51–60 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem with that is women and minorities are all individual people who make their own decisions about what they want to do in life. What does a funnel look like? Forced degrees? Forced employment?
Probably just a less obviously-hostile environment would be a good start.
I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…
I received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give up on any sort of robust future for their field.
In countries like India you would be laughed at if you aren't rich and take an arts degree. It is because in a country with limited earning opportunities, it doesn't make any sense to invest in a degree that has virtually non-existent employment opportunities. Seems like the majority of US population has now become poor enough that taking getting a humanities degree is risky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give up on any sort of robust future for their field.
Isn't it better they are honest rather than set unrealistic expectations that students will regret years later.
Edit: I should say that my professors came off more as defeatist than dismissive. I was never told that I couldn't study Philosophy at the graduate level.
I then proceeded to change degrees and universities, I never looked back. This was back in like 2004-2005, a couple years before the financial crisis started. People then we’re talking about not doing those degrees because they are a waste of time and money.
80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Social "science" is even more terrifying in my view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a crisis. I nearly took history at undergrad…
It's not that people aren't deeply interested in these topics. It's just.... maybe academia's current model doesn't work so well anymore. Woudln't be the first time scholarship as a profession adapted to changing society. I hate that it will happen, I hate what we are losing... but I feel like the fundamentals are strong in the long term. You can go to a book store or library ... the books that have staying power represent the ideas that have staying power, and software products that have a life time of 7 years (which is what a lot of classes selling themselves as STEM actually teach) do not make the long term cut in the marketplace of important ideas.
If countries care about humanities, they need to fund it via government. I'm not much of a big government person, but things like this is required when you care about things that capitalism won't fund.
On the whole, I don't think this is good... but this has been coming for a long time, due to many reasons, including:
* a broken funding system that saddles a majority of students with life-altering debt, effectively keeping many of them from studying what they love and forcing them instead to study what will land them a decent job;
* the slow-motion takeover at many universities and colleges by professional managers who use financial and other metrics to measure the "success" of and decide on the funding for different academic departments;
and last but not least,
* the gradual takeover of liberal arts faculties at many colleges and universities by individuals whom I can only describe as very ignorant -- uneducated, really -- in mathematics, the hard sciences, modern technologies, and the ways of business.[a] Perhaps the smart kids don't want to study with these ignorant individuals?
[a] As C. P. Snow wrote about these people in 1959 in his famous Two Cultures lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures)