While I’m criticizing my old schools, I shouldn’t overlook what appears to be an increasing and troubling connection between quack New Age guru Deepak Chopra and Chapman University. Chopra—whose professional specialties include enunciating meaningless blather about quantum physics (“Quantum health is based on the idea that we are always, forever, in transition”), endorsing Intelligent Design creationism (“In the fossil record there are repeated gaps that no ‘missing link’ can fill”), and making a fortune off of other fashionable health shams—was recently invited to speak at an interdisciplinary panel discussion on the nature of reality at Chapman, for example, even though Chopra is not a practitioner of any discipline and has nothing to contribute to a discussion of the nature of reality. Certainly not more than any layman. Chopra, founder of the “American Academy of Quantum Medicine,” is not a scientist, not a philosopher, and makes his living by abusing scientific terminology to give a façade of intellectual respectability to mumbo jumbo. Yet he was invited to speak at an event sponsored, not by a student organization or a religious group, but by the Scmid College of Science. And you can watch the video of Chopra’s baloney here, if you can stand it.
The Schmid College of Science is overseen by Menas Kafatos, a physicist, who has a profile on the Chopra Foundation’s website, coauthored an article with Chopra on the Huffington Post, and who received $100,000 from Chopra earlier this year. No doubt it is Dr. Kafatos who is responsible for the embarrassing decision to lend the name of the school in this way.
Chapman should be ashamed of associating itself with a well-funded crackpot. But it should be deeply humiliated to lend the name of its science school—and invite to address science students—a man who has nothing serious to contribute to the world of knowledge. For Chapman to put its imprimatur on Deepak Chopra hurts the institution’s credibility, damages the reputations of its serious professors, and ultimately defeats the purpose of a university education: to teach students to distinguish reality from fantasy.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend I discovered Tea Leaves by William McGregor Paxton. It’s just gorgeous—and, sadly, like so many of the greats of his day, subtly exploited for propaganda purposes in the descriptive paragraph on the Met’s website. Gilded age figurative painters, with their absurd interest in irrelevancies like beauty, were aiding evil capitalist exploitation and treating women as objects.... Because beautiful women elegantly painted = sexist exploitation and oppression = capitalism.
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