Some Magnificent Academic Trusels and Their Social Consequences

An attack on the indiscriminate and careless labeling of academic disciplines which has resulted in the obfuscation of the academic definition of "science." He defines a "trusel" as an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless, or even harmful. A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" is one that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its potential negative value for society. Provides examples of trusels, discusses their effects and suggests ways for dealing with trusels in the future. For the transparencies used, see “Assumptions re Academic Change: Transparencies for talk titled Some Magnificent Academic Trusels.” Presented at 1992 Annual Meeting of the Association for Integrative Studies, 19-22 November 1992, Pomona, California.



The author attacks the indiscriminate and careless labeling of academic disciplines which has resulted in the obfuscation of the academic definition of "science" ABSTRACT BY THE AUTHOR: A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" is one that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its potential negative value for society. The negative value may come from commission or omission. It may deal with the content of a discipline, with the way a discipline is perceived, with knowledge that cuts across disciplines, and even with "integrative studies." Some selected trusels with possibly serious social consequences will be discussed. Among these are Godel's Theorem about incompleteness of languages, the idea that "interdisciplinarity" should have an important place in the language of academia, the thought that in teaching language the prose form alone is of great value and should command most the teaching attention and resources, the idea that mathematics is a science instead of a language, the idea that it is all right to use the name "science" indiscriminately to name academic programs (such as "management science" and "computer science") without any stated criteria whereby this nomenclature is validated, and that people with little or no "academic track record" should be given significant power to allocate academic and research resources, or to make key public decisions affecting higher education. Examples of serious and inappropriate consequences that have ensured from such trusels will be discussed, and a strategy for dealing with them in the future will be offered. There is a set of four transparencies to go with this talk, This paper is one of the titles which Warfield assembled into a manuscript collection under the title "Essays on Complexity", in 1997-1998. Also the full text is on the web at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/t-iasis/paper/p3.htm ? EDUCATION PAPERS BY WARFIELD, contains this paper inVOL6. ESSAYS ON COMPLEXITY contains this paper in PART 1


 

Additional Info

  • Category: Education, Languages, Science
  • Size: 120 Minutes approx
  • Description: 10 videodisks, CD-ROM, containing 9 video lectures derived from VHS cassettes. Accompanying textual materials
  • Album Name: ASOGD Vols 1 & 2, Nov 2003
  • Publication Year: 1993
  • Publication Month: 10
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