Funny interview with the author of Higher Education:

COLBERT: Everybody makes mistakes in college. Why can’t one of those mistakes be going to college?

HACKER: [laughing] You’re going to end up with six figures in debt….That is not a good way to spend your twenties.

COLBERT: Okay, what about not going to college at all…do you have to go to college to be successful?

HACKER: You have to go to college to be “properly middle class.” To become, as it were, “one of us.” There are people with BAs and people without BAs, and there’s a sharp divide between them.

COLBERT: Well, what if the people without BAs just pick up pitchforks and kill all the people with BAs?

HACKER: Well, the people with BAs would try to reason with them…

Thanks to Adam and ccshinobi for the link.

From Richard Dawkins’ introduction to A Devil’s Chaplain:

Dawkin’s Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to —and do— work hard to make their language as simple as possible (‘but no simpler,’ rightly insisted Einstein.) Other academics —some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science— suffer from what Peter Medawar called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance.

From “Postmodernism Disrobed”:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

Or as David Byrne sings in “Psycho Killer”:

You’re talking a lot
but you’re not saying anything
When I have nothing to say
my lips are sealed

But let’s be clear: there is plenty of shitty writing going on in the sciences, too.

Via “Deep Simplicity: A Personal Graphics Manifesto (Part 2)” by Alberto Cairo, a piece in which he’s pointing out the needless jumble of a lot of infographics floating around out there.

Tim is a good friend and mentor of mine, a guy who helped Meg and me a lot when we moved to Austin. I respect him greatly as a thinker, a family man, and just a straight-up mensch. This is a great, clear-headed post that contains some good tips for those thinking about getting a PhD, too.

…the very best reason to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities is so that you can pursue a career as a college professor….a wise thing that Bill [Brands] said before I ever applied to Texas A&M: If I want to be a professor, get a Ph.D, but if I want to write books, … write books.

This is a nice blog post on the looming student loan crisis with a list of ideas that could help. Sent to me by @dsawler.

Also: I promise I’ll just post some pretty pictures soon, before y’all jump off a bridge.