Saturday, October 01, 2005
(12:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Same Old Grad School Doomsday Talk
Perhaps flaunting Fontana Labs' advice, I wandered into John Emerson's site and began reading an article about the injustices associated with requiring all college instructors to have PhDs, the heavy weight borne by those who are attracted to the scholarly life but don't have the real creativity required for serious academic work, the bad conscience of the institution that either fails a PhD candidate (hence stringing the person along) or else passes someone they know in their heart is not going to make a great scholar, etc. -- in large part, it's the same old song and dance that all of us humanities-oriented blogizens have long since taken to heart and, indeed, almost memorized.The thing that lends this article a special morbid fascination for me, however, is that William James wrote it in 1903.
