Universities and academies fail to teach scientific thought and rationality
By Rodrigo Neely
Article ID: 1220
As skeptics, we seek to promote science, scientific thinking, scientific fact and reason. These wonderful nouns have historically sprung from one place above all: universities. Universities can be referred to collectively as “the academy.”
Most scientific research is done through the academy. This has to do with the notion that basic science doesn’t generally have a direct profitable outcome. In fact, basic science is “science for science’s sake.” As a general rule, this is simply not funded by industry. So we get most of today’s scientific method and scientific fact from the academy.
In addition, reason, logic, and even the scientific method itself are all schools of philosophy. Philosophy is also primarily done at the academy.
I am a college student right now. I attend the University of Texas at Dallas, and transferred from Texas Tech University. My wife and I are both children of college professors and have basically been raised in the halls of the academy. My wife attends UT Southwestern graduate school. They have more Nobel laureates in science than you can shake a stick at. Both of us grew up in graduate student housing at Florida State University. As a kid, I learned to skateboard on the parking lots of Baylor in Houston and Washington in St. Louis. This is my cute way of saying I know a few things about the academy.
I study neuroscience at UT Dallas, and have found that an inordinate amount of my peers have not learned critical thinking. In one course, Integrative Neuroscience, they freaked out when the professor said that Intelligent Design was an incorrect intuition. These same students freaked out when they saw me reading Carl Sagan’s A Candle in the Dark, and were even shocked when I suggested that reading for pleasure should be a part of a well rounded science education. UT Dallas is the birthplace of carbon nanotubes, has hosted two Nobel Laureates in science, and produces chess masters the way Wisconsin produces cheese. Yet this is the average caliber of my peers.
I consider the hatred that my peers have for reading for pleasure, the shock they felt when they learned Intelligent Design is not a real scientific theory, and many other anecdotes - like how my school is hosting a student-sponsored psychic fair. This leads me to conclude that the academy is failing. I saw these same problems at Texas Tech, and every University that I have interacted with.
Philosopher Paul Kurtz, who is one of the fathers of the skeptical movement, wrote in his book The Transcendental Temptation
“I am critical of the kind of philosophy that prevails in Anglo-American philosophical circles. … It (philosophy) is like an ingrown toenail, turned within itself, festering with sharp linguistic distinctions and painful sophistries. The trouble with technical philosophy is that it has incapacitated philosophy proper, so that it hobbles about like a mendicant friar cloistered in a distant monastery on a remote island in the midst of an empty sea. … Most (philosophers) suffer lives of quiet desperation like celibate monks reading their sacred texts for nuances of inflection and meaning as the world passes them by (though today it is the professional journals that serve as their scriptures).”
Paul Kurtz is speaking here about academic philosophy, and I think he hits the nail on the head. This is also true about science.
Those of you who are skeptical activists, those of you who are members of the countless skeptical groups offering prizes for proof of supernatural power, when was the last time you felt you had strong support from academic science?
I know some of you are scientists. But be honest, could you label your presence a strong supporter of academic science?
Yet, skeptical activists provide strong support for academic science.
Every lay person I’ve met through the skeptical movement has had a firmer grip on science than my peers who are so close to their bachelors in neuroscience, or biology, or psychology, or geology.
Indeed this is a troubling reality. As skeptics we are knee-deep in this problem.
I’m afraid that on this issue I have more of a grasp of the problem than the solution. Science and rational philosophies must have a stronger presence in society, and the Academy is failing at this task.
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