
Academe’s Extinction Event: Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at MLA - jseliger
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190510-academes-extinction-event?key=mi0Bff1vaLHL09_no2Emg10qt7p80aeegQ9TpB5QAj7CR1-6q-W9WwTJh5LxzsF5eE5sNW1ZWEw0VFIzbE5mV0lfRVA3dl9PLUFXM25Wak0zVFExU05vczcwQQ
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nordsieck
It's deeply ironic to me that academic humanities is collapsing, while in
popular culture, the hunger for humanities is ever growing.

Here's some great examples from Youtube:

OTH: How Bloodborne Transforms the Myth [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-
gH_n3Yc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-gH_n3Yc)

OTH: Bloodborne vs. Gothic Horror — Reanimating a Genre
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-
gH_n3Yc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-gH_n3Yc)

Sicario: The Importance of Borders
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5vK_tUg3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5vK_tUg3w)

Collateral: Taming the Bull of Masculinity
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2imk4PXic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2imk4PXic)

I'm sure everyone has their own pet theories about the article, but it seems
clear to me that there is no lack of demand for accessible humanities.

~~~
317070
I think 'accessible' being the key word here.

I read the article, and as someone who does not have English as a first
language and therefore know next to nothing on its literature, I am still
amazed by its humanities focus on dissecting old texts and poems. Academic
English in this respect looks very different to me than academic Dutch or
French.

I mean, this is a thing that should never happen to a field "looking for
truth":
[https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341](https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341)

On the other hand, having universities educate for the needs of the economy is
one of the stupider, short-sighted things happening now.

~~~
rdtsc
> On the other hand, having universities educate for the needs of the economy
> is one of the stupider, short-sighted things happening now.

What to do though? At some point after graduation the students would need to
find someone to hire them and pay them a living wage. Even if they graduate
without any debt like they might in Europe or other countries, what do they do
next? Sure, the economy needs editors, and perhaps history majors could make
good managers or programmers with some training, but it would be an uphill
battle for them.

Most people I know who graduated with a humanities degrees ended up in jobs
they hated. They only ones that liked their jobs stayed in the academia. But
how sustainable is that, I wonder...

At least in US with the govt guaranteeing student loans, there is a perverse
incentive for the universities to lie and tell students to apply and that
everything will be fine, just so they get their hands on that loan money.

~~~
cafard
I worked for many years next office down from a programmer who dropped out of
a doctoral program in history of religion. A couple of my best friends studied
humanities in college and went on to work with computers. I was myself a
liberal arts major in college, and have made my living first in tech support,
then in systems administration and programming.

And no, I don't hate my job. I very much enjoyed school, but had no desire to
stick around an teach.

------
Eliezer
The books I've read on the professional craft of writing (written by
successful authors) have emphasized that you can't expect to learn anything
from your English professor - and many of those books were from decades before
the collapse described here. This area of academe is widely considered a
fraud, not just by evil Republican governors, but by the only people with
externally visible expertise in its supposed subject matter. I don't know if
it's collapsing because of the fraud, if there's causality; but my
understanding is that the conventional belief among people who can actually
write is that the MLA can't read.

~~~
bilbo0s
You're talking about something slightly different than the article. What
you're talking about might more precisely be directed at something like a
creative writing program. What the article's author is discussing is, in
layman's terms, the profession of being an analyst-, or the profession of
giving "critique"-, of creative writers.

~~~
Eliezer
It's a bad sign if all the creative writers with external viability think the
MLA obviously has no expertise on the underlying structure of books. I can
imagine an art of critiquing proofs, but I'd expect it to be headed up by
professional mathematicians or at least be in good standing with them.

------
roenxi
I was just watching Thiel talk on a topic that touches this - the parallels
between the academics and the priesthood.

There was a time when the Catholic church was seriously powerful; and that
time was marked by important people wanting to have family in the church. The
days when the Medici, for example, boasted of family members being Dukes and
Popes and the church was strong in its broad influence. That is a far cry from
today, even if the Catholics are still quite important.

Academics is similar in that it was once composed exclusively by people who
were either clever enough to be sponsored or people wealthy enough to be able
to afford to put their feet up and get educated for a few years. There has
been a serious push towards a vision of universal education in the last 50
years. In a sense, that is driving a dilution of the level of wealth and power
to be seen in a normal university.

It'd be fascinating to have some sort of historical compendium of wage, salary
and social connections of the Arts Professorships and PhD students in the
Arts. The trends would probably be quite revealing of something. Education is
an area where culture is critical as both an input and an output, and there
are clearly some massive cultural changes afoot there even if they are only
partly quantifiable.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Thiel is dead wrong.

Academics tend to be middle middle class - not particularly privileged, except
maybe at the Ivy Leagues, but not from the poorest backgrounds either.

The real contemporary priestly caste are investors and VCs.

~~~
rdtsc
> Thiel is dead wrong. Academics tend to be middle middle class

Hmm, how is he wrong? Sounds like you agree with him...

Universities didn't start like a place for the middle class. They were elite
institutions. I guess depending how far back you look there was not much of a
middle class to speak of..

The idea was then to make it universal so lower classes could participate as
well. So now academics don't always live wealthy lifestyles and there is a
chance they came from and stayed as middle class.

The "intelectuals" so to speak is in a way a separate class. Depending in the
time and the context it may be desirable to become a member of this class.
Just like at a time it was desirable to become a priest, a member of Communist
party, or other parties or groups.

------
norswap
I agree with the author the decline of the humanities is about a narrative
winning out on the other.

But what about what is actually desirable? Is going to the university to learn
something that is only indirectly useful as a job skill something fundamental,
or is it an historical aberration?

Depending on how you define it, the "humanities" are not going to die. The top
comment at the time of writing is how analysis lives on even on YouTube. But
is it something that has to be subsidised, or that we have to encourage
students to spend precious years and frankly absurd amount of money in?

------
pseudolus
A pretty sombre article. In what were the "go go" days of academe, the MLA was
the target of some fairly comic parodies and ridicule. A standout was David
Lodge's "Small World" which formed part of his campus trilogy. [0][1]. Still a
great read today.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_World:_An_Academic_Roman...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_World:_An_Academic_Romance)

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/s?k=campus+trilogy&ref=nb_sb_noss_1](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=campus+trilogy&ref=nb_sb_noss_1)

------
not_a_moth
Balanced with a technical trade, the mind and world broadening study of the
humanities is useful for producing original thought and avoiding group-think
within said technical trade. Bringing diverse thinking into a field, along
with requisite skills for that field, is a healthy thing for the field.

Thus a way to "save humanities" is to have technical fields actually seriously
promote at least some significant coursework in the humanities at an undergrad
level.

~~~
Fomite
I agree with this. We've talked a lot about math, CS, etc. being essential
skills for humanities students, but I think the other thing is true as well.

One of the reasons I've pushed this more is an observation in my field - the
people at the top of their game, delivering plenary talks at conferences, etc.
_often_ betray a grounding in the humanities even when discussing fairly
technical problems.

------
mcguire
" _I had to admit I was happy that a Ph.D. had been a potent prologue to my
current life, disciplining me into a more patient thinker, a slicker architect
of arguments. Asinine and medieval it had certainly been, in many ways —
prelims! The dissertation itself! — and had taken time, tracts and tracts of
it. But the tracts of time — seemingly an endless postponement — had turned
out to be their own reward, not least because I’d gotten to spend them with
the person across the table, who’d built me up and modeled a new intellectual
intensity for me._ "

Amen, brother! Sing it!

\-- Ph.D., 2004, UTCS.

------
SolaceQuantum
Sometimes I read these articles and wonder if this is a sign that society is
increasingly changing such that capitalism and commodities matter more than
life enrichment and, in fact, are replacing life enrichment as a value (eg.
People believe commodities are how their lives are enriched). Thus, education
is devalued unless it lets you own more things (through labor). Or a sign of
increasing economic insecurity such that humans are broadly less and less able
to pursue highly educated topics on its own culture and study their broader
effects, which almost seems to be like the opposite of what I’ve always
understood a civilized society to be.

But at the same time by other metrics life has never been better... mostly
commodity based metrics. There’s very little ways to quantify if we’re losing
“culture” in the way I’ve understood it. What will happen to us if we lose
there ability to examine the latest YouTube or Instagram phenomenon with
historical and broader sociological framework? Or we become unable to
accomplish the amazing innovations within the humanities, such as the revival
of the Mayan language, simply because the study of linguistics is no longer
within scope of modern society?

------
jpm_sd
Not to be all capitalist-reductionist about it, but I think this is really a
case of over supply - an English major bubble bursting - that will result in a
new equilibrium. Not an extinction event.

~~~
Fomite
Not to be all ecologist about it, but smaller populations trying to find an
equilibrium that are also subject to external shocks (like the 2008
recession's impact on university budgets) are extremely susceptible to
stochastic extinction.

------
rjkennedy98
Harold Bloom has written extensively on this subject calling the profession
Literary Sudies nothing more that a "rabblement of lemmings" running off the
cliff to their own destruction.

Literary Studies used to mean the study of great works as great works by their
own literary and aesthetic merit. It valued the unimpeachable greatness of
Shakespeare and Dante and Milton. It believed in genius, the author, aesthetic
value, and literary beauty.

Today, Literary Studies is more cultural studies. It is collage of different
perspectives: queer, feminist, marxist, ect, that treat the work nothing but a
product of some external force with no intrinsic value.

Any sensible person, of course, would run away from that.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
When would to describe the scope of this changing? Milton himself wrote
literary essays on cultural topics of his times (areopagitica in 1644 was a
pamphlet protesting the banning of unlicensed works, which was already a
fairly debated and settled topic within the literary sphere by the time he
published it).

Death Of the Author itself was written in 1967, which debates the merit of
analyzing literature on the authors intent and not what is literally on the
page regardless of the authors intent.

At what point we things not cultural discussion?

~~~
rjkennedy98
Yes, Milton wrote political and cultural topics, so has Harold Bloom. That is
far different from believing that works of art are merely the product of
cultural forces.

------
closedgrave
I know this comment is bad... I just want to point out how creepy the look on
that guys face is in the graphic where he brings the pear torte to his
advisor.

~~~
nkurz
I was bothered less by his expression than the fact that a pear torte is
neither frosted nor pink:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pear+torte%22&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pear+torte%22&tbm=isch)

The demonic expression can be explained by an individual's artistic limits.
The extreme misrepresentation points to a editorial system that doesn't care
about accuracy.

------
nixarian
"We have rhapsodized demolition as liberation" Sounds like a conservative
criticism of the Enlightenment.

"There was this sense that we were being broken down and built up again as new
people, as these high-powered minds — only without the groupthink that gets
enforced in a barracks." Is he sure about that? It seems _certain_ ideas are
enforced with cult-like rigidity.

My experience heading toward the academic track, and then ducking out, wasn't
a great one. I felt like I learned more on my own, out of my own interest in
the subject, than in any classroom. It gave me a few starting points, but
that's all. Academia seems to have ceased to be a place where people engage in
and built upon the Western cultural project, and instead is a place of
'liberation' from that project, from the west, from the canon, from everything
that put a foundation under our civilization, letting in everything that
doesn't matter. In a sense, it deserves to die. And it deserve to die even
more for not seeming to recognize why it's dying, and for placing all the
blame on others. And yet, cultural studies, humanities, and history, are all
_absolutely necessary for democracy_ , and if it truly ends, what then?

If I'm allowed to be rude, another problem is a serious lack of thoughtful
people, even this guy doesn't seem to be saying anything interesting or
provoking, yet he thinks he's worthy of a position. I really noticed a lack of
any kind of academic debate going on in my time at university. I felt alone in
my desire to test and challenge ideas. One female student in an English class
once attacked me for 'wanting to argue with ideas all the time'. What should I
make of that?

I'll end with a provoking thought, the kind of thing that should be allowed in
academe: so men together, in the good old boys club, built things, and women
and men together produced what? too many heirs? :^)

