Covid has turned the gap between universities and colleges serving mainly privileged students and those serving needy ones into a chasm and it is unclear if the latter will be able to survive.
Ir Stone istock/getty images plus
Not long ago, heading out to an academic conference where I was scheduled to take part in a panel examining “alternative” careers for humanities degree holders and looking for airplane reading, I grabbed from my bookshelf three aging publications:
Getting a Job Outside the Academy: A Special Publication of the American Anthropological Association (1982), and
Humanities Ph.D.s and Nonacademic Careers: A Guide for Faculty Advisers (1983). After I got home, I retrieved an even earlier publication, Rita Jacobs’s
in the Humanities (1977). Each of these publications could benefit from some minor updating to make them fully relevant today, but the overall impression is that after roughly four decades, they have weathered surprising well.
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.