Reflection on Syllabus
I find that my syllabus was a little bit backward (or in some sense forward looking). I planned to study first the debates around the Science Wars in a historical setting and then the underlying material and political problems of academia that may have contributed. However, what I am doing now is looking for secondary sources on the debates from the past few years and I am zeroing in on the important documents of the debates themselves. I am not teaching a class on the Science Wars; I am writing a thesis. Therefore, I need to research the actual events first and put them into context later. When I finally write the thesis, I hope to have it in the chronological/thematic order that is presented in the syllabus. At the moment, I must start in medias res. In this case, I am taking about Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition the Academic Left, answers to the book in Social Text and other publications as well as Sokal’s hoax.
