ON Bullshit & Crap Detecting

Dear College,

The Goodies and the Baddies:
a pox on both their housings
but if you force me to choose,
I’m more at home with the
Baddies and all their Badness
than with the Goodies and
all their Goodiness.
 
This will sound ridiculous to the
Baddies and offensive to the
Goodies, but it’s how I feel.
Still & overall. A pox on both
their housings.
 
While I do trust the intentions, I don’t trust the
language and sound of all our strategic objectives
and goals & kow-tow to SACS. Back in the 60’s
Neil Postman wrotea book called Teaching as A
Subversive Activity in which, among other things,
he recommend that schools should provide students
with their own Crap Detector.
 
http://criticalsnips.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/neil-postman-bullshit-and-the-art-of-crap-detection/
 
And Harry G. Frankfurt, professor of philosophy at
Princeton published On Bullshit in the mid-eighties.
republished in 2005 where it spent 27 weeks on the
New York Times Best Seller list.
 
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
 
And I right now put forward the possibility that
Bullshit Detecting might could be the aim of the
Gen-Ed part of our curriculum, that part distinct
from the vocational disciplinary-interdisciplinary
majors & minors part of our curriculum. which 
I call the special ed part.
 
Some euphemizing would be necessary: we couldn’t
call it Bullshit Detecting and that right there is bullshit,
understandable but bullshit never the less. Even more
problematic: there is a Good Bullshitting  and Bad
Bullshitting and the term itself doesn’t carry the
distinction.
 
I remember a class years ago where we were
bullshitting pretty good about “the passion of the
Western Mind,” a book that hyped up Aristotle’s
notion  that the energy of intellect we were trying
to nail down yesterday as maybe crucial to the
whole “energy’ crisis” Arthur Vining Davis is
sponsoring us to investigate.

It was flying thick and fast in that class (and some
what yesterday)  when suddenly one kid blurted out
"If someone opened the door and  looked in on us
for a moment, they'd declare “What Bullshit! What
total Bullshit going on.” 

And it was true. That's what would happen
And that sobered us up. And we got quiet..
 
Here’s what I wonder—and would ask  Laura & Jeff
& Paula & Katherine & Catherine & Margo and any
others interested in sustaining a conversation about our
energy and art and sustainable  resources:
 
how come, when it is so clear we
can now bullshit together (for good
and for ill, of course: entropical
& negentropical) what with our
Virtual Commons & 24/7/365
E-lectirc Company called Faculty L
and Faculty Think: we don’t take
advantage of this sustainable and
sustaining resource which is US?
 
All those awesome academic projects people reported
yesterday—sure: old  school scholarship, independent
research & faculty funded professional development trips
to here and there to read papers and attend conferences
and workshops: little schools and big universities are doing
that all over and always have.
 
But what about our Local Food?
US-in-Converse Action across the curriculum?
Our Amateur Standing  . Tell me, someone—anyone—
how this could NOT be our strongest  no-overhead
energy resource?   Explain to me why it is we haven’t
developed it.    What’s  the resistance when it’s a source
of Free Play for all and chief resource for any Leadership
in Liberal Art intention?  What prevenes?
 
Help.  Correct me, or what are colleague for?
 
PS.  what does it take to “work out” the “energy of the intellect”
as Aristotle described the source?  Our noetic Golds Gym?
 
ANYTHING
 
It don’t have to be Shakespeare. Try  defining “mind” &
see what it takes to come  to some shared terms together.
Or anything. Anything'll do it.  IT, I said.  Need we argue?

(Your silence on this question will speak volumes: I pray
for some sound and fury.)

xxxooo, Sam