Yeah, that wasn't a very strong defense. Critiquing current practices is one thing some parts of academia should do, but it'd be sad if that were 100% of what it were doing. The strength of the academic enterprise imo is doing hard-to-monetize basic research: developing the ideas and techniques that after several more iterations will produce or enable interesting things. I tend to think of tech-heavy startups as essentially mining ideas and results that are promising but have never been made practical; academia's job is to keep restocking that mine.
Critiquing current practices is one thing some parts of academia should do, but it'd be sad if that were 100% of what it were doing.
Precisely. And Dijkstra seems to take great offense at the critiques traveling in the opposing direction. To wit:
Did the writer not know that the use of the term "the real world" is usually interpreted as a symptom of rabid anti-intellectualism, or did he not mind?
As a PhD candidate in political science, a good 90% of my colleagues could use a daily injunction to think more about the problems of "the real world," rather than the abstractions of Deleuze and Guattari.
