# 46: What is Academia? Don’t Ask the Dumbest Generation
Story behind the Passage
“Oh, could you please be a little less academic about this?”
Have you ever heard this sentence in response to something you said or presented? If yes, you are probably above 30 and graduated from a university that actually deserves the name. If you are feeling caught right now because you keep saying this to others, please stop reading right here. It is an accident that you landed on this page. There is nothing for you to learn because learning is not your business anyways. You have already read more than 80 words at this point. This is way more than your brain can digest.
How come, I am so grumpy today? Guess what, I need to talk about something that really bothers me. You are going to call me an arrogant smart ass “academic” after this but that is o.k. I simply want to ask the question of what academia/scholarship/science means? It seems to be something that nobody has any idea about — at least, no idea that comes even close to the facts. And the reason why such a knowledge gap can emerge is usually because the people responsible for defining it are mute.
That is the status quo.
Want another story of how this status quo is reflected in everyday business? Here it is. A colleague of mine who works as a coach just told me about this today. He had presented a very simple — simmmppplle — chart on leadership style to his workshop participants; all of them supposedly well-educated and in advanced management positions. The chart had two axes and four single word labels, that was it. Three of the participants immediately went like: “Oh, please, could you put away this academic stuff and be a bit more practical?” Geeeeee, you know what? My colleague has never ever done anything in academia! He is a practitioner with many decades of experience in business consulting! But as soon as someone presents something that is one step beyond Twitter length and contains 1% “theory,” people’s brains already pass out.
I have encountered situations like these again and again. In my case, people think they are right when blaming me for my academic background, even though I know that the stuff I present has nothing to do with scholarship as such. Charts like the one presented by my colleague are more simple and clear than anything you even find in a daily newspaper. And yes, of course, this is my definition of “simple” but as I am trying to explain here, the baseline of where “abstract” starts has dropped considerably from the perspective of more people, not just me. You would expect an elementary school kid to understand a chart like this. But I guess, members of the dumbest generation, now also including people from 20 to 50, do not even understand the news anymore — nor do they care about current (political) events, it seems.
The common denominator that most people outside academia seem to be agreeing on when defining scholarship is: complicated, useless, snobby stuff that nobody needs in the real world — supposedly. People who think this way can be found in all walks of life. They are managers and decision makers across all private and public institutions. And these are preferably the people who are so much into “education” and personnel development. They spend thousands and even millions of Euros each year on coaches and trainers in their organizations to teach their staff the latest life and business “hacks.”
90% of this money is for the trash.
Because next year, they will hire new coaches and trainers to teach them the same stuff. But since this “new” stuff has a different label and different catch words in the blurb they read (people like this do manage to read up to 50 words, I would say), they are totally excited about the innovations around. And then they end up booking these people for talks and workshops and trainings… And then they are so happy and proud that they are advancing their organizations.
And next year they run out of business.
They have to close down.
People lose their jobs.
How could this happen? They were always ahead when it came to learning...
Hellllllooooooo? Anybody at home in this empty dark container called BRAIN?
The difference between the kind of learning I am describing above and the learning that smart and educated people engage in is that the latter folks are able to recognize patterns. They immediately see the source behind all the noise on the surface. And if not, they at least have the inner sensor and the skills to detect that some sort of common source must be behind all this. As soon as you have gotten hold of this source, this fundamental set of principles and validated findings (once generated and curated by scholars), the supposedly “new” stuff will not bother you that much. You might be pleased by the new packaging of the old material but you will not be tempted to buy everything and pour money down the drain.
This is not to say that the packaging itself has no value. Indeed, the new keywords and the digital format of the material might make it more fun to learn. But in the end, you will walk away from the coaching workshop or the seminar without much new stuff in your brain — if any. Maybe you even left early because you were bored. You might have gained some inspiration, however, of how to communicate in a more creative way whenever you yourself have nothing new to offer to your boss or colleagues but want to impress him/her.
Does any of this sound familiar?
We live in an age of bullshitting.
Everything and everybody is loud — on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube…
Guess what, these people have no business. That is why they have the time to be loud.
Am I one of them because I am writing on a blog?
Are there differences between this kind of writing and the other kind?
I am getting off topic here, as sometimes happens. But you know what? I am just so sick of where our education system has taken us that I do not know how to even talk about this in a more structured way. I might sound like a grandma already but I am just the product of a decent education. Without this education, I would feel just as overwhelmed and stressed out as many others by the constant information overload (personal benefit) and I would not be as helpful to others (benefit for society). Of course, everyone is valuable for society, you might say now — true. But my focus here is different.
What kind of society are we even talking about? If the stupidity continues, we are probably going to lose all the historical breakthroughs of social progress that people with sufficient brain capacity where able to contribute in the past. And you know how you can see this already? You might not have any idea about technology, business, or the natural sciences. Me neither. But when I read that Germany is not successful in science transfer and when I see reports about school children who do not even have access to computers in school — what does this tell me?
Yes, right. We are stuck. We are not moving forward. And please — try to get this into your brain. This is not abstract. This is for real. Very practical. Let us add an exercise here real quick:
Think of your most important health or business problem.
Think of how you will feel when the problem has been solved next year.
Now add 100 years to that.
How are you feeling now?
Disappointed?
Well, guess what, the likelihood that your problem will be fixed in your lifetime increases considerably if there are smart people around you with the ability to fix it. But that is not likely to happen, as it seems. The world is getting dumber. We are all getting dumber. The younger you are, the more stupid you are. And I mean in both ways: less intelligent (IQ) and less intellectual (education). I just googled and found a number of articles on this.
But I am not writing a scientific paper here. I cannot even do that. I am not a scientist. If anything, part of me is a humanities scholar. Most of me is a humanist. You will find other articles claiming that there is no decrease of intelligence. That is fine. Whenever there is a thesis, there are arguments and papers supporting it. And then there are papers claiming the opposite. That is the point when you need to dig more deeply into the material to find out under which circumstances an argument is ‘true’ or ‘false.’ By the way, this is what scholarship is all about. Are you getting it?
I just want to talk about what I see from my subjective perspective today and all the stupidity I see around me makes me really worried. How do I define stupid? Well, just read what Bauerlein (66) writes:
I can totally confirm this. But Bauerlein wrote this more than ten years ago. Today, I think, we are facing an e-literacy that has turned into illiteracy already. And please do not get me wrong: I grew up with a computer, I loved playing video games, I still like to play around with tech toys. The difference between embracing technology and depending on it is: I have a brain that can use technology to become better and faster at what I do. The dumb generation has no alternative. It does not understand. And I am including the dumb generation in corporate management as well as the dumb heads in startup hubs who procrastinate by running from one “workshop” and “brainstoarming” to the other.
Now that I am talking about the “dumb generation” already, let me get to the main passage from Bauerlein’s book above and its relation to academia and the lack of a definition. I encountered his book when doing research for my last book. I was very interested in the relation between the liberal arts education and the overall level of education in U.S. society. So, when I relate Bauerlein’s findings to my observations from Germany , there is a risk of generalizing too much. Still, based on what I am observing, this problem of mass stupidity is not an American problem, it is everywhere — especially in the highly industrialized countries.
And the universities play a huge part in this mess.
My Learnings
“Education would preserve the sovereignty of the people, and without it the very system designed to represent them would descend into yet another tyranny in the dismayingly predictable course of nations.” Bauerlein is talking about Jefferson’s democratic ideal here and this ideal applies to any democratic order in the world. If you want to find out what happens if the worst case described by Jefferson takes place, look at the U.S. in the Trump era or at other countries which are caught in violence and ignorance. Even look at the German news these days with right-wing populists sitting in parliaments — with the votes of people who lack the education to look beyond rhetoric and who very often have university diploma.
So, what does this have to do with the definition of academia?
You know what, scholars produce new knowledge as the foundation of innovation. And universities as the unity of research and teaching are supposed to pass on this knowledge to the students and to society at large. That already indicates the flaw in the system. Passing on knowledge is based on communication. And there is hardly any functioning communication between the social systems; between academia, business, and society.
Scholars are somewhere out of space for the common public.
Business people only care about getting things done without much thinking.
Students and the young generation are pissed off by universities — for several reasons, some of them quite understandable — and prefer to get their education from blogs, YouTube clips, and self-declared coaches.
The latter education is exactly the non-education that makes them become executives who spend much money on crap in a nice packaging. But it does not bother them because, as you can read above, ignorance is something that you do not notice yourself. That is the nice thing about it. It does not bother you because only people who actually think get worried and thinking is not part of the daily ritual for the stupid and ignorant.
How can we fix this lamentable situation?
Very easy: Could we talk to each other again?
One major reason why people outside the Ivory Tower have an image of scholarship and universities that does not at all reflect the crucial value higher education should have for society is because they do not communicate. How could anybody understand what scholars do if they, the professors, never talk about it — in practical terms? What does a scholar do? What do the students actually learn? What is behind the supposedly complicated language? What is the essence? Why not make it simple?
“No, I do not need to hear any of this,” some might say. “I know what they learn there and I do not like it. We have no use for complicated tables and graphs and long texts. We need quick solutions.”
Go back to the beginning of my text if that is what you are thinking.
If not, please be willing to just move one step closer to real LEARNING. Sorry, but if any text that is longer than 100 words or any chart that has more than three squares or circles looks like SCHOLARSHIP to you and therefore is too complicated — please check your grades from high school. They were not that great? Well, there you go. Maybe you were never among the people who valued learning. Why should you start now?
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” — Benjamin Franklin
That is o.k. If you want to remain stupid and ignorant, that is your decision. Please, do not blame it on scholarship — because what you are seeing most likely has nothing to do with scholarship. And please do not complain about your CEO or any other leader in the nation. Only well-informed and educated citizens have the capability to prevent disasters when dropping the ballott paper in the box. You can have a happy life without this. But it will most likely be one without progress, without new technology, without more human welfare.
If we want all this — human flourishing, health, technological innovation, someone has to make the first step. And the only someone who can make things happen is you.
YOU, dear scholar, please get in touch with the outside world of business and society, even if it might appear dull and simple to you — at first sight. Share your brain power and prove that thinking can make a difference.
YOU, dear business person, please start practicing two simple questions and apply them in your daily business when talking to your bosses and colleagues: “Who are we building this for? Why?”
Reflection Questions
1) What is your definition of scholarship/academia?
2) In which areas of life/business do you personally see a decline of brain power?
3) Do you question what your boss tells you to do? How?