Reaping the Whirlwind

The academy - our former home - is one of the subjects we follow at COTTonLINE. As comic Arte Johnson often said, in his persona as a WW II German soldier on Laugh In, “ it is verrrrrry interestink ... but not pfunny.”

Steven Hayward, the only academic among the Power Line bloggers, writes about the beginnings of a restructuring coming in academia. Hayward’s thesis:

I think we’re already seeing the beginnings of a de facto divorce of universities, in which the STEM fields and other “practical” disciplines essentially split off from the humanities and social sciences, not to mention the more politicized departments.

At this rate eventually many of our leading research universities will bifurcate into marginal fever swamps of radicalism whose majors will be unfit for employment at Starbucks, and a larger campus dedicated to science and technology education.

And he quotes the following from Inside Higher Ed about the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point:

Programs pegged for closure are American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English for teacher certification), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (excluding social science for teacher certification), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish.

COTTonLINE, since its beginnings eleven years ago, has advocated college students choose majors which lead to careers where there is actual demand. Both of the DrsC taught in programs where our grads were recruited and got jobs.

Choosing anything else is self-indulgent narcissism. Lenders interested in repayment should stop supporting students pursuing non-remunerative majors.

The difficulty is how such hard-headed notions conflict with the politicized need for inclusion and diversity (i.e., non-trivial numbers of Hispanic and Black graduates, regardless of major).