The Lit Crit Job Bust

[FrodeauxB at aol.com]

At long last there is widespread talk of a crisis in literary studies, and 
yet in a kind of displacement the hand-wringing is directed not to the real 
problem, but to one of its side effects-that there are almost no college 
teaching jobs available for new Ph. D.s. When supply dwarfs demand, the 
question arises, is the problem mainly one of demand, or of supply? Everyone 
talks only about supply-that is, too many people in graduate school-and 
nobody ever faces the dreaded possibility that the crisis is really one of 
reduced demand. Yet, it should be obvious that demand is the problem. If 
undergraduates were majoring in English at the rate of 30 years ago, their 
numbers would be 60 percent greater than they actually are today. The supply 
of Ph. D.s would then be hopelessly inadequate to meet the demand for 
professors of English. The real source of the crisis must therefore lie in 
the fact that undergraduates are not attracted to what college literature 
programs now offer them. The college literature establishment professes 
sympathy for its hapless graduate students, but is not prepared to do the one 
thing that might help them-and that is, to think again about the mix of 
identity politics and postmodern dogma that has made English and related 
departments intellectually uncompetitive.
-John M. Ellis, a professor emeritus of German literature at the University 
of California, Santa Cruz, in Academic Questions (Spring 2000)


TTFN

frodeauxb
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