ceasar2777
 
Saturday, 14. September 2002
Academic Snobs

Allow me to rant about one thing in particular that brings to me more disgust than anything else I encounter in day-to-day existence. This thing is academic snobbery.

Now that I am advanced in my undergraduate program I have experienced the maggots amongst men. These are the academic snobs. I think the Political Science discipline is notably predisposed to this phenomena because of its fixation on the particulars, rather than the concepts, of governance.

Pardon me while I elaborate. There are some that think that the collection of abstracted facts, removed from the environment from whence they came, will lead to some practical knowledge regarding behavioral models and the like. I run into these people every day. They look down upon those of us who dare to inculcate some form of idealism in governance. They laugh and snicker when propositions are made that reflect the true motives of what a political science should be.

Yet, I pity these people. They may have statistics and probability matrices on their side, but on my side, I have the understanding of the full weight of what political science should be. Aristotle said that political science is the highest science, because it dictated what and the degree to which all other sciences would be taught. Therefore, with so lofty a labour as this, it should be the duty of the political scientist to not only examine something as arbitrary as the voting habits of pregnant minority women in the 1956 presidential campaign, but to also use these statistical facts as a ground for prescribing what their voting habits should have been.

So, all you stat-mminded polisci guys out there, to you I say, "go to hell." Indeed you will, for your burying youself in the numbers will be a proper burial indeed when you find that you cannot see but the walls of the hole that you dug and you are blind to that which your neighbor is doing.

As for me, and my own, we will do what is right, and see to it that all those who seek the truth of the matter will do the same. We will not abstract. We will see things in their context, and we will educate in the best manner possible. We will produce societal participants that are truly informed rather than specialized.

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