Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Last Professors

The Last Professors by Frank Donoghue is a must-read for all humanities professors in the US. And, the story of their demise is so telling that it should be recommended literature for all academics. It is interesting to learn about all those books published and never read, about the debate on tenure (while it slowly disappears under the eyes of the debaters), about the companies that will soon own every bit of what universities produce, including their temporary staff, about the difficulty to defend certain intellectual values, and about how the better education will slowly but surely only become affordable to the rich. It is scary how the evolutions predicted in this book are rapidly coming true. (Example : Cameron in Britain, autonomous universities in France, rationalization in Flanders, ..)

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