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The
Humanities Today
Over the years I've written a few things stating my
point of view about university education today, with special attention to
the humanities. My opinion is that there are a number of serious problems
there, of several different kinds, and that they will probably get worse.
While these pieces are meant to be provocative, I also mean most of what I
say here.
Les Érudits Maudits:
Education and Class
So only the few and the proud will be interested in
my érudit maudit concept. In fact, however, our society is
opulent enough that it is possible to live decently at quite a low
relative economic level. And while certain pleasures and comforts will
need to be sacrificed, the most painful sacrifice will be success
itself. People often talk about “true success”, but nobody really
believes that success is anything but money. Those making the
bohemian sacrifice will have to choose between taking a lot of ribbing
and nagging about their personal failure, and just cutting unsympathetic
people out their lives. Neither option is an appealing one.
8. What is inevitable is not
necessarily good, and the methodologization, etc., of literary studies
is really the shitty colonization of an ultimate value or form of play
by instrumental, productive, positivist, and bureaucratic forms of
organization.
"Much has been written about the divide between academe and "the
real world," and about academic writing versus popular writing. But
far less has been said about the split within the academy between
those who care about the popularization of academic learning —
either they want to be popularizers, or they enjoy reading
popularizers, or they at least feel a professional obligation to
know who the popularizers are — and those who do not."
The Purpose of the
University (with special attention to the humanities)
The nub of the problem is that everyone wants to be
a professor, but only a few can. The hopeful, doomed graduate
students are propping up a system which, for most of them, will
never work. The professor is a survival from a bygone day when
cultured elites actual ran the world. Culture has always been a
money-loser, but even a century or so ago political power was
exercised mostly by people who had mastered classical languages
and other genteel ornaments. More recently, only transient and
unreliable subsidies from the universities have kept humanist
intellectuals from descending to the marginal, semi-criminal
status of the clerc maudit Francois Villon.
Mary Midgeley on the PhD
"I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the
indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with
difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard
subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big
questions that provide its context - the background issues out of
which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a
corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to
look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own.
Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles
without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder."
Forget the BA!
"But wait a minute! The BA
degree is not a vocational program. It's for cultural
enrichment!" That's all very fine, but do you really want to
start off in life with a five-figure debt and working at $8.00 an
hour? Cultural enrichment is fine for heirs and heiresses who
will inherit the family business or marry money, but is it
something to make enormous financial sacrifices for? In the first
place, a lot of B.A.students slack their way through school
skipping the readings anyway. In the second place, if you like to
read, you can buy the books and read them on your own. The people
who are giving you this cultural enrichment stuff are people who
need you to study with them, because if you don't, they won't
have jobs. If you and your parents have to make a lot of
sacrifices in order for you to study with these guys, that's
perfectly OK as far as they're concerned.
Can I Afford a PhD?
There are ways to win at musical
chairs, but if there are twenty players and five chairs, fifteen
people are going to lose. For the universities this is no problem
at all, because grad student T.A.s and cheap post-doc adjunct
professors are what keep the system going. Every generation, the
schools need to find a new batch of suckers to feed through the
grinder, and every generation so far they've succeeded in doing
so.
Should I go to grad school
Less negativistic short version of the above.
Response to discussions at Crooked Timber and Unfogged.
The college of my dreams
What would I do if someone gave me a
few million dollars to start a new college?
I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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