"Christopher M. Kelty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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 actually do think that. The study of, say, literature, is not particularly demanded by the market. The economy would not collapse if all the world's professors studying Victorian English novels vanished without a trace. The principle natural demand for such professions comes from academia itself, which is highly subsidized by the government at the moment and thus not operating particularly according to normal market dictates. Demand for academics in the humanities is largely synthetic, being generated by redistributions of money from taxpayers by governments. This synthetic demand is created both directly via payments to fund academics and academia, and indirectly through the subsidy of college educations. The latter is an especially important subsidy, since without it many more seeking such educations would feel tremendous pressure to learn things that would be of benefit in the job market, and might not otherwise spend much time on the study of poetry and the like. There is precious little objective test for the quality of such academic work in any case, but in the current environment, a lack of practical value in the work done will go largely unnoticed. A century ago, there was little to no government subsidy of professions like the academic study of literature, and as a consequence there was fairly little of it done -- those who might have been so inclined found other ways to occupy their time, be it the practice of law or running lumber mills. The few who did manage to get such work usually had to pass a very high barrier in order to do so. It is not clear that society was radically worse off as a result. Now, engineering *is* in high market demand, without subsidy. People want their cars and heart-lung machines and fire suppression systems and bridges, and for good reason -- without such things they might live very uncomfortable lives. There is thus a considerable amount of market pressure on the profession of engineering -- and considerable market judgment about the quality of the output. No amount of posturing will alter the objective qualities of an engineered artifact -- vigorous argument will not make a car more fuel efficient, and a thorough command of arcane jargon will not make a bridge stand up. > 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). That's not being "more like (US) reality than ever before", that's far less like reality than ever before. The average person in the US has to convince other people to trade hard won resources for their labor in order to earn their bread. The average academic survives because of subsidy. The "pressure" on academics is not actual market pressure at all. It is, in fact, a very luxurious state of affairs. There is, of course, dramatic competition for academic jobs in the humanities, and why shouldn't there be? If you can get a tenured job, you have a lifetime of doing more or less only what you enjoy, devoid of any need to actually do terribly much other than the indifferent teaching of a class or two. (You might have to read the student's papers and grade them, but that's hardly onerous compared to any real job.) You even get your entire summer off, sabbaticals, funded trips to conferences, carnal access to the occasional undergraduate if you are so inclined, etc. The pay may not be fantastic, but the job itself is, so why wouldn't there be huge numbers of people striving to get in? Now, if you compare the current state of affairs to that a century or so ago, and the contrast is fairly stark. There just wasn't enough money flowing in to the marketplace to support a large class of academics in the humanities. Of course, even in the modern situation, far more try to get in than actually manage, and so we have the academic underclass that is forced to actually work hard, at the behest of actual market demand, doing such "demeaning" tasks as teaching remedial English composition classes at community colleges (a task held in contempt in spite of the fact that it actually is of substantial benefit to society). Perry
