The Four Color Media Monitor

The Times of Israel interviewed a UC San Diego professor, Thomas Levy, who published a GN autobiography titled The Boomer Archaeologist, about how archaeological and academia studies have evolved over 50 years, and today, it's regrettably collapsing:

When the Yom Kippur War broke out in Israel on October 6, 1973, American citizen Thomas Levy was in Athens studying Greek after working at a dig in a small prehistoric site in the north of the country.

Twenty years old at the time, he made his way to Israel to help out and spent two months milking cows at Kibbutz Eilot in the Arava Valley before flying back to Arizona, where he was attending college.

Today a prominent archaeologist, Levy tells the story in his newly released autobiography, “The Boomer Archaeologist – A Graphic Memoir of Tribes, Identity and the Holy Land,” illustrated by Levy’s niece Lily Almeida. The memoir was designed by Bhaveshkumar Suru and published by British academic publisher Equinox.

The book covers Levy’s life journey from Southern California, where he was born to Jewish parents whose families had fled Europe at the end of the 19th century, to Israel and back. It distills his own version of the American dream, archaeological work on four continents — including some revolutionary discoveries from the time of King David — and how, at the age of 72, he likes to joke that there only two things he knows how to do in life, archaeology and milking cows.

“This book is my story, a personal kind of coming-of-age story, but it’s also a story about how the field of archaeology has changed from the old days of doing surveys with paper maps and a compass, to this amazing world of cyber-archeology today,” Levy recently told The Times of Israel, meeting at a cafe in Jerusalem.

“At the same time, it’s also the story of how the American academia has changed over the years,” he added.

And how exactly? Here's the explanation, which he discussed in his GN:

At the same time, the atmosphere at UC San Diego, as at many other American universities, began to change dramatically.

“I was very privileged to get a job at one of the best research universities in the United States, and I kind of trace the degradation of that sort of elite,” he told The Times of Israel. “It used to be based on merit, and then it changed to a system that focuses on racial identity politics, and it’s really not healthy for research.”

In the book, he recalled that in 2010, he was working with a group of five students to examine artifacts from Jordan. After Levy praised their work as “the best of our meritocracy,” one of the students responded that “meritocracy is racism.”

Levy explained that in recent years it’s become increasingly difficult, to the point of being impossible, to work with students and prepare them for excellence in the field.

“I find that a lot of American graduate students today are not as invested in the adventure and excitement of archaeology,” he said. “The old way of being a graduate student was like a mentor-mentee relationship with the professor. Now, people count the hours; everything is monitored. It’s not fun anymore.”

What's particularly troubling is that the student undoubtably took the ethnic studies professor's claim entirely at face value. But at least Levy's bringing up an issue that's been harming academia for a long time now, and in illustrated format, creatively enough. Ironically, if the student alluded to in the GN buys all the aforementioned ethnic studies professor says, then in a way, it's like a mentor-mentee relation, but in a dark, distorted reflection type of way, as it amounts more to indoctrination. Perhaps academics like Levy might want to draw a whole comic about stuff like that?

And if today's USA students don't care for archaeology, it's a component of a college mentality that doesn't care about history in general, and that too is not a good omen. It's something in serious and vital need of change, and improvement. And we can only hope comics-style books are a good way to tackle the subject.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, history, indie publishers, msm propaganda, politics, science