Tag: Humanities

Easy PhDs

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

So I’m talking on the phone to my sister and she says at some point:

“I was interviewing this guy today and he has a PhD in one of those really hard disciplines.”

“What, as opposed to people who have all those easy PhDs?” I ask. “Like maybe in literature?”

My own sister, folks. I changed her nappies and dropped her on the floor twice when she was an infant. I taught her to read and to write. And I still can’t get over her biting the nose off my favorite toy piglet when she was six months and I was six years old.

Even for my sister “the really hard PhDs” are not the ones in Humanities. Because anybody can read about books and then blab about what they’ve read, right?

You have no idea how many times I heard from people in sciences, “Well, what you do is not real research, right? I mean, you can just argue anything you like. It isn’t like anybody can prove you wrong.”

Well, it’s time for me to go engage in some of that easy-peasy research of mine, folks.

Quote of the Week

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

The real danger is that the departments of English are to become service departments, functioning in the name of commerce. Across the board, those subdisciplines which have moved in during literature’s waning hegemony (technical writing, cultural studies, composition/rhetoric, linguistics/TESOL) can all easily be articulated as pure service functions to the educational factory’s imperative to get people ready to work.

Creative writing’s sad responsibility in this eventuality then would be to administer the last rites of the imagination to children damaged beyond redemption on their way to the great maw of America, Inc.

– Curtis White, Monstrous Possibility (1998).

Cool, huh? On the one hand, one can’t deny that the attempts to commercialize the Humanities have done incalculable damage to the system of higher education. On the other hand, though, you can practically hear White gnashing his teeth at the idea that all those proles who see having a job as a sine qua non of their existence dare to invade his ivory tower. Unless you have a trust fund that makes work a choice rather than a necessity on a par with breathing, White has no use for you.

This quote brings to mind all of those folks in my grad school for rich kids who kept telling me that the need to graduate and find a job as soon as possible meant I could never be a real scholar. Precisely because I remember only too well the political allegiances of the people who claimed one couldn’t develop intellectually without a trip to Europe at least once a year, I was not at all surprised to discover that Curtis White is a Marxist. Nobody despises the working people quite as much as Marxists.