Levicoff Snuffs It

[Armando Ramos]

"I don't want to rip the guy, but..." then proceeds to rip the guy.

Never understood why Doogle tolerated the joke Levitard, other than because they both had "degrees" from the Union Clown College and Finishing School. 

Levitard's 324-page dissertation was apparently based on the theory that the bigger the pile of bullshit the less likely it is that anybody is going to bother sifting through it. To criticize it as anything more than an egotistical dumpster fire you would first have to read all of it, which no sane person is going to bother with.

Example:

In 1972, I went to Chicago for an extended visit with my brother and his family. Warren was a racing photographer, a prosperous way of earning a living back then, and lived in a large town house on the South Side, not far from the University of Chicago.

The house had become a commune of sorts. One of the other residents was Jerry Samuels, a musician who had become known for his song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha". He had recorded the piece using the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, and was well known in the musical underground.
. . .
I was born and raised in the Jewish faith. Like many of my generation, my family was Jewish in culture, though we hardly attended synagogue or practiced Judaism as a religion. In our predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia, there was a common understanding: even if a lot of families were not religiously observant, we were Jewish. And that was all that mattered. Judaism, to us, was not just a religious faith (for though we didn't practice many religious teachings we still proclaimed Judaism as our faith); it was a way of life. It was engaging in Jewish culture, supporting the sanctity and the nationhood of Israel, eating bagels and lox (always the Nova Scotia variety), and staying at home on significant Jewish holidays. (After all, we may not have gone to synagogue, but we didn't want the neighbors to see us going to work or school as usual.) Even though we weren't overtly religious, it still meant lighting the candles at Chanukah, eating matzoh during Passover, and wearing a Star of David or a chai (Hebrew symbol for life).
. . .
In 1976 at the age of twenty-two, I became a born again Christian. . . . At the same time, I remain culturally Jewish, right down to the bagels and lox (still the Nova Scotia variety).

None of this has anything to do with his topic, and nobody gives two shits about it in any event. Just a self-important ramble about nothing. 

Now, comparing two Union Institute dissertations is kind of like comparing rotten apples and rotten oranges, or trying to decide which transgender woman is the least repulsive. Doogle actually did prove that most people don't give two shits about regional accreditation either, and that the number of "right" responses increases when the interrogator tells the subject what he thinks the "right" answer is. Not exactly front page news anywhere but in Doogle's mind,  but he at least took the trouble to throw in a statistical analysis and made it look like a real dissertation. Overall a pointless exercise to be sure, but then most dissertations are.

In the end, what we have here is less a battle of academic rigor and more a contest in self-indulgence. Levitard's bloated, meandering opus is a vanity project disguised as scholarship—less concerned with insight than with inflating his own importance. Doogle, while hardly producing anything groundbreaking, at least made a pass at structure and analysis. Neither effort justifies the paper they’re printed on, but if you’re forced to pick between bad and worse, you might lean toward the one that at least makes a gesture toward substance rather than parading around in a clown suit.