Thread by @adelinekoh

Why are the #humanities dying? Why is enrollment dropping precipitously, why are departments shutting down from lack of funding and support? A 🧵by a former English professor:

The answer: the humanities are becoming more and more irrelevant, and its stakeholders are refusing to critically address its irrelevance.

A case study from my former field, #literarystudies: the central object of analysis in literary studies has not changed for century: only novels, poetry, drama are acceptable. Everything else is either on the margins or relegated to another department.

This insistence on gatekeeping is a big part of why literary studies is becoming so irrelevant.

If you regularly spend time on social media, u’ll see less and less posts with words promoted in your feed. Especially posts with long blocks of text, or text without a cute design element.

The few places on social that I see text-only posts being promoted r LinkedIn & Twitter

Literary studies is about training folks to analyze patterns in texts and tease out the cultural contexts and traditions within these textual patterns.

If people outside the academy aren’t reading - let alone engaging substantially with long form texts any longer - what exactly is the point in what you do? What value do you bring the world outside the ivory tower?

Not grappling with this question in a serious way is a big reason why you’re seeing fewer and fewer young people enroll in your classes, and why your funding is becoming more and more difficult to find.

The solution? It’s a scary one. Literary studies needs to be broken.

It needs to be asking itself questions its practitioners have avoided examining for decades: what is the point of our existence, and what value do we actually bring to folks outside of our navel gazing?

Thank you for reading.

#highered #englishphd #academictwitter #leavingacademia #quittingacademia #englishphd #Literature