• MORE DREARY NEWS FOR ACADEMICS

    Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a humanities professor has been on a crusade to reveal the many ways that graduate school is a bad idea. There are too few academic jobs for the training to be anything other than a crap-shoot. This is a problem, particularly because the hurdles to becoming a professor in America include slaving away for years on a PhD and submitting yourself to the low-wage exploitation of adjunct teaching.

    Louis Menand addresses this in his new book, "The Marketplace of Ideas" (reviewed by The Economist here). He notes that whereas you can become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four, the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. And then good luck finding a job.

    Given all the bad news, I was initially heartened to see that the Chronicle has published a response to the original story, called "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie". Surely James Mulholland, an English professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, would offer evidence that secondary degrees in history and English aren't a fool's errand. Surely he would suggest that the economics of academia isn't so dire.  read more »


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  • In which I am Bored by Otherness


    Guest post #1: Philip Davis, author of "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life", is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine. Davis has written the first full-length biography of Malamud, a self-made son of Jewish immigrants who went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Come hear Davis speak at New York's 92 Street Y on October 31st at 7:30 pm.

    The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is "Otherness", and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying Alterity as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe.

    I was brought up in Nottingham, home of D.H. Lawrence, in the English Midlands. When I was a boy, I am afraid that "the Other", in crude slang, meant Sexual Intercourse. As in: "I fancy a bit of the other."  read more »


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