A few links for those pursuing (or having previously pursued) the difficult road of a terminal degree in any field of the humanities, and I know a few of you read this blog.
Stanley Fish discusses the future of "humanist educators." The punchline:
It looks like the only way humanist educators and their students are going to get to the top is by hanging on to the coattails of their scientist and engineering friends as they go racing by.Reasons to avoid grad school, mostly oriented toward humanities degrees. I like that "your office is gonna suck" is on the list.
If you do go, though, here are some blogs you might want to check out.
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2 comments:
I think Fish is criticising the industrial (and hence Natural Science-obsessed) model of education to which he thinks Obama, with the rest of American culture for the last century or so, subscribes.
You really must step up your game, old bean - I thought you economists were at least supposed to know how to be dismal. For despite your continued efforts to depress those of us who sit writhing in the agony that constitutes the studium humanitatis, I confess myself most deeply underwhelmed. Everyone knows that there are a lot more people who would like to be professors (or ballerinas, or Senior Vice Presidents) than there are any of those things in the world. If there weren't a larger supply than demand, we might reasonably question whether or not academic work were really so desirable in the first place. As to the various complaints in that list - sure, the field is highly competitive and a lot of work. But that doesn't make it exploitative, any more than it's unfair for Mel Gibson to be filthy rich.
Well, Joel, we economists make it our business to study and understand rational agents, so perhaps we just don't get those in the humanities ;)
In all seriousness, though, I found the list of reasons to avoid grad school to be amazingly unconvincing. The best message I could get was "don't do it unless you really, really like what you'll be doing," Which is really just a variant of "go big or go home!" Not much deterrent for someone with a seat in Cornell classrooms.
And while you know I'm not a fan of classical schools and their emphasis on Latin and the humanities, I'm no fan of industrial education either. I think pretending everyone should be a math and biology major is beyond silly.
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