dagblog - Comments for "Teaching Shakespeare and the New Normal"

D'oh!

Donal — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:34:08 +0000

In reply to That wouild be Lil' Abner...

D'oh!

There is something about the

Richard Day — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:05:38 +0000

In reply to Teaching Shakespeare and the New Normal

There is something about the fall. The colors and the magnificent odors.

And I am always taken back to my first year in college. Shakespeare and Homer and Heroditus and Caesar....

My entire mind just opened up. It was magic to me.

College opened up my mind like a young monk at Oxford a thousand years ago.

Imagine, some peasant is brought into a monastery and taught how to read and write and takes it seriously and ends up one of the keepers of knowledge.

The ability to be taken out of the volkskunde and into a universe never before contemplated. ha

Benefits and burdens. Get at job and a hair cut.

And here is Homer and Shakespeare describing people you have actually met but with new perspective.

The land grant colleges are gone. Tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousand is the cost of what cost me next to nothing.

ha.

Good news?

Everything, I ever learned and much much more is right here on the internet.

You just have to look for it.

A lot of your post gives me

artappraiser — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:49:51 +0000

In reply to Teaching Shakespeare and the New Normal

A lot of your post gives me deja vus allover again thoughts vis-a-vis my experience of the late 70's.

That said, there's probably not much to learn from me telling of that, because every cycle in academia is different, dependent not just on the economy but on what the generation being educated is like, how big it is, trends in education and fashion in life choices.

Nonetheless I will bloviate on it a bit, hell, maybe some tiny bit of it will help you with putting some kind of perspective on wassup now.

I am right in the middle of the boomers agewise.

I was a TA for 3.5 years in the late 70's while getting an M.A. in Art History at UW Milwaukee, the large big city extension campus of the UW system, after having gotten my B.A. from the more prestigious main UW campus in Madison in 75. The art history department at Milwaukee was small and therefore we TA's were privy to a lot of doings.

There was high unemployment, pretty much the same numbers as now, and high inflation.

At the same time all of the boomers, the first generation to expect to go to college like it was a natural thing to do, were coming out of higher education and competing with each other. When we went into college, no one looked down on a humanities degree. By the time we got out, PHD's in humanties were punchlines to jokes and subjects of cartoons. Everyone had a humanities degree and a lot of them were going back to school for more. Same as you describe, there were hundreds of applications for each teaching position in the humaniites, and Renaissance scholars were a dime a dozen. And the post baby boom generation didn't have enough kids for all the new boomer teachers available.

Even early on, Ttis actually had an interesting effect. in my horrible big suburban high school, we had the luck of getting some recent brilliant college graduates as teachers in our final year, like an obviously extremely bright radical economist teaching us Sociology.

As an undergrad at UW Madison, we had the big fancy tenured players teaching 101 classes.

By the time I was in grad school, what we were seeing was some of the best and brightest competing for 1 year positions. The colleges saw the glut on the market and bargained everyone down to the point where they thought a 1 year position with no chance of renewal much less tenure was a great prize. It looked like there would be a permanent gypsy class of professors, bouncing year to year with low pay across the country.

This actually benefitted grad students like me on the quality front. I got to study with some pretty great minds, at a college that many might have looked down upon in the past. Especially as it was considered a big city community university where many "grownup" people went part time to improve their resume for a job, and not an "ivory tower" kinda place like Madison. At the same time, I got the strong message that going into academia was hopeless and stupid. The "ivory tower" was coming to me, as it were, because they were desperate.

One of the main things I am trying to get across is we boomers who happened to be in academic circles in the late 70's felt the turn to Reagan like anti-intellectualism quite a bit before Reagan was around. We even participated in the self-deprecation. How could you not, the the job situation looked so dire and to be a big weight around the necks of a whole generation that was too big and too spoiled. It looked like it would stay that way until we died, they were just too many of us to have jobs as bricklayers much less to have jobs as herpetologists or scholars of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

One really big trend coming out of this in the late 70's was: law school. A couple of examples: my favorite professor in grad school, an innovative scholar of 19th century academic painting who had published quite a bit, had a lot of international connections, and who would surely have gotten one of the scarce tenured positions there, instead quit art history the same year I graduated, move to California and enrolled in law school. My undergrad roommate, who got a B.A. in English, managed to snag a prize that wasn't easy to get--a job teaching high school English in a godforsaken town in Iowa. She did that for one year before quitting and enrolling in: law school; those kids in Iowa had a great English teacher for a year. Most reading probably have on opinion on the result of society having all those boomer lawyers.

Actually I'm a total foodie

Michael Maiello — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:18:21 +0000

In reply to To snobs. To people who

Actually I'm a total foodie and that's a luxury I'll splurge on. But it's the taste, not the cost that I enjoy!

That wouild be Lil' Abner...

Austin Train — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:45:31 +0000

In reply to There was a great arc in the

That wouild be Lil' Abner...

To snobs. To people who

Doctor Cleveland — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:42:13 +0000

In reply to For what kind person does the

To snobs. To people who measure themselves by comparison.

If you want to avoid these people, I recommend inexpensive restaurants.

For what kind person does the

Michael Maiello — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:39:01 +0000

In reply to There was a great arc in the

For what kind person does the food taste worse just because everyone else can eat it if they want to?

There was a great arc in the

Donal — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:30:22 +0000

In reply to I think we have something

There was a great arc in the old Pogo comics. A rich man was wandering around complaining that it wasn't hardly worth being rich because any fool could afford a decent mattress, or car, or whatever. IIRC, he bought the rights to be the only one who could read Fearless Fosdick comics. He lorded it over the rest of mankind for a while, but was foiled by Mammy Yokum.

I think we have something

Michael Maiello — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:38:42 +0000

In reply to Teaching Shakespeare and the New Normal

I think we have something very unique now -- a new artistocracy but the illusion of freedom. After all, unless you work for him, hedge fund manager Steve A. Cohen can't, like a king of old, walk up to you and start barking orders. He can, however, buy your employer and fire you for no reason.