Posted on 08/22/2019 8:31:48 AM PDT by Liberty7732
Scenes from the higher education apocalypse: I don’t know whether Columbia University’s graduate program in English literature is as premier in the field as it was back in the glory days of Lionel Trilling, but yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this:
Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.Ds on Tenure Track. “Alarm” Followed, and the University Responded
The story is unfortunately behind the Chronicle‘s paywall, but when you get into the story it turns out the headline is misleading: It should read “No Success” rather than “Little Success,” because the number of Columbia English Ph.Ds placed in tenure-tracked jobs this year was Zero.
The news was grim. Columbia University’s English department had failed to place a single current Ph.D. candidate into a tenure-track job this year. And 19 new doctoral students had accepted admission into the program, raising questions about why the cohort is so large when the job prospects aren’t plentiful. This had “given rise to some alarm,” concerned graduate students wrote in an April 30 letter to department leadership.
Not to worry. Columbia is on it!
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Wait...a SIXTH-year PhD candidate?! Does that really mean 6 years post-grad or just 2?
Yep. The movie is not bad even though there’s some stuff that is ridiculous to the point that I question if the screenwriter has ever left the house. Some examples:
1. In the last one-third of the movie, that large dufflebag full of rifles, pistols, and at least one rocket launcher would weigh north of 100 lbs. There’s no way he’s walking 5 miles home carrying that.
2. In the road construction scene toward the end, how the hell is a flagger going to know or care what’s wrong with the road and admit that they’re just working on it for busywork? They should’ve had that guy be the construction foreman instead of a flagger, who is lower on the totem-pole than the temp that a runner for parts and paperwork. That guy is just trying to maintain the will to live, he doesn’t know or care about anything going on in that place.
3. A guy wearing all-black military gear and carrying a heavy dufflebag full of long rigid metal objects would get picked up by the cops before he could make it to the next block.
4. Why would a guy walk 5 miles through gang-land to get home? Gonna tell me that LA doesn’t have public transportation? If he can’t make sense of the mass-transit system, taxis accept credit cards. That whole premise makes no sense.
The movie is not bad (good, not great, I wouldn’t pay extra on Amazon-prime to rent it). It always bothered me how it’s marketed as a movie about a guy who snaps and goes on a rampage. The first time I ever saw it, I was expecting him to go on a mass-shooting or something. It’s not that at all, he’s a guy who’s been pushed his whole life and today is the day that he’s going to push back instead of his usual docile compliance. That’s really all it is. It’s obvious that the people in the studio’s marketing dept. had never seen the movie and got the movie description from some intern that was stoned.
And yes, Michael Douglas’ career hit the skids after this. For the last 25 years, he’s just been going through the motions for a paycheck on whatever garbage movie will take him. The one bright spot was The Game. That movie was good even though I don’t think he did anything particularly great in that flick, pretty much anybody that could play an older stuffy rich guy could’ve done that role. If I was Michael Douglas’ age with his money, there’s no way I would’ve been in a role prancing around playing Liberace. Gotta be kidding me. Very realistic role for Matt Damon, though. I’m sure being a one-night concubine for rich Hollywood executive homos is how he got into Hollywood and kept getting roles. It can’t be for his acting ability or business sense, he’s as dumb as a post.
Actually you are wrong.
English majors are in demand as administrative types because they can communicate clearly.
Or at least they used to be.
Now, who knows?
But Douglas craved a starring role. And Remington's character as portrayed by Douglas was pretty bad.
The author of the book was very upset about it.
I don't like Douglas.
Matt Damon should live in infamy for making the lunatic, Howard Zinn, a household name.
Furthermore, Good Will Hunting was an absurdly unrealistic portrayal of an intellectual genius.
Will Hunting was a Marty Stu: handsome, muscular, savvy, and clever; in other words, a complete non-nerd.
And he did it all rather effortlessly while mopping floors like any ordinary male, and associating with same.
Totally agree. In the movies that he was in that were good, it wasn’t because of anything he was doing. I always thought his acting was pretty wooden and most of the time he seems bored. I caught Black Rain in the early 90s on HBO and didn’t last 5 minutes. The beginning scene with him racing motorcycles on a waterfront with tourists milling around (at least one woman screaming as she’s nearly mowed down) was beyond stupid. I don’t know and don’t care what the movie is about. Michael Douglas as an action movie star is about as believable as Herve Villechaise as Batman.
you ignore the second US language Ebonics When combined with the liberal mindset, words mean whatever they want them to mean.
Yes, there is that and it’s “cool” and maybe has currency with black constituents and street cred and whatnot... but it still goes against grammar or the positing that there is value in white old things like grammar or the handed down rules of a western tradition. It becomes a slogan — in this case a slogan that the white elites coined or stole to make themselves feel less white guilt.
I loved English lit
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