{"id":66199,"date":"2018-03-08T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=66199"},"modified":"2018-03-06T21:45:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T03:45:09","slug":"66199","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=66199","title":{"rendered":"Watching The Bubble Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are no worthless degrees [1] – only dumb, entitled or inflexible people.<\/p>\n

My BA in English set me up pretty good for a life where I changed careers 2-3 times before I turned 40, and taught myself to work in a STEM-related field (and doing very well, thankewverymuch).<\/p>\n

But my major advisor, the late Dr. James Blake, was a pretty no-nonsense guy. For starters, it was he the finally convinced me I was really a conservative (he characterized himself as a “Monarchist”);\u00a0I doubt you could find anyone like him in an English program today. He was also pretty diligent about reminding us that unless we wanted to a) spend years chasing a PhD and then academic appointments, or b) teach high school, or c) work for near-slave wages in the literary world, the odds of “working in our field” after college were miniscule. We were going to have to adapt, be mentally nimble, and *think* to make a living.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

So the chuckleheads who are cheering the demise of liberal arts and humanities programs<\/a> have it half wrong. They COULD fill a very useful niche.<\/p>\n

But today, unfortunately, outside of places like Hillsdale College, they do not. They are sinecures for intellectually sloppy but boundlessly entitled academics who “teach” soggy, rootless, post-structural, personal-feelings-based ideology rather than the arts and humanities that *civilization is built around*. And we’re all poorer for it, even if you didn’t go to college, or major in humanities if you did.<\/p>\n

And for that, a reckoning is due.<\/p>\n

[1] that don’t have the word “…Studies” in them, anyway. Those are all pretty worthless.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are no worthless degrees [1] – only dumb, entitled or inflexible people. My BA in English set me up pretty good for a life where I changed careers 2-3 times before I turned 40, and taught myself to work in a STEM-related field (and doing very well, thankewverymuch). But my major advisor, the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[324,10,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-education","category-education","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66201,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66199\/revisions\/66201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}