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Fixing the Humanities Ph.D.
An anonymous reader writes "A new report from the Modern Language Association focuses on the decline of Ph.D. programs in the humanities over the past several years. "These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job." According to the report, 40% of new Ph.D.s won't be able to find tenure-track jobs, and many of the rest won't manage to receive tenure at all. "Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don't want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. ... Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, 'adjunct' professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire." The MLA doesn't want to reduce enrollments, but they think the grad school programs should be quicker to complete and dissertations should be shorter and less complex."
In other news, who cares? When was the last time something important was done as a result of studying the humanities? They're only good for "huge manatees" puns.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
To meny people are in college and there are to meny joke degrees. We need more tech / trade schools
...for humanities PhD grads is to add a required class in which they are taught all the nuanced ways in each regional dialect to say, "Would you like fries with that?"
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
I'm failing to see where the problem is or what actually need to be fixed.
Addition of a B-ark, perhaps?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
http://xkcd.com/451/
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact