The Gnostic Pynchon

[Derek C. Maus]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2000, Terrance wrote:

> I regret to say that I consider English, Comparative Literature,
> Philosophy and several other fields like art history professional dead
> ends.

Only if you're idea of "professional" means becoming the next Hugh Kenner.

> As I wrote to Paul, if my son starts showing serious indication of
> entering the humanities, I will have a serious problem, for I won't
> want to discourage him, but I don't want to support him until he gets
> a shield to drive a yellow cab.

God yes, by all means, much better to force him into marketing or applied
calculus (fields from which, if he ever wants to escape, he'll have to go
back and retrain himself in the humanities, most likely...) than to have
him go into a field he prefers where he has to develop analytical and
interpretive thinking skills. I've been an English major for well-nigh ten
years now and my father hasn't supported me financially for any of them.

> Despite the MLA's habitual deception that the job crisis isn't really
> so bad, it is.

I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about here. The MLA has been
one of the chief moaners and groaners about the wretched state of the
academic job market. If you want to talk about the "deception" talk about
all the collegite administrators who are shifting the higher education
system in this country over to a client-provider model that assumes an
eighteen year-old (or his father) knows what the "real world" demands in
terms of "intellectual and professional capital."

> 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.

With all due respect Terrance, this is totally ass backwards. As Vaska
pointed out, the recent (10 years plus, ever since the end of Reaganomics)
trend in corporate hiring has swung very favorably toward students who
excel in the humanities as opposed to those who excel in business
administration or the sciences. Spend twenty minutes in a collegiate
"technical writing" or "business writing" class and you'll see why. For a
long time now, the "real world" (love that implied value judgment...) has
begun realizing that the thinking skills required of a broad humanities
education (note I said "broad" as this does not apply to people who major
in poststructuralist history of ornithology...) are actually better
preparation in a number of ways for an economy in which the necessary
skill sets change in rapidly accelerating cycles. Y'know...Henry Adams?

> 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.

Some of the more successful recent companies (like SAS Institute) fund the
intellectual capital of English and Comp. Lit pretty well. Our graduate
program at UNC has turned out double-figure numbers of people who have
gone straight into the "real world" into damn good jobs, albeit after
dragging themselves through the unfriendly academic job market to see just
how little their own profession suddenly values their skills. 

> 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.

Yeah, but if they were smart they would. Adam Smith was a philosopher, not
an advertising major. Economics is a social science (i.e., humanities
field) no matter what the business school wishes to tell you. When I talk
to advertising honor roll students here at UNC who don't think knowing
anything about linguistics will help them in their chosen profession, I
just laugh/cry myself to sleep. The major difference I've seen with most
humanities students (from freshmen through docotral candidates) is that
they are more keenly aware of what they know and how they know it as
opposed to a lot of other fields that see education as goal-oriented
(learn this, get job, stop learning, start working).

Having said that, a lot of the new subdisciplines in the humanities are
sometimes bunkum, if only because they remove the breadth of experience
and examination from the larger discipline. The problem there is a
thoroughly different one...canonicity. If people who wanted to study women
writers could have done so without encountering barriers at every turn,
we'd never have had gender studies as its own field. It's not my thing,
but I do see why someone would want to do it--hopefully they'd remember
that a literature scholar works with primary as well as secondary texts,
though.

> 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.

Whoops...I guess I and 150 of the brightest people I know personally have
been pissing our lives away, huh? Well, see in you ten years. I'm off to
drive my cab.

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Derek C. Maus               |   "Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |   human beings if you didn't have some 
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |   pretty strong feelings about nuclear
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |   combat."  --Major Kong, DR. STRANGELOVE
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