Skip to main content

The Academic Apocalypse



Photo by Pixabay from Pexels


If we were living in a better society, one focused on the quality of life, where one could pursue one's interests, even if less remunerative and survive, maybe the humanities could be sustained. I work in one of those 'hot' professions as a software developer, and until recently in finance. in my years there I interest in the humanities or the social sciences to be almost nonexistent. There were many opinions, but generally ignorant. The unbalanced worlds of technology and finance have no art and at times no heart.

That said, some reasons, as well as some not mentioned by others:

Technology - That's where the money is, along with anything else the works with technology

Inequality: The wealthy can't make money from the arts, although they might enjoy it privately or at events, so it is underfunded

Funding: Students are cash cows milked for tuition, so choices are made for economic reasons.

Sexism: Women are often in non-STEM fields so...

Sexism: Men are in the [put one here] profession, and it gets funded...

Masculine society: We fund the military and let corporate ambitions destroy the planet, but again, little for the quality of life, family or health care or leisure, except as a cash cow for corporations...




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Meanings of Ender's Game

In response to an Ender's Game discussion (Goodreads), with a link from Reddit, I posted the following: Much of the Reddit stream seems to focus on military tactics, or the lack thereof, used by the Ender, but who reads Ender and thinks it about military tactics, except the 20-year old grunt that started the thread? For a book written in the 80's, then edited in the early 90's, it seems more prophetic, with its use of game immersion, remote military operations and portable computing. Then when you think about the use of children in military games, one can think somewhat more deeply about sociopolitical indoctrination.  The series itself becomes a broader exploration of empathy and foreign culture.  The criticism seems more like the problem of a man with a hammer, who thinks every problem is solved by hammering, but even worse, every problem is about hammering. An additional post, regarding suspension of disbelief: Some people commented on the suspension of disbelie...

Accomplishments of Mayor de Blasio (as of December 2014)

I realized that de Blasio's accomplishments go unnoticed, primarily because affluent white people do not benefit from them. The benefits the mayor has brought are often corrections to the abuses of Bloomberg's, along with prior mayors', policies: Policing The NYPD conducts fewer stop-and-frisks. The city dropped its stop-and-frisk appeal. NYPD officers are starting to use body cameras. New York police officers are being retrained. Carrying a small amount of weed will probably result in a ticket, not an arrest. Teenage inmates are no longer put in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. The city has settled with the “Central Park Five.” Poverty There are 23 new homeless shelters in the city There's a new rent subsidy program for homeless families. More public housing units are available to homeless families. Traffic Pedestrian deaths are at a record low. The speed limit was lowered from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour. There are harsher ...

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com

In an article,  The Right to Write - NYTimes.com , I commented on the right to write, since writers are sometimes questioned on the validity of their writing, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin: One, people always have the right to write, but readers concurrently have the right to reject said writing. Much personal criticism of depictions from writers is whether the depiction seems valid or plausible, but even that is an exercise in empathy, since it requires one to experience that depiction ideationally.  Two, there is a streak in Americans, and maybe anyone, that states that you cannot understand 'my pain', usually the death of a child or some horrific personal lose. Over a longer term I have sensed that people most easily accept empathy if it is expressed by someone with similar experiences, an aspect I believe is part of human nature. I find both irksome, since they deny empathy.