Print

Print
David Lohnes’s comments are consistent with what I was seeing from senior academic administration positions.and well put.

Susanne

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 5, 2019, at 7:39 PM, David Lohnes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Happy to have you circulate with attribution. 

On Nov 5, 2019, at 7:37 PM, Peter Herman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Would David Lohnes mind if I posted his comment on the "Remaking the University" page on Facebook? You make some very important comments, and I'd like to see them get wider distribution. 

I would not include your name (unless you want me to). 

Thanks in advance, 

pch

On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 2:31 PM David Lohnes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
“As I understand it, the greatest drop in humanities jobs --in English and History esp-- has happened since the 2008 crisis although the decline was gradual before that.  How to get back?”

As someone who’s Ph.D. (ABD) with a sadly unfinished Spenser dissertation and a now almost decade career in technology, I’ll speak to this.

A BA in humanities is sellable in business and tech fields in my experience provided there’s additional certifications or experience that demonstrate competency in the target field.

But graduate degrees offer little additional competitive value in those fields, especially the doctoral degree. Specialist fields like medicine, law, and the sciences of course require their own education path.

So from an investment point of view, there’s very little return on investment for graduate studies in the humanities outside of a higher ed career.

That is to say, the money I spend on the degree and the years of income and resume-building job experience I lose while pursuing the graduate humanities degree are not going to make me more competitive or get me higher pay—in virtually any field at all outside a higher ed career. In fact, they may make me less competitive.

So we have a situation where graduate studies in the humanities are only useful for training future teachers of graduate students in the humanities. The snake consumes its own tail in an echo chamber with no meaningful integration with the wider market or community.

In such a situation, demand for graduate studies in the humanities will inevitably fall. This is *doubly* so when such studies divorce themselves from the useful preservative functions of philology, archiving (of books and manuscripts), and paleography.

Society only needs so many theorists, especially antiquarian theorists. It needs a few specialist memory keepers, and it needs communicators and humanists in all domains.

Graduate studies in the humanities need to position themselves to fill those voids. More of the art and music and the physical, historical materials themselves. Less politicization and fewer theoretical byways.

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1


--
Peter C. Herman
Professor of English Literature
San Diego State University

Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 

Editor, Critical Concepts: Terrorism and Literature

Editor, with Elizabeth Sauer, The New Milton Criticism

Destabilizing Milton: "Paradise Lost" and the Poetics of Incertitude (Palgrave)

To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1


To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1


To unsubscribe from the SIDNEY-SPENSER list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=SIDNEY-SPENSER&A=1