Intellectuals vs. The Internet
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What sparked the viral outrage around Dr. Louks' thesis?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Our show today starts with a story of viral outrage. In November, an academic named Allie Lukes posted a photo of herself on X, holding her thesis. After years of work, she was celebrating finishing her PhD at Cambridge University.
What is the focus of Dr. Louks' PhD thesis?
My thesis is titled Olfactory Ethics, the Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. So I look at why certain authors of the past century use smell to indicate social hostilities. And I connect these literary examples with the real world understanding of smell and how we think about smell in society.
Ali thought she'd get a couple congrats comments and go on with her life. That's not what happened.
How did social media react to Dr. Louks' thesis announcement?
It didn't even occur to me, actually, that it could blow up in a negative way. After it was retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts who had kind of mocked the idea of my thesis and actually the fact that I was doing a PhD in English literature.
To make it clear, just the title alone of her thesis, which you could see in the picture she posted, was enough to make it go super viral. It now has over 126 million views. I'm sorry to say I was on X the day that this went viral. And let me tell you, that comment section was rough. Here's a taste of it. 10 years of childbearing youth that she will never regain.
A liberal arts education is worth nothing. Academia is a disaster. We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense.
What does anti-intellectualism mean in today's society?
Make education great again. It seemed like a perfect storm of cultural threads converging. Alt-right misogyny, the anti-woke crowd, calls for disinvestment in the humanities. And to me, it all pointed toward a larger threat, anti-intellectualism. That is, hostility and mistrust towards academics, experts, and education. And I'm not the only one seeing this.
How are cultural threads influencing views on education?
Researcher Matt Mata found that one in three Americans holds anti-intellectual views. But who benefits? I sat down with Dr. Allie Lukes. Just Allie is fine. And Dr. Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale.
Thank you so much.
To dig deeper into anti-intellectualism and what it means for the future of our democracy. To jump right in, Ali, I want to start with you. Despite a lot of the negative attention that came your way, you've really taken this and kind of run with it. I see you connect something new happening in culture back to your dissertation. All the time. You know, I think about how Cardi B recently posted about how she smelled, kind of touting her lack of smell in some ways as an asset. And you tied it back to your research. You were like, this is kind of what I'm talking about in my research. It's really cool to see you show people how to think a bit more critically about smell, despite everything else that happened.
What role does disgust play in politics and scholarship?
Yeah, well, that's the thing. I mean, smell is a sense that almost all of us possess. But it largely goes unacknowledged and uncritiqued. And olfactory language is really pervasive too. It's just that we're not used to thinking about it critically. So it's not difficult for me, actually, to recognise these instances where my work is relevant in the world. It's something that I've been doing for years. It's just that I haven't been posting about it on social media. I've been putting it in my thesis.
So Jason, I heard you're not online like that anymore. Yeah. But you did read about what happened with Ali's thesis and the reaction to it. What was your initial reaction?
Well, it's interesting that the far right targets exactly the scholars who are studying elements of the far right. So they're trying to attack the aspects of scholarship that allow us to understand scholarship. their politics and their propaganda. A lot of the politics of the far right is the politics of disgust. And smell is, of course, a central feature of disgust. So I'm seeing that aspect recur. And then, of course, the very idea that there's scholarship that may problematize the ordinary status quo and that scholarship is done by women is taken as an existential threat.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What sparked the viral outrage around Dr. Louks' thesis?
0:02–0:36
2
What is the focus of Dr. Louks' PhD thesis?
0:36–1:09
3
How did social media react to Dr. Louks' thesis announcement?
1:09–2:04
4
What does anti-intellectualism mean in today's society?
2:04–2:30
5
How are cultural threads influencing views on education?
2:30–3:34
6
What role does disgust play in politics and scholarship?
3:34–6:39
7
How does socioeconomic status relate to education in America?
6:39–7:07
8
What connection exists between elite status and anti-intellectualism?
7:07–14:58