Graham didn't say that liberal-arts academia is a conspiracy. He said that the part of the humanities that makes heavy use of words like transgression/narrative/postmodern/gender constitutes "the more bogus end of the humanities".
I won't 100% support that, since I don't have a deep understanding of these areas. But I think it's in a valid range of opinion, given things like the Sokal affair [1]. All sorts of people are reasonably suspicious of the hard-to-understand output of the "Theory" and "Studies" fields, not just "STEM-lords".
The suspicion isn't restricted to the humanities either. We all know that business schools and social science departments are having their own problems right now with trendy findings that don't hold up. There's legitimate controversy over whether work in string theory represents meaningful scientific progress. Etc.
Some areas of academia have more problems with bogosity than others. It seems hard to dispute.
I won't 100% support that, since I don't have a deep understanding of these areas. But I think it's in a valid range of opinion, given things like the Sokal affair [1]. All sorts of people are reasonably suspicious of the hard-to-understand output of the "Theory" and "Studies" fields, not just "STEM-lords".
The suspicion isn't restricted to the humanities either. We all know that business schools and social science departments are having their own problems right now with trendy findings that don't hold up. There's legitimate controversy over whether work in string theory represents meaningful scientific progress. Etc.
Some areas of academia have more problems with bogosity than others. It seems hard to dispute.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair