See what I find depressing is that I'm a media and history grad. My degree is actually useful in terms of marketing and understanding target audiences and a huge part of my degree has been applicable in terms of being able to critical disassemble the bollocks using my understanding of propaganda (which is part of advertising too btw), politics and history. Its all about holding power to account. It also covered ethics in media and technology change again which has proved to be useful.
Yet media is always regarded as a mickey mouse degree. The reality is there are good media degrees and there are terrible ones.
A lot of these academics are doing stuff that isn't applicable and useful to the real world. Its just a pet project that no one else is ever going to give a shit about. And no one is looking at this and asking questions about its real world value and how many experts we need in certain fields.
Also, even though I am an arts grad, I am capable of learning and understanding at least the basics of bias in research, methodology and quality of research to a point where I know where something is utter bullshit. And I wouldn't go around questioning the methodology of Hilary Cass because she clearly knows what she's doing because I understand that!
Studying media and history also goes into a lot about understanding the quality of sources and bias. It does it in a different way but it is very much about understanding people with differing views and where this might be problematic to your understanding. It covers politics and propaganda in examining sources.
For supposedly clever people, even in completely unrelated fields, they are undeniably academically illiterate. Some of them are historians and media specialists and they aren't applying any level of quality analysis that I would expect even from those fields using the methodology applicable to those fields.
I go back to my point about good degrees and terrible degrees and it not just being the subject thats the problem.
These are people who have hidden in academia for years and years and no one has questioned their presence there.
They need to.
We are living at a time where there still this thing which Nigel Farage termed as 'the liberal elite' who are out of touch with reality. This sentiment has political traction and unfortunately the calibre of academics who spout bullshit like this only serves to help this. The far right damn well can capitalise on this nonsense. Just yesterday I was talking to a parent of a kid in my sons class and she was saying she was contemplating voting Reform. It makes me despair.
The centre ground really needs to take a look at this and start to have a clear out of grifters in academia and grifters in the charity sector who are there for no ones benefit but their own pay packets. Its not just embarassing, its politically dangerous in a number of ways which go way beyond the Cass Review.