Academe
quits me
| “
|
He
doesn't come right out and say it, but he alludes to it. Too many
universities traded out classic humanities for leftist pablum which
blames white males for every ailment that a leftist can imagine.
Via
Ron First SeMetzger |
Academe
quits me
Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a
24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am
not “burned out.” The truth is rather more banal. Ohio State University
will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the
spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, I
would become eligible for tenure. In an era of tight budgets, there is
neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has
never really fit in nor tried very hard to. (Leave aside my heterodox
politics and hard-to-credit publication record.) My feelings are like
glue that will not set. The pieces fall apart in my hands.
This essay is not a contribution to the I-Quit-Academe genre. (A more
accurate title in my case would be Academe Quits Me.) Although I have
become uncomfortably aware that I am out of step with the purposeful
march of the 21st-century university (or maybe I just never adjusted to
Ohio State), gladly would I have learned and gladly continued to teach
for as long as my students would have had me. The decision, though, was
not my students’ to make. And I’m not at all sure that a majority would
have voted to keep me around, even if they had been polled. My salary
may not be large (a rounding error above the median income for white
families in the U.S.), but the university can offer part-time work to
three desperate adjuncts for what it pays me. A lifetime of learning
has never been cost-effective, and in today’s university—at least on
the side of campus where the humanities are badly housed—no other
criterion is thinkable.
[Full]
AHEM
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When you by law must admit functional illiterates into your system it only makes sense to have a course of study comprehensible to them.
ReplyDelete24 years and he hasn't made tenure? Wazzup wit dat? Most make it in 5 years at most. Something is fishy.
ReplyDeleteA liberal education was an education suitable for a liberated - i.e., free - man, one of property and wealth, not under the control of another. It emphasized history, the arts and sciences, literature, music - essentially, everything that made a man a civilized gentleman.
ReplyDeleteThere was no point in giving this education to a slave. Their masters preferred to tell them what and how to think.
Today's "liberal" education emphasizes "progressive principles", like Man's contribution to Global Warming, like how the "rich 1%" oppress the rest of mankind, like how every other culture is in some way superior to ours, like how there's nothing special or exceptional about America, like how knowing spelling and grammar and math is just some sort of "white privilege".
Fortunately, there are a few colleges left that stand by traditional values, like Hillsdale College