everything > PhD school

A lot is happening in higher ed these days, and since my life is deeply enmeshed in higher ed stuff, I have Thoughts.

In an nutshell: the general public no longer thinks it's a good idea to spend most of your entire adult life paying for a degree from a mediocre school. As a result, the vast majority of schools are having money troubles and some have decided to eliminate subjects like English and/or university departments entirely. And the government has decided now would be a good time to make it more expensive to get doctoral degrees.

All the academics in my twitter feed seem to think this is a coordinated assault on higher education. But...doesn't it seem obvious that the cost of college is insanely high? And shouldn't students who are going heavily into debt major in something with clearly transferable job skills? Who could argue with a straight face that there aren't enough doctoral students in the world? Who among us disagrees that most PhDs (myself included) may have been better off doing something else with their time? And do we really think that all those entry-level jobs that require a 4-year degree couldn't be done by a high school graduate?

So am I crazy or are all the people in my twitter feed? My hunch: the tweeters (twitterers?) are actually just worried about their jobs. School and department closures mean fewer jobs for new PhDs. No grad students means professors will be deprived the pleasure of replicating themselves through their students. An army of administrators will no longer be available to fill out all that pesky paperwork. Academic jobs are disappearing, the means of (academic) production are changing, and many of us may need to re-train when our positions are eliminated. Who knew that factory workers and academics could have so much in common?! 

And the cherry on top: Ben Sasse saying that the humanities, hard sciences, and sports are all "greater than" the social sciences. Reader, I laughed! (Social scientists, of course, are pissed.) Now what I really want to do is find a way to make Sasse's tweets and the responses into a modern version of the Protagoras (a version where Socrates is too busy with his day job at Google to chat with the sophists). Obviously, the conclusion of the dialogue will be that sports management is in fact the highest form of knowledge. 

peripheral tidbits: grant edition

A couple nights ago I finished Ron Chernow's new biography of Grant. I'm feeling pretty accomplished, too, because the book is 960 pages and I managed to read it in three weeks. (I checked it out of the library so there was a hard deadline.) It's easy to read 960 pages when they're interesting, though, so it's actually Chernow who ought to be feeling accomplished.

Anyway, it's a good book and I learned many things. (Notably: reconstruction was hella important and I should know more about it.) However, as is my wont, I would like to make note of two peripheral tidbits:

First, I hadn't fully comprehended just how crazy office-seeking and patronage politics were in 19th century America. I feel like an idiot, but I finally understand what Tocqueville was talking about. Also, I think he's probably wrong, since Americans were clearly obsessed with place-hunting. Though I guess the French were worse?

Second, I learned that campaign tactics were infinitely cleverer before television and the internet: in the 1880 election, Republicans printed a pamphlet about Winfield Scott Hancock's political achievements—a pamphlet that contained nothing but blank pages. Why did no one think of this in the 2016 election? If either side prints a clever pamphlet in 2020 I will vote a straight ticket for them.