As much as we enjoy deriding communism, anti-Americanism and childish victimism, hypocrisy definitely takes the cake; if you’re going to spout morally and ideologically bankrupt drivel, then at least do so genuinely. That is, don’t be like the wannabe commies at Keep Building Brown (KBB), who, it turns out, fashioned their utopian Ivy League manifesto for a class.

So kids, will you share your project with the rest of homeroom?:

KBB is a critique of capitalism and the University system as a manifestation and a manufacturer of that system.

But not so fast proletarians! In Brown’s classes server for “Course MCM 1700: Radical Media,” we find the “Anti-Capitalist Group” responsible for KBB, describing their project in the “Student Work” section. Personal statements, laudatory website stats (self-promotion whee!) and hilarious pics abound.

The Red Menace has no clothes: Keep Building Brown are just academia-enslaved attention-whores in denial. Check the wiki for a deeper and even more inane summary of the ridiculous revolutionaries’ improbable and incongruous mission, which manifested in lame protests, disruptively loud “audio detournement” (what?), and general 9th-grade angst earlier this year.

So, Gabriel Doss, Monica Garcia, Crow Jonah Norlander, Julian Park and Tracy Szatan (web-celebs!), why did you fight the law, and who won?

Our project was initially conceived of as a timely disruption intended to trivialize the importance students give to finals period, grades, education, success, wealth, and so on

The irony—of so-called anti-academic provocateurs, decrying grade-grubbing and the monolithic “system” for a graded class project, posted on a student wiki—is so very delicious. But apparently, the hypocritical/hipolitical Brunonians are smarmy enough to admit it. Check out how trendy and ironic these kids’ political views are after the jump.

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In the Op-ed section of yesterday’s Times, Mark Taylor – chair of Columbia’s Religion Department – broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit – a city saddled with crime and unemployment – the dubious distinction of being America’s most miserable city).

We’re guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to “handle the entire content of learning” professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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