The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives
October 13th, 2010I personally know someone who recently got a tenure track position in a French department. Yes! It’s true. (I exhale deeply and lean back in my chair with sense of awe and wonderment at his achievement.) Of course, he might simply be fired after four to eight years—increasingly, this is how alleged tenure track jobs wind up—but let’s just bask in the golden light of miracles for now.
Via: New York Times:
In a response to last week’s column on “Howl,” the movie about Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Charlie from Binghamton asked, “What happened to public investment in the humanities and the belief that the humanities enhanced our culture, our society, our humanity?” And he speculated that it “will be a sad, sad day if and when we allow the humanities to collapse.”
What he didn’t know at the time is that it had already happened, on Oct. 1, when George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, announced that the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs were getting the axe.
For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting.
Now Spanish is the only safe department to be in. Russian’s stock has gone down, one presumes, because in recent years the focus of our political (and to some extent cultural) attention has shifted from Russia to China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq. Classics has been on the endangered species list for decades. As for theater, the first thing to go in a regime of bottom-line efficiency are the plays.
And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)
here in ‘big city in Texas’ we have high schools that are going to straight core curriculum, no Art, Languages, Electives, Sports, etc….now, these are schools who ‘failed’ in Bush’s NCLB statistical scoring system and were going to be closed anyway, so they fired all the teachers who teach the above, kept the Math, English, Science and History teachers and re-opened for biz…I am not sure what the purpose here is as this curriculum does not meet minimum requirements for college entrance…I guess it meets State and Fed guidelines for attendance though, so those $$$ are still kept ‘in system’…I answered my own query! I will have a good day now….
Here’s a piece by a struggling english PhD. Last week, this writer published a story about spending the last two years teaching english at the mismanaged American University in Kurdistan, until he was finally fired when the incompetent neocon administrators finally googled his name and looked at his CV. The students were fine but the curriculum they deliver is sad. With so many great teachers from this generation out of work, I wonder who is in the classrooms.
http://www.alternet.org/story/102992/5_pieces_of_advice_for_the_new_paupers/