JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: A GREAT MANY MODERN PHDs BEAR NO RESEMBLANCE TO JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S CONCEPT OF AN INTELLECTUAL - THEY ARE PRODUCTS OF A FACTORY SYSTEM

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the point of the intellectual was to be interested in everything. Joy Connolly agrees and recommends that postgrad courses should produce all-rounders who are better adapted to the real world

'Beware of experts with PhDs, they might just take over the world'

Indeed, you can see them all over, as cab drivers, as Starbucks servers, as vacuum cleaner salesmen, etc.

Any similarity between Jean-Paul Sartre's view of intellectuals and modern PHDs is strictly coincidental.

We have PHD factories today, churning them out by the platoon in such useless and non-intellectual subjects as film studies, television studies, education, women’s studies, black studies, journalism (a dead subject), sports administration (in the US), library studies (another dead subject), and on and on.