The educated public favors subjective scholarship over dispassionate research today
Evidence
In our own day it is impossible not to notice that, in some fields at least, there is the beginning of a drift away from the academic; the educated public gives subjective scholarship an enthusiastic support which it combines with lip-service to research; and research has itself become discredited in certain contexts, by being too widely extended to inadequate and unimportant subjects. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1711
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Echoes criticism of ideology-driven humanities scholarship and the decline-of-objectivity debates in contemporary academia.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the author’s 1960s observation anticipate today’s ‘lived experience over expertise’ turn, and is the symmetry with medieval polemic really as tight as implied?