No Alternative?

I wonder if the folks who make the argument that “The only alternative to posting job ads for one person with 5 PhDs in completely different areas would be to close down the department altogether. Is this what you want to happen?” are really that stupid. Surely, no human being with a functioning brain can fail to see the idiocy of this argument.

There is a plethora of alternatives to destroying the concept of a scholar who is a professional in her field in favor of hiring an army of sad Janes of All Trades who never stopped to acquire mastery of a field in their hurry to accumulate as many diplomas as possible. All of these perennially terrified folks who agree to teach French , Japanese, and microbiology at the same time are not the only alternative to closing down a few departments.

Every school that participates in these abuses has an army of useless administrators, a crowd of overpaid bureaucrats, a huge money drain of a football team, etc. Why is there any talk of closing down departments when there are completely insane inventions of diseased minds like Office of Diversity and Chief Consultant in Intra-university Ethics?

Last week, my sister visited her alma mater, a formerly great and famous university that has recently been slashing departments, adjunctifying like crazy, and pestering the alumni with tragic stories of donations urgently needed to endure students had chairs to sit on in class.

In the course of her business, my sister has an opportunity to visit the headquarters of some of the richest companies in the world. However, she has yet to meet a CEO whose office decor would match in price and sophistication the offices of the university bureaucrats she visited. These countless “guidance counselors”, clueless “managers of human resources” and other ignorant idiots sit in large, beautifully appointed offices and do precisely nothing all day long. In the meanwhile, this same university has closed closed down its literature programs and transformed what was left of them into a language school.

And you know which event inaugurated the process if destroying the literature programs? I can tell you because I witnessed it. It was the hiring of a person specializing in Spanish and German (at the same time). The logic is clear: if German and Spanish are so easy that they don’t even merit a specialization in one of them, then do such intellectually light-weight programs deserve existing at a university at all? Especially, when there is a bunch of bureaucrats dying for a raise.

So please stop excusing these hiring policies already. All you do is clumsily mask your terror of going anything to benefit scholarship and fight injustice. Your arguments in defense of such abuses make you sound like exactly what you are: a pathetic little weakling with zero intellect.