Xirl Science
In my youth when we hunted the mammoth and sabretooth, it became clear to me that a lot of jobs in corporate America are pointless. I was working at a big company that had to go through a round of layoffs. They called is Reduction In Force, which quickly became RIF. People were riffed rather than fired or let go. The banality of evil lies in corporate jargon. As a low level functionary with computer skills my job was to keep track of who had been riffed by their job function.
The first thing I noticed is management did not seem to know what many of their positions did for the company. The managers could talk about their direct reports, but the people creating the titles and roles were often unsure about the reason the positions were created in the first place. Most jobs seemed to evolve into an all-around staff assistant after they were created. Assistant accounting manager was just an office clerk that worked in a cubicle over in accounting.
The other thing that became clear is the work being done by the people riffed was not all that important as no one missed it. Some tasks were moved to other people, but most of it was just busy work that was eliminated with the person. The 20% cut in office staff did not result in 20% less work. It just reduced the number of meetings and the volume of paper moving around the office. The truth was, many of the remaining jobs were just make work as well.
When you read the work product of the academy, the thing you see right away is much of it is nonsense busy work. These are people with no useful skills and nothing to do so they fritter away their time in a game of make believe. They imagine themselves as academic and intellectuals. Their specialty is basically a hobby of their own creation, which is an offshoot of their mentor’s hobby. You could eliminate the social science and humanities and no one outside the academy would notice.
The other thing you notice about these nonsense fields is the struggle to apply these boutique theories to anything resembling reality. Queer studies makes perfect sense within the extremely narrow scope of academic queerness. Outside of that narrow scope it makes no sense whatsoever. Much of what is produced in these pseudo-intellectual fields – that is a generous description – is a desperate attempt to apply these crackpot theories to real world situations.
The financial structure of the American university system is unsound and serious cracks are starting to appear. There has been a 15% decline in public university enrollments over the last two years. Some of it is due to the Covid panic, but that is just an accelerant in this trend. The higher education Ponzi scheme cannot withstand drops in enrollment without it creating very serious financial problems. Demographics is only going to make this issue more obvious.
You have to wonder if what lies over the horizon is the biggest reduction in force we have seen since the collapse of the buggy whip industry. Colleges will be forced to cut costs and the low hanging fruit is the nonsense studies. It is not hard to imagine a university system riffing entire departments. We may be seeing the peak of bourgeois decadence in higher education. What lies ahead is a massive contraction that eliminates these sorts of fields entirely.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro and Holiday Schedule
- Identity Politics
- Whitey & Whiteness
- Xirls and Xims
- Our Glaciers, Ourselves
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