I want to state at the outset that the ridiculous research paper I’m about to make fun of is only one horrifying example of institutional insanity, and it would be unfair to use it to characterize the entire higher education complex. However, I do believe that a healthy and functioning scholarly sector must have a way to reject, condemn and shun such abuses of position and authority.
I’ll have more to say on this matter after revealing the head-exploding product of University of San Diego professors Diane Marie Keeling and Bethany O’Shea.
These scholars have published a study titled “Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials” Here is the abstract:
Amplifying the importance of geologic processes in subject formation, the study asserts that geological time is important for understanding memory and memorials. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, materials of geologic composition like soil, and those made from earth materials, such as steel and bricks, are employed to trope the bodies of lynching victims and weather racist geologic formations of subjecthood. The holding and eroding of violent memories crafts an intimate and resistant geopoetics of Black humanity.
Oh. What???
As far as I can determine, this is not one of those hoax papers that some ethically-dubious wags have submitted to supposedly legitimate “peer-reviewed” journals to prove how careless and unprofessional the publications are. I would try to read the study, but a download costs $56.00 for 48 hours of access, and I could buy a new sock drawer with that.
No, Keeling and O’Shea, who are professors of Communication (Keeling) and Environmental and Ocean Sciences (O’Shea) were interviewed by the University of San Diego News Center. They are serious about this “discovery,” which in an earlier time would have had the university asking them to go with the nice people in the white coats and not make a scene. The scholars enthused about “how people can use rocks to heal from this horrible history,” the history being Jim Crow racism in the South. The professors traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to see soil that was gathered from different states where lynchings occurred, and they examined other ways that geology could be “strategically used” to memorialize lynching victims.
Many questions come to mind. Who paid for this boondoggle? Are there any limits to “academic freedom”? Is no research topic considered so absurd that a university won’t support it? What would have happened to professors who issued such a paper before The Great Stupid spread darkness, fear and ignorance across the land?
The paper doesn’t just make Keeling and O’Shea appear ridiculous, it impugns the faculty that they belong to, the institution that hires such silly people, and parents who would pay to send their kids to an institution with teachers like this. Tuition at the University of San Diego (USD) for the 2024–2025 academic year is $58,420, in addition to $3,998 for health insurance and $17,270 for housing and food. Paying almost $80,000 a year to a university that allows even a single faculty member to be this addled while teaching students is irresponsible. The study is the equivalent of a scholarly examination of the magical powers of stump water or an “assertion” that astrology really can predict the future.
I understand: sometimes wacko theories turn out to be true, and yes, it is difficult to know at the moment of inception that any surprising or innovative idea is absolutely wrong and not worth examining. And yet there must be some limits, particularly at a time when ideological biases have made so many of the allegedly wise, educated and perceptive people society depends upon for guidance and to train its young as dumb as rocks.
_______________
Pointer: Legal Insurrection
Ethics Alarms 
And yet there must be some limits, particularly at a time when ideological biases have made so many of the allegedly wise, educated and perceptive people society depends upon for guidance and to train its young as dumb as rocks.
Traditionally, it was the wise, educated and perceptive FACULTY who provided the guidance to train the young. Current day faculty appear to be dumb as rocks or simply deranged and incapable of being anywhere near wise and perceptive. Curmie?
Frank Zappa’s short, repeated lyric done in response to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s “I am a Rock” comes to mind: “Help. I’m a rock.”
OB
I am of the opinion that the recent crop of educators who are working on their Doctorates or Post Doc publications use this ridiculous language because they think that it makes their study more important and they know the more esoteric the thesis sounds the less likely that a reviewer will question its validity when the crap cannot be understood and he or she does not want to be viewed as less erudite or intellectual than the “colleague” whose work they are reviewing
Becoming a reviewer is a prestige role and enhances the faculty member’s CV. This is very much like the story entitled The Emperors New Clothes. No one will dare to challenge the verbiage of a colleague out of fear of retribution.
Some of the dumbest people I have known having worked at a community college for twenty plus years are those faculty who keep trying to prove how intellectual they are.
“Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials.”
I am not sure what that means. At all. Does that seem to suggest that rocks/soil/steel have some sort of animus or soul? I get the poetics of the land crying out for peace or justice or revenge or . . . But, most understand that to be metaphorical and not literal. Right? Yet, these scholars seem to be arguing that digging in the dirt creates its own source of objective reality. If that is the case, and dirt has intrinsic memory, then should we really be making holes all over the place?
Perhaps the scholars are suggesting that we should abandon technology and go back to living off the land as a our early hominid ancestors did.
But, wait, if dirt has a soul, wouldn’t plants and animals also have souls? If that is the case, we should remove plants and animals from our food/life chains. That would solve an awful lot of problems, ¿no? Humans would be extinct in less than a generation.
jvb
“if dirt has a soul”
Not to quibble, but being dead, DIRT would have no soul; SOIL on the other hand…is alive!
PWS
And this would all be cause for mirth, pointing and giggling if were not symptomatic of the larger rot in academia and education generally. From that perspective, it is tragic and terrifying.
Didn’t intend to trivialize the fact that Keeling and O’Shea are being elevated and lionized for being nucking futs; proof enough that the world is being shaven by a drunken barber.
PWS
Fear not, Paulie. Satire and sarcasm have their uses.
And boy, it’s a shame what’s happened to the academy. The faculty at my college were uniformly smart as hell, adult, well credentialed, good teachers and responsible human beings. This was in the early ‘seventies. I think it was my contemporaries who went to graduate schools and academia who were the first damaged tranche of faculty. So, by now, there have probably been three generations of out of touch lefties populating college campuses and academia generally. It’s a problem. There are no longer any adults in any of these faculties.
I can envision another study to determine whether these researchers and those who authorized and paid them are all dumber than a box of rocks.
I’ll call Elon and see if he’s giving out research grants.