XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc, alt.history.american   
   XPost: sci.history, soc.culture.history, soc.history   
   From: d@ray   
      
   I feel compelled to read about the implosion of academia, having myself   
   quit higher-ed as a profession in favor of more hands-on policy work. Any   
   destruction is morbidly fascinating; self-caused ones, even more so.   
      
   The latest hit in this newly evolving genre was a queer little essay in   
   Jacobin magazine, titled “I Love Higher Education. It Isn’t Loving Me   
   Back.” Unreciprocated love from the (supposedly) highest echelons of   
   detached meritocracy is a relatively new form of blues, flourishing due to   
   the mass democratization of higher education. But among other tedious   
   examples, this essay was oddly moving. A bit twee, it became the subject of   
   much discussion.   
      
   The authoress, Hannah Leffingwell, is a Ph.D. aspirant in history at New   
   York University, whose dissertation is titled, “Becoming Lesbian: Sex,   
   Politics, and Culture in Transnational Circulation, 1970-1998." According   
   to NYU, her dissertation "examines the proliferation of transnational   
   lesbian networks in late twentieth-century Europe and the United States.”   
   Leffingwell explains how she was confused that her favorite professor could   
   be leaving academia, despite being “brilliant — an incredible instructor   
   and a perfect fit for the student body.” She further explains that she   
   rolled through a master’s program as it was a “safe space to land” and   
   figure out life before the usual academic motions: second master’s, Ph.D.   
   program, field research, and dissertation. She writes:   
      
   > I have now spent my entire twenties in graduate school. In many ways, I   
   > have been one of the lucky ones. When I graduate from my doctoral program   
   > next year, I will have a PhD from a prestigious private research   
   > university, recommendations from top scholars in my field, experience   
   > teaching some of the nation’s smartest undergraduate students, and an   
   > impressive list of fellowships and grants I have been awarded based on   
   > the quality of my research. My CV is, as they say, sparkling.   
      
   And yet, she is worried that she will earn “poverty wages” as an adjunct   
   after a lifetime of sacrifice. The academic job market is broken, as   
   “hundreds of highly qualified PhDs compete each year for a vanishingly   
   small number of tenure-track jobs.” It is not fair, she argues, considering   
   that they contributed “cheap labor to the university for years just to get   
   their degree, contributing research, service, teaching, and grading to the   
   university…”   
      
   I once wrote a short essay on the direction of historical and political   
   research in which a couple of throwaway sentences caused some mild uproar.   
   “One has only to look at the history departments in British Universities to   
   see how seriously interdisciplinary research has diluted the discipline.   
   Today, a historian of World War I studying fleet tactics is considered to   
   be on an equal footing with someone exploring post-structural erotic   
   subtexts in letters from the trenches.” The crisis in the discipline of   
   history isn’t new and will only get worse, given that, as Jon Lauck   
   recently wrote, “between 2019 and 2020, 1,799 historians earned their PhDs   
   and only 175 of them are now employed as full-time faculty members.” The   
   job listings in history are the lowest since American Historical   
   Association started keeping records. But it is somewhat stupefying how one   
   can not see all of this as a simple supply-and-demand issue. The harsh and   
   unsaid truth is that not every subject or topic is worth studying, at least   
   not professionally, in the academy.   
      
   Both Leffingwell’s essay and subsequent discussions refuse to address what   
   is fundamentally a moral question of our times. At what point do we tell   
   the great mass of starry-eyed Hufflepuffs that you shouldn’t pursue higher   
   education, and instead should learn some daily trade as an apprentice, get   
   a steady job, learn how to make good coffee, have a house and a vegetable   
   garden, and, maybe, a family? When do we say that the subject you think is   
   interesting, the topic you are “exploring,” or all the experience won by   
   years of semi-monastic precarity on borrowed money, isn’t worth the paper   
   you’d type your thesis on, and that there is no need for “perpetuating an   
   ‘illusion of hope,’” as Leffingwell poignantly wrote? That it is a   
   systemic   
   scam that you’re willfully party to? That no one of the right mind thinks   
   that teaching seminars during a Ph.D. is “contributing free labor,” and if   
   you think that, this field might not be the best for you?   
      
   University students can be forgiven for imagining academia as a mix of   
   Indiana Jones and Theodor Mommsen. But the specific socio-temporal dynamics   
   they evoke are now lost. Fewer than 10 percent of history grads will be   
   professors, most of the half-decent ones will be culled under a DEI regime,   
   some others will end up adding to the bloat as some form of DEI Borg in a   
   system that is already about to burst at the seams. Most of their   
   “research” is perhaps fine to study as a pastime or a hobby, but   
   practically worthless socially, civilizationally, or materially. A handful   
   might end up writing a coherent book, but even fewer will be remembered for   
   any rigorous and scholarly contribution in the coming decades. Most   
   “peer-reviewed” papers in history and international relations go uncited or   
   even unread.   
      
   The academic discipline of history was always a courtly subject. One, it   
   needs an emotionally detached and occasionally amoral temperament to be   
   done right. There is a reason cardinals and monks were often great   
   historians, as were adventurers and soldiers. Two, it needs patronization.   
   History as a subject was never egalitarian, but in a paradoxical way it   
   used to be a lot freer. Statesmen posted in far-off colonies during peak   
   Victoriana were free to travel around and study a subject or a   
   civilization. They did it as a hobby, were unbiased about their subjects,   
   and were usually under no financial pressure to toe a political line, the   
   human and social biases of those times notwithstanding. Those who were not   
   in a position for that, but were still exceptionally talented or   
   meritorious otherwise, were patronized individually or through an   
   institution, yet with little scholarly pressure. That changed gradually   
   after the Second World War, and especially with the rapid   
   institutionalization and mass-democratization of the discipline in the   
   1980s and ’90s.   
      
   But one obviously can’t mass-produce AJP Taylors or Hans Morgenthaus. Much   
   less can one produce a peer-reviewed and DEI-certified Edward Gibbon or   
   Rammohun Roy. An oversupply of mediocrity stopped creating its own demand.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)