"I was reading with interest the profile of Joshua Angrist in the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli-American MIT economist who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in economics with two others when I came upon this uncongenial sentence: “Angrist said he was frustrated that many salaries, particularly in academia, were set using fixed pay grades, with professors in fields such as computer science and economics being paid the same as professors of literature, instead of being set by market forces, (emphasys mine) as they are elsewhere.”
Angrist apparently was much earlier deeply at odds with the way in which academic salaries were set in Israel. His words of 15 years ago were reprinted in The Jerusalem Post: “I was tired of the situation here. The Israeli system does not reflect the reality of pay differential by field. (emphasys mine)It’s the public system, and it’s not very flexible.” It seems to me that Israel was engaged in admirable initiative–treating a university as a community of scholars where knowledge flourished across disciplinary borders without affixing price tags on the comparative value of differing ways of knowing to be determined by market forces. (emphasys mine) An alternative approach would be to seek higher, apparently more appropriate salaries for the faculty across the board, which might have helped create a contented community instead of alienated economists and computer geeks who rushed for the exits whenever a foreign university offered more money to attract an Israel professor. (emphasys mine)
There is a further disturbing implication of Angrist’s invidious comparison. It is as if literature, and presumably the humanities overall, were a superfluous luxury in a society where computer science and economics are valued highly by the market. (emphasys mine) Professor Richard Falk (entire article here.)
As a literature professor and art lover I’ve been noticing this phenomenon for a long time. Mr Angrist's words reflects the combats humanities have been suffering to deliberately alter their particularity, their core or even eliminate them.
Neuroscience wants to approach all humanities’ fields and some “experts” are showing that they simply cannot understand let alone claim responsibility for anything related to aesthetics, art, literature, sociology… name it.. Their “studies” are laughable.
