On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 07:41:11AM -0500, Christopher M. Kelty wrote: > really? I mean do you really thing that people in the humanities are > somehow more disconnected from reality and commercial pressure than > engineers or scientists? I have no idea what exactly that would > mean... it's a bad generalization.
one problem with top posting is that it's harder to notice when some things are missed out... in this case, i did say "parts of" the humanities :-) as for what that would mean, the linked article described that in detail - the need to explain ones ideas to people who are not already steeped in the related literature and discipline. the specific example described was the need of the author, an engineer, to explain things to non-technical people - managers, clients, etc - all the time. i.e. "connect with reality". academics are often somewhat removed from this reality, in every discipline, but when there are commercial applications of their work possible they need to interface with this reality. the insularity of some parts of the humanities was apparent in all the explanations provided for the professor who exploded... she was addressing people who were not in agreement with her ideas or her method of analysing them, who were not steeped in her disciplinary literature etc. the point of the author of the linked article was that engineers have to do this all the time. > The humanities today are more like > (US) reality than ever before, namely in the economic distribution of > wealth, with a handful (less than 1%) making more than say, 100K per > year, and whose names are known by the New York Times or the TLS, and > the 99% living in near poverty (starting salaries for a tenure track > job are still around 30-45K), our outright poverty (adjuncts teaching > 4 classes per semester for $3000 or less per class). The same > distribution applies to whose books are published widely... so why > does this rich-poor gap exist? Who knows really, but I don't think it > has anything to do with any metric of "connection to reality"... perhaps you misunderstood what i meant about commercial interaction? the most insular academic will get a salary affected by market pressures. indeed, the distribution of this income may have nothing to do with "connection to reality" in terms of explaining ones ideas to "outsiders". although perhaps those who write bestsellers are able to do this. best rishab
