Academe’s Extinction Event
Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at the MLA
[...] "Academe, as anyone knows who’s tried to leave it, is like a partner who is wrenchingly hard to quit. When it was good, it was amazing. God, the highs! The horizon of your happiness seemed unbounded. But the partner turned out to be a nut job who demanded nothing less than all of you. Move to a different city every year, they stipulated. Subsist on bread crumbs. Completely debase yourself. They constantly evaluated your “performance.” On a whim, they dressed you up in a sailor suit and beat you. [...]
The number of jobs in English advertised on the annual MLA job list has declined by 55 percent since 2008; adjuncts now account for all but a quarter of college instructors generally. Whole departments are being extirpated by administrators with utilitarian visions; from 2013 to 2016, colleges cut 651 foreign-language programs. Meanwhile the number of English majors at most universities continues to swoon."
Corrections (05/13/2019, 2:55 p.m.): John Schilb is a former editor of the journal College English, not the editor, as this essay originally said. In addition, he is a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, not the University of Indiana. The text has been corrected accordingly. Andrew Kay is a writer living in Madison, Wis.
For the full article, visit: https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190510-academes-extinction-event