So, there’s this cute little graphic making the rounds on the internet. Take a look, and tell me what you see: If you laughed, I’m disappointed. This joke, to me, represents absolutely everything wrong with the humanities these days. The joke, essentially, is that scientists are narrow-minded eggheads. They have knowledge, but not wisdom. But your lovable humanities types? Well, they may not know their ass from their elbow as
The plight of sessional lecturers (or, as they call them in the US, “adjuncts”) is possibly the only issue in higher education that generates even more overblown rhetoric than tuition fees. Any time people start evoking slavery as a metaphor, you know perspective has flown the coop. Though data on sessional numbers in Canada are non-existent, no one disputes that their numbers are rising, and that they are becoming an increasingly central part of major universities’ staffing plans. In large
There’s a line you tend to hear in Canadian universities: that tenure “is essential to the defence of academic freedom”. There’s no question that historically, in North America, the two concepts grew up together, and have been intertwined here for about a century. But it’s demonstrably false that tenure is the only way to defend academic freedom. In Europe, tenure has an entirely different historical origin. Civil servants in many countries have tenure, and since university professors in many places were (and
You’ll recall that last week I wrote some pretty blistering stuff about the way humanities profs sometimes defend the value of their field. A few of you wrote back saying, “well, how would you do it, smart guy”? The short answer is: the way Paul Wells does in his 2010 article, In Praise of the Squishy Subjects (read the whole thing. It’s worth it). He points out that in the real world, where societal problems are incredibly complex and can’t be explained
Two examples of ludicrous things I’ve seen/heard lately: Example #1 – A few months ago, I was in a session on the topic of, “how to defend the humanities”. The animator threw up some quotes that were (at least in theory) derogatory of the humanities, and asked people for possible responses. One of these quotes was from Harvard literature professor, Louis Menand’s, book, The Marketplace of Ideas (highly recommended, by the way), which ridiculed times-to-completion in humanities PhD programs thusly: “It takes three
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