Department of English, 2020
When the economy tanked in 2009, some people predicted the demise of the liberal-arts degree. In 2012, The Chronicle reported that 30 percent of all new nurses had also passed Ph.D. qualifying exams in 20th-century poetry before abandoning their dissertations. Tenured professors began sleeping under their desks to protect their hard-earned window offices. And yet — like cockroaches, Styrofoam, and Harold Bloom — the humanities survived. Consider the shock waves we’ve endured:
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Universities stopped paying for conference travel. After a wave of armed protests, professors began talking with their colleagues at nearby universities. Study groups formed. Now, instead of performing their work at a national meeting for an audience of 10, professors find themselves in heated discussions with people from the college across town — people they never would have met under the old system. Regional schools of thought have formed. New ideas are being generated. The only Thai restaurant in Grinnell, Iowa, now thrives, packed with academics who can no longer afford to fly halfway around the globe to eat with similar colleagues in similar Thai restaurants in Boston and London.
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After the collapse, academic presses began publishing tenure books online, keeping the rigorous review process but axing production costs. As an added bonus, authors who hated their book designs or colors were given password-protected access to their cover pages, so they could change them at will. Book designers were thrown out of work, until everyone realized the horrific aesthetic consequences of allowing academics to act as art directors. By 2014, book designers were back at work, but now they are paid more than cardiologists. Meanwhile, researchers in McMinnville, Ore., and other “island communities” have unfettered access to every new academic book online, which is good since the practice of interlibrary loan went out with the SUV and the hedge fund.
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As costs mounted, all colleges and universities went to a 10-hour, four-day-a-week schedule. All buildings except the libraries were closed on Fridays. As a result, it was difficult to hold committee meetings, which dwindled in number. Now most meetings are conducted via e-mail instead of face-to-face, and troublemakers are (unbeknownst to themselves) summarily deleted from in boxes. Faculty members are trying to keep up the infighting, but many dispiritedly report that capital letters and emoticons are just not the same as fighting in person.
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In a related development, because academic senates do not meet, they’ve stopped issuing advisories to university presidents. As of this writing, university presidents have not noticed the grave dearth of nonbinding advisory memorandums, and continue to issue edicts as usual.
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Forced to make hard decisions, colleges and universities experimented with eliminating faculty members, only to discover that without teachers, students complained that they were learning less. Online robot instructors were tried, but they had no paychecks from which to deduct their maintenance costs. Finally, faculty members were reinstated, complete with salaries and pay-as-you-go medical plans. To compensate for revenues lost to faculty expenses, institutions were compelled to stop hiring consultants. Assessment teams disappeared, leading to widespread panic. Professors no longer knew how to list student-centered outcomes on their syllabi or how to tabulate six course objectives on an Excel spreadsheet. Professors and students heroically overcame those barriers and, as of today, continue to learn. It is unclear how long this can continue, however.
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Study-abroad programs were eliminated. Students responded to that calamity by organizing and lobbying their legislators to lower the drinking age to 18, “like it is in Europe.” To fully replicate the study-abroad experience, they also began the now-ubiquitous practice of singing in bars. Students who dream of traveling to Britain choose football anthems, while Asian-studies majors favor karaoke. This has also reduced transfer-credit red tape.
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As conditions worsened, service-learning programs began to operate in reverse, increasing campus diversity. Groups of fresh-faced volunteers from India now arrive on campuses each week, eager to recondition “gently used” computers for deserving freshmen. These visitors have strained our resources almost to the breaking point.
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Fewer students now attend four-year, liberal-arts institutions. Instead, a European-style apprenticeship system enables vocationally minded students to learn work skills directly from workers. Respect for blue-collar jobs has increased, and the prestige of a B.A. has fallen. As a result, students who do pursue B.A.'s in the humanities tend to be passionate devotees, many of whom already know how to weld or fix a sink. Class absenteeism has plummeted. Plagiarism is nonexistent. Enthusiastic discussions about Frantz Fanon echo through the halls, especially since the carpets had to be torn up. Faucets in English departments no longer drip.
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The old campus apartments gradually filled up with professors and their families, since no one could afford a mortgage or a commute anymore. The campus got progressively more crowded, more intergenerational, and less private. The swimming pool dried up. The campus coffee shop began selling Folger’s. The ivory tower crumbled, along with the campus infrastructure. In this new environment, students and professors are economic equals who see one another on the weekends. They also walk home from night classes together, giving them added protection against the gangs of half-starved former assessment consultants now roaming the streets.
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Sartorially, humanities professors seem to be thriving under the current dire economic conditions. There have even been mutterings from our colleagues in the business school that we “seem to enjoy this sort of thing.” It is true that even before the Great Collapse, we carried battered leather book bags and wore “vintage” eyeglasses. Now everyone must adopt those practices, allowing us to actually be the trendsetters we always believed ourselves to be.
Today, in 2020, colleges and universities are not as large, high-tech, or landscaped as they once were, but they remain centers of innovation. As we move forward, toward an even less restrictive “university-without-walls” model, we expect to become more interdisciplinary, unimpeded by bricks and mortar. We are not afraid, because we have what matters most: A sense that as the stock market fluctuates wildly, the humanities retain their value.