Posted on 01/06/2006 12:35:46 AM PST by Lorianne
While most of us were opening the last of our "holiday" presents, basking in the glow of Lancome's "multi-defense protective tinted cream," or deciding whether to wear the new tie with prancing horses or the one with intertwined golf clubs, several hundred Nervous Nellies and Fearful Freddies, many with newly minted Ph.Ds in hand, were busy networking, i.e., job-hunting, at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Washington.
This meant sitting through days of seminars on subjects of interest only to the authors of the learned papers. Their parents had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to educate them, incurring loans putting them deep in debt for decades, and it was time to shed the cap and gown and look for work. The politically incorrect graduates who don't conform to the unstated but clearly implied correct color have to work hardest to find jobs. That's particularly true for white candidates who majored in black studies. How can a white man teach black literature?
Of course, at most professional conventions, whether of accountants, plumbers, dermatologists or hip-hoppers, the range runs from dull to boring to shocking. But MLA conventions are unusual, if not unique. Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason magazine who has attended MLA sessions as both member and reporter, observes that "there are few collective groups more insufferable than humanities professors." (Gulp. Full disclosure here: When I was a card-carrying liberal in an earlier century I earned my Ph.D with a dissertation exploring "realism and allegory in the early plays of Harold Pinter.") The graying profs were particularly frightened this year by the news, as one professor after another told ghost stories at the bar if not around a campfire, that more and more conservative kids are arriving on campus, ready to argue.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I remember an upper philosophy class I took in college. Can't remember the name of the course, but my final paper in the class was fifteen pages of bs titled, The Nothingness of Nothing. I aced the course. I put the most outrageous things I could think of in that paper. I am still convinced that the prof. never read it. I think he just liked the title.
What job is a graduate with a Queer Studies degree qualified for?
Democratic senator maybe...? Can't think of anything else.
such gatherings inspired the inventor of the pineapple grenade.
Boortz had a young gal, 22 or so, just out of college, on the phone on his show yesterday. She had attended a small Liberal Arts college in New England, and her degree was something like "feminist gender studies".
He nicely ripped her apart, and showed her to be a complete idiot. She never caught on, and took herself seriously.
University enrollments are shrinking everywhere. On-line and teleconferenced classes are reducing the demand for faculty. Internet bulletin boards "skip trace" leftist profs as they con their ways from one adjunct assistant professorship to another. Intelligent parents and students seek out high quality technical and vocational training instead of 4 years of expensive Marxist indoctrination interspersed with partying at the "U". A newly minted PhD in liberal arts will never earn enough money to repay the student loans.
This is the situation when times are fat. When we go into the next economic downturn . . . (Hey, doc, get you a rag and clean up those tables in front!)
"Tenured professors are hysterical (a good "gendering" word) over the rise of the right on the campus, of students who aren't buying into lesbian literature, identity politics, deconstructionism, feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, Marxism, gay culturalism and all the other -isms that have dominated the curriculum for the generation since the '60s. Assumptions are under siege. "
About time!
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