[New-Poetry] "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives"

[Mark Weiss]

Subsidies of one kind or another are a major 
revenue stream for virtually all universities 
everywhere, whether by government, church, 
individual donors or industry. But I'm not sure 
what you're getting at, because I'm not sure what 
you mean by "value." Do you mean that 
universities and colleges should be trade 
schools? Because that's a lot of what's been 
happening for the past forty-odd years, and 
certainly what the president of SUNY-Albany 
thinks should happen. Outside money has 
increasingly flowed towards "useful" subjects, 
and students, who supply the other major revenue 
stream, have increasingly gravitated towards 
"useful" degrees, with less and less resistance 
from their schools. Although the picture is made 
more confusing by the existence of departments 
that attract other students and have little value 
in the non-academic job market or, compared to 
traditional disciplines, as education.

I was very lucky to have gone to Columbia, where 
one gets to choose almost no courses for the 
first two years because the required courses, 
taught by top scholars in the various fields (I 
had Donald Keene for the Japanese section of 
Oriental Civ, for example) fill almost all one's hours.

I do agree with you wholeheartedly about degree 
as job certification. It seems never to end. A 
friend of mine who has been a concert pianist for 
almost forty years has been looking at jobs 
teaching piano in music departments, which is why 
I've become aware that doctorates in piano have 
become an essential piece of paper.

But at the level of the undergraduate degree, 
part of the issue is that in the US the degree 
became an instrument of upward mobility during an 
unusually socially fluid period under the GI 
Bill. The democratization of education was a good 
thing, I think, but it had unintended 
consequences, largely because of the collapse of 
secondary education in most of the country. So we 
have a situation in which an often semi-literate 
population goes to college for social and job 
certification, and also to provide the very basic 
skills (which used to be taught in high school) 
that employers look for in young workers.

Best,

Mark

At 07:24 AM 10/16/2010, you wrote:
>  I would say socialism is as much at fault as 
> capitalism--the government essentially makes 
> people pay for college degrees (while 
> socialistically subsidizing colleges, and 
> giving gov't-certified ones a monopoly) by 
> making almost every well-paying job require 
> one--and the kids take courses they like in 
> order to get a degree without worrying about 
> learning anything of value because in our 
> world, credentials count, abilities don't.
>
>--Bob
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New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
$16.  Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm


"What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a 
lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the 
poet alive in every sense of the word, and 
through every one of his senses. Instead of 
missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are 
like Chekhov’s short stories­the more that gets 
left out, the more they seem to contain
 One can 
hear echoes from all the various 
ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its 
core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment 
is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure 
musical threnody
[it] opens a window, not only 
into a mind, but a person, a personality, this 
human figure at the emotional center of the poem."

M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. 
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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