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]] on behalf of Steven J. Willett [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 7:11 PM
To: [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]> 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
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