Posted on 06/27/2022 7:43:22 AM PDT by Borges
A university has suspended its English literature course, after a Government crackdown on perceived "low value" degrees.
Sheffield Hallam University said that the core humanities subject is among the courses that will be suspended for the 2023/24 academic year, but did not clarify the reason behind the decision or say how long the suspension would last.
Dr Mary Peace, an English literature lecturer at the university, told The Telegraph that staff were informed of the decision five minutes before a departmental away day.
She said that she believes the rationale behind the decision was “largely economic”, and suggested that the decision was made over a poor job return for graduates amid expectations of students being in a “highly-skilled” job within six months.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
After 35yrs of having my own Horticultural Business, and now retired, I probably would be.
LOL.
“being able to speak and write well”
This has really become a lost art. I blame the school systems starting at grade one. I learned to read and write in grammar school. Now, we have kids attending college that can not form a complete sentence. Much less a paragraph or a composition.
Texting has only made it worse. Texting has made it so it is acceptable to write U instead of YOU.
A Masters in Interpretive Afro-Haitian Dance Theory.
Now there’s the ticket.
I'd like to caution on such broad brush statements. I have several degrees in English, and I have an exceptionally successful career in IT. I was outearning my peers within 5 years of graduation.
English, esp. written English, is fast becoming a problem in corporate America. In IT in particular, the ability for individuals to form coherent sentences let alone entire emails is becoming very hard to find. My skills are very much in demand, and while hiring on an English background alone may be difficult, the ability to articulate oneself both verbally and in written form is fast becoming a "unicorn" trait among job seekers.
Yep.
Probably all of the core liberal arts departments are heavily infested with tenured “woke” professors, PhD students, TAs, staff, etc.
Discontinuing English Literature as a major blow to the prestige and standing of the department. Probably the opening salvo in an all out assault on all the woke academic departments and a warning to others that student return on investment is going to be the critical measure of the worth of their courses.
Considering their doctrinal rigidity, they will probably be unable adapt and will go extinct. What a shame. NOT!!
Our friend Nyquist for proper sampling without aliasing. Shannon covers the information channel limits e.g. signal to noise, the maximum number of symbols per second, SNR required to discriminate between symbol elements. All of that is good background before designing a hardware/software DSP solution. I prefer analog front end filters to limit input frequencies such that my A to D sampling doesn't alias. After that, it's all DSP "magic". My railcar bearing analysis code used a 16-bit A to D sampled at 100 KSPS for 20 seconds. Interesting info modulates an 11 KHz band. Harmonics up to the 5th are useful in characterizing the bearing defect type. My colleague had an extensive library of known defect types in a digital audio collection on DAT. There are characteristics attributable to cup, cone, cage and rollers. The basic collection covered 55 common types.
I have some more reading to do before I get on your level.
By some I mean a lot…
I noticed you have Welsh information on your homepage.
A bunch of places around Philly have Welsh names.
Tredyffrin, Bala Cynwyd, Llanerch, etc…
And I’ll bet all of that reading and writing has given you excellent verbal and written communication skills.
I overheard two young teachers discussing how they will engage elementary students in a subject they were teaching.
Every other word they used was “like.” It was obvious to me that neither of them had studied English grammar or had read any great literature in their teacher preparation courses. I feel sorry for their students.
As an English major, I had to read two Shakespeare plays every week. My other classes required reading American and 19th century English literature and writing literary analysis for great works of fiction and Romantic poetry—Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, etc. We had to examine each word in its context to understand and appreciate how great writers employ the nuances of the English language to convey complex ideas in figurative language. It was not easy to do all of that reading and to meet the professors’ standards for our written work.
I will never use “like” repeatedly in a sentence the way obnoxious illiterates do today. Nor will I confuse the use of “lie” and “lay” and “further” and “farther.” And I’ve managed to make a living by employing my communication skills. They’re highly relevant in my career. I’m not a lawyer but many of them began as English majors.
Effective communication skills are rare and are highly prized in most occupations. Most of the math and science courses I took are of no use to me today. My liberal arts courses, on the other hand, have been immensely worthwhile. My education, though, was completed long before anyone was “woke.”
What a shame, though. In the early seventies, my Liberal Arts French degree got me a solid, well-paying job with benefits because, at the time, just completing college with decent grades was recognized as an accomplishment.
Now, everyone understands it’s meaningless because everyone gets an A.
Life’s answers are always in the movies…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiRGRvE_Wqg
THE DICKENS YOU SAY!...........................
People with Great Expectations like English lit.
Yes, the Best of Times; It Was the Worst of Times............
Studying English literature or allied fields is how most people who need to write well for a living used to learn mastery of the mother tongue - you know, journalists, lawyers, that sort of thing. It used to concentrate on the classics and serious modern writing. Now I suppose woke studies can substitute where you learn to hate, especially yourself or anyone who looks like they are trying to succeed through self-merit.
Thomas Hardy writes The Return Of the Native.Monty Python - Novel Writing | Dyynamo
I tried a Netflix show about a college English Department. The professors were tenured and gave the same lectures they gave thirty years ago. No change was allowed.
Dropping the program might be the only way to burn up all the accumulated professorial dead wood
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