And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping by in a ghost-career, a vestige of an older order that no one has yet worked up the courage to put out of its misery, but that really cannot continue to fulfill its purported function of shaping well-rounded citizens, when it is so fully subordinated to the primary function of the 21st-century university, which is, namely, fundraising.

Justin Smith-Ruiu via Alan Jacobs

“For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. (If you major in a field like business for the purpose of getting rich, it doesn’t follow—but can be mistaken to—that majoring in English will make you poor.) Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.” Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: The End of the English Major.

via NextDraft

"The barista degree -- I don't know where it came from and I really want to combat it," says @DrJRiddell https://t.co/cF9mwk9yRR

— CBCSundayEdition (@CBCSunday) February 16, 2020