Well, that was depressing

I went to my first Unit on Critical Theory event and my first MillerCom lecture tonight (one and the same event) due to my sudden ability this semester to actually do things I feel like doing every now and then, instead of things I have to do all the time instead. It keeps you pretty busy still, and there are plenty of things that need doing, but overall it's nice. Anyway. I'm struck by the disconnect between the humanities and everyone else, or at least the one that gets expressed at these sorts of things: tonight a talk centered around the book "The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities" or something like that. The audience seemed, to my unaccustomed eye, to be full of sympathetic humanists, most in the English department, providing a true choir to preach to. The system is broken, they proclaim - we must fight it, we must rationalize our value within it, we must prove that the system is the wrong system and change it, we must stand up for what we believe! Except that the grad students are too lowly, the non-tenured too small for their powerlessness, the tenured to comfortable or too small even in their power. And there was only a tiny push to take things to the other fields in the university - to the sciences, the professional schools, the schools that I think of as professional but don't categorize themselves that way (engineering, I'm looking at you; also ACES...) As long as the other departments who right now are doing fine continue to be complacently happy (and really, who can blame them? they fit into the capitalist/corporate system just fine) the humanities are doomed to be a tiny voice that is too easily ignored. If we can't even convince other academics of our value or of the problems inherent in the tenure and promotion system (among other things) we will be even more screwed with the administration and the public. The advice of "wait 10 or 15 years" until there are enough adjuncts to really gunk up the works with a strike or something does nothing at all for the present situation. But I wonder about the wisdom of fighting a model that, however wrong, is apparently sticking because the people in charge think it is the only model that works, and are probably too afraid to branch out and try something different. There's a problem of price fixing or collusion or something, it seems, even if unintentional or subconscious between universities and each other, and universities and the private sector. The fear that we must compete monetarily with corporate America over hires or we'll only attract subpar talent seems wrong to me. Should we not want those qualified individuals who are concerned with the chance to teach and research and mentor and be happy to exclude those whose primary concern is playing at the country club for the next 40 years (at $15000 a year)? I know the humanities are in no shortage for applicants right now, and as far as I can tell there are plenty of eager and willing folks in other fields too. But who will be brave enough to challenge perceptions, and risk losing "all" the qualified candidates to higher paying institutions? Who determines what that quality consists of?

Things seem always the same

Deleted beginnings are never a good way to start writing. Although I suppose that's a misleading statement, since they can't start writing at all once they've been deleted. At least not the part of it you read. Semantics II has made me very aware of these sorts of things, much more so than Semantics I which was kind of like a fun thought experiment about language using very basic things I learned a long time about in Algebra (I wonder where motorcycle riding, police calling Jeff Brock is these days... I wonder at all the things I have forgotten about rings and fields and sets). Semantics II is nothing like that: full of things from formal logic and philosophy. We interpret things like "John believes that Mary eats cheese" to be true in the set of all possible worlds that are compatible with John's beliefs in the actual world and in which Mary eats cheese in the possible world. Sets of worlds and individuals and all sorts of relations. Or something like that. An hour of class three days a week and I'm mentally done for the day. (This is not good for my other studies, I should mention, since class ends at 11am). But it is sort of fun to sort out the possible worlds where Sherlock Holmes has an even number of hairs on his head, from those in which the number is odd. Linguists at least manage to come up with nice example sentences, often funny. I would write one of them out here, but of course I can't think of any at the moment. Must be the lingering H1N1. In any case, I wish John and Mary well - and anyone else who wondered if I would ever write again in this space (aside from myself) - I think of it often, but laziness gets the best of me.