The Ivory Tower Effect

The US has too many PhDs.  You see this in the silliness of extreme DEI positions, overwrought intersectionality theories, the number of scientific paper that end up retracted, and confusing gender in language with gender in biology.   

We got into this mess with the best of intentions - Of course!

After WW2, when the men stated to be released from the military, the economy couldn't really absorb the sudden increase in the workforce.  Part for the solution was to pass the GI Bill.  Increasing college graduates in the 1950s served at least 2 purposes.  First, it removed bodies from the labor market, especially in the "blue-collar" fields, which allowed wages to increase for this part of the population.  Second, it increased the educated population and the scientific pool of expertise, allowing expanded experimentation and increasing the knowledge base rapidly.  However, much of this expanded base of college educated individuals was supported by the government.  President Eisenhauer recognized part of the danger here in his farewell address: "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."  Today, with the wisdom of hindsight, I would broaden this concern to include a college based intellectual elite.   

The Sputnik shock just increased the societal pressure to increase our pool of college educated, and then President Kennedy's elevation of College PhDs, rather than Business experience re-enforced the trend.

So by the early 60s, the US had a large and continuously expanding population of college graduates, which also meant a large and continuously expanding population of college professors and PhDs.  And college professors, to increase their "value" in their competitive environment must publish, and especially publish "new" material, "new" theories, "new" results.

This lead to the widespread acceptance in the college environment of the "new" theories coming out of (mostly) Europe, which can be lumped into "Post-Modernism".  And Post-Modernism can't really be definitely defined by what is it, but rather by what it isn't.  Britannia defines it as: " a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power."  So everything is subjective, relative, to be viewed skeptically, to be viewed through your preferred lens of ideology, and without the sideboards of reason.

Compounding this, of course, was Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap."  This applies to science as well as Science Fiction.  It also applies to the increasing numbers of PhDs.  And with the expanded numbers of PhDs, the raw amount  of crappy "science" - especially in fields where post-modernism was present - began an explosion.

We are now in our 2hd or third generation of expanded dominance of what used to be called the "Ivory Tower" elite in our government and culture.

So today, things the Sokal Affair (and similar, follow-up publications) demonstrate that even the supposed intellectual "elites" can't identify obvious falsehoods in their own field.

This is an inevitable consequence of the "over-selling" of college, the resulting increase in the PhD population, the need for the PhD population to publish, and Sturgeon's Law.  What makes it worse, of course, is exactly what President Eisenhauer warned about the capture of public policy be an "intellectual" elite.  An intellectual elite often not able to apply rigorous reason to position, and that elevates Ideology and skepticism over objective fact.