I’m not a humanities expert. I just write about things I barely understand.
Rimshot
I don’t mean to be insulting. I think the humanities are vital to understanding ourselves.
But is that academic sub-world an increasingly frustrating place to be in? Erik Hansen shared a link to an interesting article by Ian Bogost. Ian wades hip-deep into something that’s outside my personal bubble of understanding. Here’s a great explainer:
A lot of part-time faculty, especially in less marketable fields, can’t seem to get side jobs anywhere that keep them above the poverty line. And there’s a trend toward having more faculty be part-time, partly as a cost-cutting measure. (Erik)
I work as an admin in a basic science lab. We’re fairly insulated from the university culture. By all appearances, the people here are quite happy, but I’m willing to bet that’s because we aggressively court (and obtain) NIH funds. But some people here exchange stories that relate to Ian’s observations. And by ‘observations’, I mean they’re very happy to not be poor.
Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton’s New Republic review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand’s suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school should be hard because it’s supposed to “test people who think they have this sort of calling.” Croxall rejoins Grafton for refusing to offer a solution. (Bogost)
Maybe it's me, but the traditional college campus is seeming a tiny bit more anachronistic than it used to. (Creative Commons image "DILO: University campus" by tillwe at Flickr)
I could quote the whole damned thing and be no closer to truly absorbing the principle observations and data. Just go there and read it. Maybe you’ll do better than I. But the source of the frustration is palpable in the following bit:
The part-time problem is real, don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, most humanities programs haven’t even considered change. We haven’t tried to reinvent ourselves, but instead have only reproduced the same structures that have existed for half a century. We have fashioned our own turtleneck hairshirts, and yet we complain about their discomfort as if we don’t even know that we’re wearing them. (Bogost)
The bigger picture
I often wonder about the future of education.
But this is only because, during my lifetime, I’ve watched the difficulty of obtaining information drop like a rock. In my youth, I spent a lot of time in libraries. I used the card catalog, I perused the aisles. I grabbed the stacks of books.
It’s a tired subject at this point, but the internet and search engines have disrupted education. So have free college lectures. Add all the options into the mix and you get big problems for institutions that aren’t known for their agility.
Bracketing the valid and troubled problems of the structure and operation of universities for a minute, perhaps the reason the part-time academic life seems so dangerously afflicted to humanists is because “the cultural role of the humanist,” to use Croxall’s words, has been so hamstrung by its very proponents. Humanists don’t have the faintest clue about the cultural role of anything; like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, they only know the world as it has been filtered through the very institutionalization they claim oppresses them. (Bogost)
Universities are still vital. Streaming video still doesn’t replace the atmosphere and access to talent. But the university structure much change, but hell if I know how to do it. Conversations like Ian’s are important, though, because they signal that there’s some serious thinking about how to escape this crisis.
If you have something to add, or something correct, please do so in the comments. It’s how I learn. And, say it with me, learning is fun. If it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
