"Area studies" is bogus. Asian studies, American studies, Latin American studies: it's all really dumb. Is it a good idea to lump countries together and talk about their cultures and politics in such a broad way? Area studies gives us the impression that all of the countries in a given area are homogenous, that we can talk about "Latin America" in a general way and, in doing so, encompass all the countries that make up Latin America. This is not possible. Each country is different, with its own problems and history. Argentina is not the same as Mexico (indeed, even within the geographically-defined region of Latin America, they have very little to do with each other except for the language they speak) or Brazil (which speaks Portuguese) or Cuba or Chile. Why not have individual classes that talk about the history and culture of each country? And make them history classes, because that's what area studies is: the history of an area whose countries' only commonality is that these countries are in the same geographic area.

Area studies is another easy way for people to get doctorates. This is the difference between old-school history in which we investigate the past and look for new evidence of things. New-school history involves using fancy linguistical or theoretical terms to re-interpret history (the physical penetration into the jungles of Africa was really metaphorical for the sexual penetration into the female. Don't give me that crap that would make even Freud's hair stand on end) and apply fancy philosophy to it (usually of the post-colonial variety). This re-interpretation does not contribute anything new to history. It's like the dotcoms of the late '90s that failed because they didn't actually produce anything.

This is the continuing cycle of academia: people become academics because it easy and they don't have to do produce anything tangible. They can engage in a lot of abstract philosophising, which I can do from the comfort and convenience of the bathtub. One day, academia will suffer from this lack of new, concrete information -- like academic incest -- which furthers human beings' understanding of the world.

Perhaps the best example of the meaningless academic is Jacques Derrida, a French linguist and the father of deconstructionism. Derrida developed his career simply by saying that everyone else was wrong. You think this is the correct interpretation of this literature? Wrong. In fact, guess what? There is no correct interpretation, due to the subjectivity of language. This is not the correct way to contribute to human understanding; saying that everything is wrong does not make the human race any smarter than it was before. This is the same reason why Weird Al Yankovic isn't too terribly respected: he criticizes others' work but produces no original work of his own.