The Gnostic Pynchon

[Vaska Tumir]

Intellectual capital and the bottom line don't necessarily coincide -- which makes me wonder why all the citizens so keen on having their kids acquire the first don't make a bit of a stretch for it. 

But that aside, it's something like 14 years now since I first saw an article publicizing the results of a survey done across a number of US industries.  The point of the things was (and since then I've been seeing about one of these things every 3-4 years) that right across the board, employers were claiming that humanities graduates make the best managerial cadre.  Better, apparently, than kids coming out of business schools, for instance.   One could do a little archivial digging through The Wall Street Journal to find the first in this series of articles.  

One wouldn't think so, but it in the end seems that all the theorizing and all the rest of the stuff we do in our humanities departments ends up being pretty good for that old bottom line.  Sometimes it worries me, mostly it doesn't.  [BTW, the job market is dire only for the Ph.D.s, not for the kids with undergraduate degrees in humanities.]

Vaska 

P.S. Just saw Mifune.  A great little Danish film well worth catching.  It picked up something in Cannes, but in Toronto, at least, it's playing only in the rep cinemas.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Terrance 
  Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 12:08 AM

  [snip]
  It seems we
  have turned our backs on the humanities and for very good
  reasons: they aren't providing the intellectual and
  professional capital to help students in the real world.
  Here it is the money and the money and most citizens are
  doing well in the new economy and would be more than willing
  to fund English, or Comparative Literature if they felt
  their children were accumulating intellectual capital.
  Citizens aren't going to shell out their hard-earned money
  for philosophy or even philosophy of technology, of science,
  of mathematics, of computer science, and I don't think
  gender studies, identity politics, and Pomo/Film/Pynchon is
  high on their list either. Sorry, I simply do not think it
  has anything to do with cross departmental
  anthropology/myth/history/Pynchon classes. Pedagogically I'm
  all for it, but what will all the young women do with Woman
  Studies degrees if they can't pay the rent for a room of
  their own? Pynchon will survive. I'm convinced of that,  but
  I'm not so sanguine about the prospects for those that teach
  his fiction, Pomo, Mo, Larry or Curly.  Until the humanities
  can demonstrate that it has a positive content that
  contributes to the bottom line, no one is going to take it
  seriously.    
   


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