On the uselessness of linguistics in particular and academia in general
A couple of months ago I mentioned some internet-wide reactions to danah boyd’s essay regarding race, class, and social networking sites in the US. What was most interesting to me about many of the comments I saw was how people brought in some sort of skepticism of academia, in order to either discredit boyd (because academics are useless) or to condemn her (because she didn’t meet some high standard expected of academics) – a double-bind of being an academic.
So the other day when Mary Bucholtz’s work was mentioned in a piece by Benjamin Nugent in the NYT, who framed her research as making some really bold and broad claims about race, I knew a similar kind of reaction chain would happen online. I was really interested to see how people would interpret her work given the complete lack of important context in the NYT, and how the notions of linguistics and academia would figure into their comments about the piece. Taking to the blogosphere via Technorati and Google blogs searches, I found a bunch of really awful, mean, spiteful, depressing commentary. Almost all of it was completely reliant on Nugent’s piece, and hardly any of it reflected an actual reading of Bucholtz’s work (you can tell, because half the time the very points commenters bring up are points that Bucholtz covers in her articles, including the 2001 one that Nugent cited). This didn’t surprise me – who’s going to wade through a 17-page academic article if they’re not attempting to get an academic degree or maintain their academic status? – but I was really, really shocked by how hypocritical people are. Because basically they are fast-as-lightning to criticize Bucholtz’s work for failing to consider all angles of the issue, but they do so without themselves considering that perhaps the NYT didn’t give them all the information. Ugh!
Anyway, as I suspected, there were a lot of comments invoking the uselessness of academia/linguistics in order to discredit Bucholtz’s work. These are what I want to share with you, because the comments that criticize Bucholtz’s arguments are mostly based on information that doesn’t permit them to make applicable arguments anyway (because they’re based solely on Nugent’s piece, not the actual research), so they don’t merit the attention, not in this post at least. But when I checked my RSS feed this morning to see Catafora Paratactica’s post on Stephen Colbert’s listing of linguistics as a beyond unmarketable field, and thinking back to Tulugaq’s post on people conceiving linguistics as not-science, I was impelled to look a little closer at some comments that are hateful towards the academy/linguistics. I’ll just list a selection of them here, with some ongoing commentary.
[IMPORTANT update: As a commenter pointed out, none of the comments below are (as far as I know) written by the proprietors of the blog from whence they came. I should have been clearer about this - all the comments below are from *comments* to the blogs, not the text of blog entries themselves. If you want to look up the commenters or look at the comments in context, check out the blog. Thanks for driving me to clarify this, Jeff G!]
From Just One Minute:
“Linguist” is the key here – when someone from a “I understood there would be no math involved” non-discipline “examines” a question involving anything, the results are not generally worth the value of the paper and ink expended, let alone the time. If the prof at UC Santa Barabara had spent a day or two around the engineering department at UC Berkeley she might have run into more than a few Asian nerds.
Bucholtz got away with this for 12 years?
People kept a straight face for 12 years?
What kinds of insanity prevails inside of academia, when they’re not killing each other over parking spaces; that this woman HYPER-IDIOTIC wasn’t told straight off that her Ph.D Thesis was a crock.
I guess she thinks “all Asians are slanty-eyed people.” Not true about “all asians.”
I guess she’s math phobic. Because she thinks math belongs to the “hyper-whites,” but that’s not gonna be found in textbooks, if you’d care to look this up for verification.
[text deleted for brevity]
This “hyper-white” bullshit investigated the wrong stuff. It would have been better, if, over 12 years, this dame just asked if she could measure a man’s penis. For science. Bet she’d have discovered a lot more than her “questioning of high schoolers” … while she sought out this “definition.”
Until you can measure this with an accurate ruler, your findings aren’t worth much.
Here we have a first-of-many complaint about the lack of quantitative data/analysis in Bucholtz’s work, but also in linguistics as a whole. This gets my goat, because a LOT of linguists (including Bucholtz, no doubt) do work with numbers (see my post regarding similar points here). It’s not a math-phobic discipline. Even if we didn’t work with numbers, that wouldn’t mean we couldn’t do good analyses. To paraphrase something Greg Guy said in class at LSC, Numbers do not make an analysis. Without interpretation, in fact, they mean nothing. This is something danah boyd caught shit for too, not providing quantitative analysis in her essay. Why do people care so much about numbers? Why do they think that numbers alone “prove” things?
From dispatches from TJICistan:
I wonder how much in government grants and public university salaries we, the taxpayers, have spent to learn this valuable, valuable piece of opinion ?
I’m glad the words “hegemony†and “hegemonic†exist – they serve as a signaling device that the speaker has been well-steeped in academic Marxist nonsense, and everything they say can henceforth be totally ignored by adults.
Ah yes, complaining about taxpayers’ money going to pointless academic research. I am more worried about my tax money going to pointless wars, but whatevs.
From
At least based on my experience, that’s what a significant percentage of today’s academia does. They take some basically random factoid about life, and then pull some bizarre “racial” connection out of it. They seem to have some sort of a who’s-dick-is-bigger contest going on, based on who can find racial “undertones” in the most ridiculous places.
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…semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure…Does this mean anything to anybody?
If it does, is it amenable to treatment?
OK, so on this point I can understand how people might think that all academics are obsessed with race, and to be fair, those semiotic processes of differentiation do sort of sound like diseases. But my god, the condescension!
From Sepia Mutiny:
razib_the_atheist
True, but this is an academic working on this topic for a dozen yearswell, she is getting her papers past ‘peer’ review. perhaps it says something about the culture and peers in her discipline?
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razib_the_atheist
take a close look at her cv. linguistics is a social science, right? but i doubt she is the sort to be constricted by linear-hegemonic-patriarchal-constructs such as science ;-)
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razib_the_atheist
re: #7, look, i understand why ennis is baffled. i had the same reaction. the woman is a prof at UCSB (though i do recall that is one of the less asian campuses). that being said, looking over her cv & her publications it pretty obvious she has a paradigm and empirical data isn’t going to budge. she’s not an empirical scientist, she’s a cultural mathematician, she has her axioms (e.g., white-black dichotomy, oppression, etc.) and derives truths which are ‘proven’ because of the axioms.
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razib_the_atheist
i clicked through and skimmed the publications at the cv. she isn’t a statistical social scientist (e.g., no p-values or ANOVA). she seems to work in a sociolinguistic methodology, so she is focusing on the play of language within subcultures. that perhaps explains her lack of sensitivity to the quantitative presence of asian nerds in her ambient environment.
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Dr. HyperTree
do people really have an image of the researchers and professors at top schools as squarish and emasculated?
In fact, these days due to intense competition for a handful of positions, the professors at these top schools particularly the young ones, are almost always intensely charismatic. [ed. note: thank you!!!]
WOW. Again with the if-you-don’t-use-numbers-you-don’t-count bit. I would especially, in this case, like to draw your attention to the phrase she’s not an empirical scientist. I don’t know if this means that she’s not an empirical scientist or that she’s not a scientist, but I would just like to point out that if ethnography is not empirical then I do not know what is. Also, WHAHLEDAFJDAFJDOAIEWAHEAEH WTF. This one really riles me up, probably because the commenter (rahib) mistakes “sociolinguistics” for “not quantitative,” which is ironic since sociolinguistics is one of the more quantitative subfields of linguistics. S/he probably just doesn’t know this, so fine, but do your research, people! People are so quick to want to complain about shit like this, what is it?
From Protein Wisdom:
Comment by Shawn
Actually, the preferred term is “geek.†Of all academic types, you’d expect a linguist to be down with that.
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Comment by J. Brenner
I knew there was something I didn’t like about that black guy I once saw wearing hobbit attire! Now, thanks to academia, I know that my reflexive hostility was motivated by his cultural theft from American geekdom (and, needless to say, my own racism). Anyhow, I should have kicked his ass…and, since the combat skills of hobbit imitators are probably pretty low, this would have been a safe option.
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Comment by Sue
My bad, I thought it was “brainysmart†not “hyperwhite†that caused nerdiness. Geez…just realized what I typed! Talk about a Freudian slip. But, really, Santa Barbara? They really have a place that might cause people to think? Maybe learn? I don’t believe it. This is just a dumb (there I go again) ploy to get more grant money. Bet on it.
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Comment by physics geek
Some fine, urbane comments above, to which I feel like adding: WTF?! I mean really, WTF?! Christ, my IQ dropped about 100 points just reading that article which, in retrospect, allowed me to cogitate on the same level as the author.
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Comment by Scape-goat Trainee
“UCSB actually has one of the best Material Sciences departments in the world.
Two Nobel LauretesTell someone in that department that sociology is a science and they’ll laugh out loud.â€
How about this idea: All public research funds get scooped up and only spent on finding cures for cancer, blindness, etc.
And all social scientists go to work for McDonalds where they belong.And all social scientists go to work for McDonalds where they belong.
Don’t know if that would be such a good idea.
“I’d like a Big Mac.â€
“Ok. Do you want fries with that?â€
“No.â€
“Excuse me?â€
“I said no.â€
“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO EXCLUDE THE FRIES, BIGOT?â€Morgan Spurlock, on the other hand, might be pleased.
Oh geez. Here again, academics are accused of being hyper-politically correct and, ultimately, useless. Not that people who work at McDonald’s are useless, because they definitely are very valuable members of society (bigot!), but this person seems to think that they are lowly.
There’s waaaaay more out there than just this. In fact, maybe I will start a website devoted to tracking public academic-bashing. That might be fun or therapeutic. Or maybe it would just be depressing. I don’t know.
As a final note, let me draw your attention to this very funny thread in LingForum (which exists, btw) entitled LINGUISTICS SUCKS. It begins:
Linguists!!! Listen!!! I am asking you!!! Is there another area in the universe which is as useless as linguistics is? What, on earth, does a linguist contribute to the advancement of knowledge? Nothing!! If anything, linguistics serves only the purpose of makings things more complicated for students thereby making them feel bad about themselves.
Yes, I was in linguistics, too. But I left. I left the field, because I noticed that it is totally and totally and totally useless. All linguists follow what one man (Chomsky) made up. How, on Earth, do you know all those structures are right? People keep changing them.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Did you hear that, Chomsky? We are all following you. Every single one of us. We are walking in your every footstep. We are in yr shadows worshipping yr creations.
Thoughts? Are we useless? I’ve spent too much time writing thus far to provide counterarguments, but I would love to see this start a discussion (I guess Mark Liberman has already kind of started it, but LL doesn’t have comment threads, so wev.)
 [Update: Check out Mr. Verb's and Mark Liberman's related posts. Good stuff. See also a post at PsyBlog, for a different perspective (I'm blogrolling this site, too - I think it's the Language Log of psychology, maybe). See also the long and rather interesting post at Artifex's Blog. Also, for an excellent discussion regarding the *content* of Bucholtz's article(s), see The angriest rice cooker in the world.]
Please note that the proprietor of protein wisdom (me) did not write the post in question — though I agree with many of its observations.
And I taught English, rhetoric, argument, and creative writing — and spent plenty of time studying theory, including two stints at the Cornell School of Crit and Theory — so, while some commenters were certainly overbroad in their criticisms of the social sciences for effect, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that they view all those with academic training and experience so dismissively. Else I’d have no audience.
Unfortunately, the post you cite comes on the heels of several posts from a Morehead U professor who used thousands of words to “prove” that “conservatives” were all racists, homophobes, and bigots — and then threw around his academic credentials as if this somehow put paid to any counters.
I think it is this kind of arrogance from certain academics that puts people off, particularly when they reach conclusions that appear to grow out of the flimsiest of pretenses, and are supported only circularly by “argument.”
Best,
Jeff G
Your points about the bashing of linguists and academics in general are well taken, but on the other hand people like Bucholtz are in part to blame because her ideas are stupid and unfounded and one does wonder how she got away with them for so long (unlike Boyd’s essay, her research is actually published and so she cannot resort to the “preliminary ideas” defence). I left the field of academic linguistics a long time ago but I still have many friends and acquaintances who work in linguistics. They try hard to adhere to scientific standards in a discipline that hasn’t quite made up its mind whether it actually wants to be a science. I’m sure they are delighted to be identified with people like Bucholtz.
No! You’re not useless! We love you. Keep it up.
Newspaper articles that pull some controversial-sounding ideas out of context might be useless, though.
Jeff G. – Thanks for the reminder to clarify about comment authors. I’ve noted an update about this above. Also, I didn’t mean to suggest that *everyone* or *all* people commenting to that thread are dismissive of academics, just that this is a trope I’ve been noticing lately when slightly-controversial stuff gets mentioned in the media and circulated round the blogosphere. Some of the comments in that thread were representative of the trope, I think. As for the academic arrogance – sure, hubris is never attractive, regardless of what field you’re talking about. But I don’t think a second-party description of someone’s research conclusions (a la Nugent in the NYT) can fairly be taken to reflect their personal stance toward their profession, their credentials, or their research conclusions.
Frank O – Erm, yeah I’m not going to respond to that.
JW – THANKS! {hug}
Also, I think that I should say that I don’t necessarily think people are *wrong* to sometimes have negative reactions toward academics or, for that matter, linguistics. But I guess I’d like to understand a little better *where* those reactions come from, = what the academy can do to make itself more relevant/better regarded amongst non-academicians.
Thanks for posting the link to that LingForum thread. It brought the lulz.
As for the rest of them, poo! I’m glad that I come from an area with dialects different enough from the standards that people back home understand why lingustics could be somewhat useful, or at least interesting.
—”but on the other hand people like Bucholtz are in part to blame because her ideas are stupid and unfounded and one does wonder how she got away with them for so long”—–
Could you perhaps be kind enough to tell us which of her ideas are unfounded and wrong with reference to where she stated them in the original paper, and on what basis you consider them wrong.
Stepen Jones, thank you for that excellent question. Upon rereading my comment you will see that I never said Bucholtz’ ideas were “wrong”, I said they were “stupid and unfounded”. As I’ve stated in a comment to Mr. Verb’s post on this topic, the problem with her papers (the 2001 “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness” as well as the 1999 “‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls” and the 1998 “Geek the Girl: Language, Femininity, and Female Nerds”, all of which are available on her webpage) is not that they are wrong. The problem is that there is no way of telling whether they are right or wrong, as Bucholtz does not actually provide any evidence for her claims. Instead, she throws around a lot of jargon and some selected passages from interviews with a couple of high school kids that she interprets to fit her perception of things. That is the “unfounded” part, an objective characterization of her work that you can check for yourself (and if you do find she presents any evidence whatsoever, please cite the paper and page number and I will happily eat my words). The “stupid” bit is, of course, a subjective evaluation on my part. It is based on the fact that I believe one can and should make statements about race/gender etc. if one has very solid evidence to back them up. If not, it would be better to remain silent than to throw around buzzwords to get tenure. And if one states unfounded assertions about race, gender, and other “hot” topics, even in academic journals, one should certainly be prepared to take some heat from journalists and the internet public. Of course, academics can close ranks whenever one of their own is attacked, but what they should really be doing is critically evaluating each others work. And if someone says stupid and unfounded things wielding academic credentials, they should distance themselves from those things rather than whining about the ignorance of the public. Don’t get me wrong: I am no anti-intellectual. I have a Ph.D. in linguistics from one of the top twenty U.S. universities and although I have never worked in academic linguistics, I generally like and admire people who do. Because unlike Bucholtz, most of them are smart, thoughtful and back up their claims with evidence (take Polyglot Conspiracy as a good example — it is a “only” a blog, yet every posting contains more evidence and reasonable argumentation than all of Bucholtz’ papers taken together).
“All linguists follow what one man (Chomsky) made up. How, on Earth, do you know all those structures are right? People keep changing them.”
That would be funny if it weren’t so sad. But hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity — at least in the English-speaking world people are aware that there ARE academics who study language. Here in Denmark, when I say I study linguistics, all I get is blank stares…
There are two overlapping kinds of anti-intellectualism at play here. The first kind is an irritating and misplaced form of populism. This kind of anti-intellectualism is deeply imbedded in American culture, and not just on the right. Americans basically have two cultural responses to ideas they don’t like. 1) any academic work that contradicts your values or ideology must be, obviously, wrong or stupid and should therefore be mocked, derided and rejected on those grounds; there is no need to engage in argumentation with reasons and evidence to support your position, because the academic ideas are self-evidently wrong or stupid. And 2) academics are elitists and therefore obviously wrong or stupid because they think that they are better than everyone else and, by damn, common people actually know best already! [Interestingly, the left makes fun of the right for doing this (e.g., global warming), but then turns around and does it itself against ideas it doesn't like (e.g., sociobiology).]
Another kind of anti-intellectualism arises from the academic humanities themselves—especially, English and literature—where they think reading some late-20th century French philosophy and calling it “theory” (as if that gave it authority) has shown them that no science is real (it’s all just a social construct, afterall!) and that social science produces knowledge that is actually of less value than “theory” [see comments by Frank Oswalt]. This kind of anti-intellectualism is as likely to come from a Brit or an Aussie as an American; and may also come from within the social sciences themselves, as in the case of the deeply flawed “sociology of science” [and I say that as myself a sociologist]. Usually it displays a complete lack of understanding of social-scientific method [again, see Oswalt's comments above, who doesn't understand ethnography in the least or what it looks like in a peer-reviewed article] and a refusal of the basic premises of science in general in regards to social questions [i.e., that reliable methods can be produced that will give reliable results on the incredibly stochastic research problems of human behavior, society, cognition, and culture].
Per linguistics, some of the most interesting work on human evolution right now is coming from the combination of geo-linguistics with the mapping of human migration through genetic analyses. How could anyone possibly argue that’s not empirical science?
I’m a firm proponent of radical free speech. But that means listening to (or reading) a lot of ignorant speech. [And by ignorant I mean "unknowing" not "incapable of knowing."]
Todd O., I actually agree with everything you say. But “Oswalt’s comments above, who doesn’t understand ethnography in the least or what it looks like in a peer-reviewed article“? I earn a living producing both qualitative and quantitative research on demand — of course I know what ethnography is and what it looks like in published form. But I can also distinguish between good and bad ethnography and between claims that one can and cannot make on the basis of ethnographic methods. I wouldn’t want to single out Bucholtz as an exemplar of bad ethnography — I have seen much, much worse ethnographic papers in “peer-reviewed journals†(but I have also seen much better ones). However, I do think her research is a good example of making claims that one’s data simply do not support. However, I, too, am a proponent of radical free speech, and so I support her right to make these claims and the right of journals to publish them. But I also support the right of the “ignorant“ public to ridicule it. Speaking of free speech, I would like to thank PC for allowing all my comments on her blog despite the fact that she must find them just as stupid and unfounded as I find Bucholtz’ work.
hi i enjoyed the read
I think animosity towards research like Bucholtz’s comes from the widely held idea that science comes up with the final word on a topic. In contrast to that, science in the real world involves postulating hypotheses and theories and TESTING them. The testing takes a long time, and theories might be WRONG. But they’re represented in the media as the final word. Which means that the public has the impression that a scientist is never wrong, or that there’s not heated debate among scientists.
Bucholtz might be off her rocker on this one (I don’t know and don’t care), but if she is, there’s no need to criticize academia, and scientific inquiry by extension. It just means she’s wrong about this, no big deal.