polyglot conspiracy

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 Metafilter:

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.
—
…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 years

well, she is getting her papers past ‘peer’ review. perhaps it says something about the culture and peers in her discipline?
—
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
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
Comment by Scape-goat Trainee
“UCSB actually has one of the best Material Sciences departments in the world.
Two Nobel Lauretes

Tell someone in that department that sociology is a science and they’ll laugh out loud.”

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.”
“Ok. Do you want fries with that?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no.”
“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO EXCLUDE THE FRIES, BIGOT?”

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.]