comprehend.