Although I don't agree with what he has written about the uselessness of a humanities degree, I did want to thank Steve Willett for bringing this topic up and for stimulating an interesting discussion. I am not sure why we are suddenly being encouraged to "move on." The issue of student indebtedness seem to me to be among the most pressing issues for our profession, something that is being brought up continually at my university as well as outside the university as well, and it seems the most ethical of discussions to have at this point, even if it is off the topic of Spenser and Sidney.  I certainly hope that Andrew does not intervene.

Brian Lockey
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dorothy Anne Stephens [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2013 9:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: beyond the passive professoriate

Chelsea Hernandez’s insight is, indeed, brilliant.  She should push that essay onward.

Dot

From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Miller
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2013 5:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: beyond the passive professoriate

To bee, or not to bee.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:35 AM, Herron, Thomas <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Mel, honey, is indeed a commodity taken from flowers... --Tom
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] on behalf of Heather James [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2013 12:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: beyond the passive professoriate

Michael, I'd love to talk about Spenser, Du Bellay, and translation.  I will be looking into this article, and soon.  I need to know more about Du Bellay.

And if we can pursue an addendum, I'd also like to float a topic — a teaching topic — about the potential for insight that Dory, Florimell's dwarf, provides into Florimell's status as the eternally fleeing woman in FQ III.  For some years — perhaps since I took my undergraduate course on Spenser — I have been wondering why it is that Florimell attracts the kind of attention she attracts (poor Arthur) and raises the questions of complicity that her figure (that of the fleeing and under-dressed woman) raises and yet can claim, rightly, that the suspicion should be referred to her pursuers and not to herself.

One of my undergraduate students came into my office today with a paper on Florimell and Chastity, and of course it was inadequate as a statement of what my student thought was really interesting in Spenser.  But by the time she was done, it was clear that she thought that Florimell would be perpetually caught in the Erotic Chase as the consummate object of petrarchan desire so long as she thought of her own chastity as a commodity, a gift that she was "saving" for Marinell.  And I thought, gosh, that's brilliant.  That's not what Britomart thinks of her chastity or of Artegall.  But that is definitely what Florimell thinks as she runs away from what my student called "phallic aggression" and towards her own love object.  Florimell will always be taken for a string of splendid body parts—each one of which can be related to a commodity—so long as she thinks of chastity as a commodity, too, and one that belongs in extension to her future husband.

That is the message of my student, Chelsea Hernandez, to you on this fine Monday evening.

Heather James


________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] on behalf of Michael Saenger [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 8:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: beyond the passive professoriate

Heather, a welcome suggestion.  I just noticed this new article.  Could we talk about Spenser, Du Bellay and translation?

http://www.academia.edu/5032381/How_Spenser_Excavates_Du_Bellay


On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 10:01 PM, Heather James <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>> wrote:
Dear Andrew,

Might we have a change of topic, please?  And a retirement of this one?  I'd be ever so grateful.

Heather James


From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>] on behalf of Steven J. Willett [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>]
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 7:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: Student debt and the passive professoriate

Let me start by saying my focus was the Classics major, particularly the
graduate degree major, and I held no invidious motives in what I wrote.
The undergraduate employment rate in the International Cultural Studies
Department of my University here in Japan, the Shizuoka University of Art
and Culture (静岡文化芸術大学), is in the 90th percentile.  The
unemployment rate in Japan is 4%!  And we have full national health and
dental insurance matched only by France and the UK in terms of per capita
cost.

I would recommend that you study the following statistics as background to
what I write:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/adjunct-faculty_n_4255139.html?ref=topbar

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/adjunct-faculty_n_4255139.html?ref=topbar

http://www.ibtimes.com/educated-unemployed-unemployment-rate-recent-college-grads-higher-high-school-grads-1324431

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237/

http://www.policymic.com/articles/65609/44-of-young-college-graduates-are-on-the-wrong-career-path


On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 05:07:58 +0900, Rankin, Mark C - rankinmc
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>> wrote:

> 1) A humanities degree when properly taught teaches students to think
> and gives them reasoning skills and skills in written communication that
> are readily transferrable to a range of careers. Moreover, asking
> important questions about life are not improper to ask just because
> there is no ready connection to $ on the back end. By the same token,
> teaching students to reason through these questions seems to be to have
> great value.

This of course is the tried-and-true argument going back centuries for
studying the Classics, which will do a better job of what you advocate
than English.  I note your qualification above with the modal "seems."  Do
you have data to demonstrate it?

> 2) A corollary to (1) is the following: the humanities do appear to be a
> waste if one values the pursuit of financial profit above all other
> pursuits. Many obviously do place highest premium on financial profit,
> but not all, and I think that even the most skeptical would agree that
> life is more than money.

If you'd actually read the several hundred thousands of words I've posted
to this list nearly from its start, you would know I agree completely.
But the hard facts are really quite hard: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die
Moral to quote Brecht.  Or, in our vernacular, "Grub first, then ethics."
The problem is not just high unemployment and mal-employment, it's the
lack of good, affordable healthcare.  The young may think they're
immortal, but they're one fall on concrete or one auto accident from
improvidence.  Maybe you have good university insurance and maybe you
don't, but you'll only find out when a catastrophe hits.  We don't yet
know if the ACA will deliver, but I doubt it.

> 3) More fundamentally, we are an indebted society. The average household
> in the United States carries tends of thousands of dollars of consumer
> credit card debt because people as a whole spend more than they can
> afford. Student loan debt is only one facet of a larger problem. The
> larger problem should be addressed rather than targeting one sector of
> the higher education system because its graduates do not automatically
> earn six-figure salaries.

Did you read my statistics?  Student debt is $1.2 trillion, greater than
all credit card debt:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/

This is a fatally heavy burden compared to my times in the 50s and 60s.  I
did not "target" one sector of the higher education system, economics
did.  The US is a dying economy that has no future without divesting
itself of the military-industrial-congressional complex.  Please read the
work of my friends Bill Astore and Andrew Bacevich.  Bacevich has
recommended that the DOD cut its budget 10% per year for 10 years, which
would leave us with an enormous defensive potential without the foreign
wars of aggression and global hegemony.  Think where all that money could
go.  Consider the opportunity costs of the almost certain war with Iran
that is coming.

> 4) Even more fundamentally, the humanities enriches our culture. Imagine
> a society without the arts, without theater, without film, without
> literature, without music, the list can go on. I don't want to live in
> such a society, and I think most others would not wish to do so either.

Well, heck, that is what we used to call a gigantic glittering
generality.  My whole life has been spent in defending high aesthetic and
educational standards, as those on this list know who have debated with me
for better or worse.  You make a common mistake, however: the fate of the
humanities does not hang on university classes and degrees.  It hangs on
readers and passionate voyagers into the heritage--for me the Classical
heritage, but for those here the rather shorter but enormously revivifying
medieval-renaissance heritage.  Doubtless Jim N. will come to our rescue.

> 5) Historically, humanities educations always prepared students to
> think, and the more professional skills were simply learned through
> apprenticeship or other means. Just because these skills are now taught
> in universities does not mean that the universities should automatically
> jettison the humanities. We need to do a better job teaching students to
> envision how they can market themselves in the workforce, not cancel
> entire humanities programs.

I never said and have never said that universities should "jettison the
humanities" and did not advocate that they "cancel entire humanities
programs."  That's just shoddy thinking and reasoning on your part.  I had
a narrow focus: What is the long-term consequence of assuming a huge
nonrecourse debt in today's job market?  The academic market will never
get better unless the United States (I exclude the other English-speaking
countries and the EU) profoundly revalues its militaristic priorities.  I
personally think that university education *for the qualified* should be
free as it is in other countries.

> I also do not accept your argument that tenured humanities faculty are
> complicit in an act of injustice by encouraging students to pursue
> humanities degrees. The system of tenure can certainly be reformed, but
> tenured faculty are not perpetrators of an injustice by virtue of the
> fact that they have earned tenure in the humanities. Your argument seems
> to suggest that all tenured professors care more about job security than
> about educating students and pursuing intellectual challenges in
> research. I certainly don't, and I'm sure others do not as well.

You have a lot of living to do if you think that the tenured staff have
really "earned" their status and don't place the highest personal priority
on continuing the racket.  It is a racket, will eventually die as now
slotted into the bureaucracy, and the tenured know it.  They want to hang
on to the perks for their lifetimes.  The majority of tenured staff stop
researching and publishing after they've crossed the magical decision
border.  This is an anomaly in global employment and does not, except in
rare cases, lead to a bonanza of research, discoveries and life-enhancing
philosophies.  I support tenure on the now largely illusory basis of
freedom to state unpopular ideas and research.  Name me some of those
unpopular ideas you've met here?  I've articulated more unpopular ideas on
this list than any of the tenured.  I'm free, you see, and need not toe a
line.  The line grows thicker year-by-year.

Any faculty member who advises students on an undergraduate or graduate
major in English without fully divulging the consequences is complicit.
Some graduates in the humanities will find a job, someday, with a few
earning good money.  Many will ruin their lives in a quagmire of debt.



--
Steven Willett
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
US phone: (503) 390-1070<tel:%28503%29%20390-1070><tel:%28503%29%20390-1070>
Japan phone: (053) 475-4714




--
Michael Saenger, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English, Southwestern University
Office: Mood-Bridwell #206

Office hours: MW 10:00-11:00, TTh 1:00-2:00

Profile on Academia

http://southwestern.academia.edu/MichaelSaenger

Departmental Profile

http://www.southwestern.edu/departments/faculty/faculty.php?id=saengerm&style=english

Shakespeare and the French Borders of English

http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=661927

The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9780754654131⟨=cy-GB





--
David Lee Miller
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC  29208
(803) 777-4256
FAX  777-9064
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Center for Digital Humanities<http://www.cdh.sc.edu/>
Faculty Web Page<http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/people/pages/miller.html>
Dreams of the Burning Child<http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100865590&CFID=8776879&CFTOKEN=5f96265f3e78e4c1-CD8CDD45-C29B-B0E5-3A132DAF587030F4&jsessionid=8430cfc86f9c780302f52b2158647f227d5dTR>http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823230303