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 1/10 Low --- www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/index.xml
| Dispatches from the 10th Crusade ... |
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 --- 85 days ago http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2008/04/why_bother.html
| English departments, hotbeds of fashionable schools of literary criticism, are slowly emptying out, and William Deresiewicz , examining some of the proximate causes, suggests that the discipline lacks a survival instinct. Conservatives conversant with the bitter struggles over the literary canon and the various theoretical fads that have buffeted the discipline might indulge in a few reveries tinged with schadenfreude, consoling themselves with the thought that perhaps the relativists and radicals are finally receiving their just due; perhaps, however, the causes are more mundane. Perhaps no one really cares anymore:
...the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.
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