Jafar Panahi Sentenced to 6 Years in Jail, 20 Years of Silence
by David Hudson
MUBI
Shocking and terrible news from Tehran today. Farideh Gheirat, a lawyer representing several of the politicians, journalists and artists detained during the protests that immediately followed the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election, has told the ISNA news agency (as reported by Reuters and the AFP) that Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to six years in jail and that his "social rights," including "making movies, writing scripts, foreign travel and giving interviews to domestic and foreign media, have been taken away for 20 years."
"Panahi, an outspoken supporter of Iran's opposition green movement, was convicted of gathering, colluding and propaganda against the regime," reports Saeed Kamali Dehghan. "Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia university, told the Guardian the sentence showed Iran's leaders could not tolerate the arts. 'This is a catastrophe for Iran's cinema,' he said. 'Panahi is now exactly in the most creative phase of his life and by silencing him at this sensitive time, they are killing his art and talent. Iran is sending a clear message by this sentence that they don't have any tolerance and can't bear arts, philosophy or anything like that. This is a sentence against the whole culture of Iran. They want the artists to sit at their houses and stop creating art. This is a catastrophe for a whole nation."
Gheirat has announced that she will appeal this decision, so we do have some hope that this incredibly harsh sentence will not stand. Panahi was one of several mourners who'd gathered near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan in a Tehran cemetery who were arrested in July 2009. So, too, was filmmaker Muhammad Rasoulof, who has also been sentenced to six years today. When Panahi was released that summer, his passport was revoked and he was forbidden to leave the country. In March of this year, he was arrested again because, as the Iranian culture minister put it, he "was making a film against the regime and it was about the events that followed election." Throughout the ordeal, prominent filmmakers, film societies and festivals formally protested Panahi's detainment, and finally, in May, he was released on bail.
The speech he delivered during his hearing in November has been widely cited and quoted, and you can read it in full at Current Conflicts. Here's just a bit: "You are putting me on trial for making a film that, at the time of our arrest, was only 30 percent shot. You must have heard that the famous creed, 'There is no god, except Allah,' turns into blasphemy if you only say the first part and omit the second part. In the same vein, how can you establish that a crime has been committed by looking at 30 percent of the rushes for a film that has not been edited yet?... I, Jafar Panahi, declare once again that I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country and I like to work in my own country. I love my country, I have paid a price for this love too, and I am willing to pay again if necessary. I have yet another declaration to add to the first one. As shown in my films, I declare that I believe in the right of 'the other' to be different, I believe in mutual understanding and respect, as well as in tolerance; the tolerance that forbid me from judgment and hatred. I don't hate anybody, not even my interrogators."
To Read the Rest of the Report and Access Hyperlinked Resources
Showing posts with label Humanities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humanities. Show all posts
Monday, December 20, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Democracy Now: Ignoring Torture Claims and Questionable Evidence, New York Jury Convicts Pakistani Scientist Aafia Siddiqui
Ignoring Torture Claims and Questionable Evidence, New York Jury Convicts Pakistani Scientist Aafia Siddiqui
Democracy Now
A New York jury has convicted the US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui of attempted murder for shooting at US forces while jailed in Afghanistan in 2008. None of the Americans were injured, but Siddiqui was shot and wounded while in US custody. Human rights groups have long alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a US secret prison. We speak to Siddiqui family spokesperson Tina Foster of the International Justice Network and Petra Bartosiewicz, an independent journalist who has been closely following Siddiqui’s case.
Guests:
Tina Foster, Executive Director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family.
Petra Bartosiewicz, independent journalist who wrote about Aafia Siddiqui in the November 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine and covered the trial with daily dispatches for the website Cage Prisoners. She is also working on a book titled The Best Terrorists We Could Find, an investigation of terrorism trials in the US since 9/11.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Democracy Now
A New York jury has convicted the US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui of attempted murder for shooting at US forces while jailed in Afghanistan in 2008. None of the Americans were injured, but Siddiqui was shot and wounded while in US custody. Human rights groups have long alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a US secret prison. We speak to Siddiqui family spokesperson Tina Foster of the International Justice Network and Petra Bartosiewicz, an independent journalist who has been closely following Siddiqui’s case.
Guests:
Tina Foster, Executive Director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family.
Petra Bartosiewicz, independent journalist who wrote about Aafia Siddiqui in the November 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine and covered the trial with daily dispatches for the website Cage Prisoners. She is also working on a book titled The Best Terrorists We Could Find, an investigation of terrorism trials in the US since 9/11.
To Read/Listen/Watch
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Revolution By the Book: Academic Repression -- Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex
Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex
Peter McLaren (Editor), Steven Best (Editor), and Anthony J. Nocella, II (Editors)
Revolution By the Book
...
Neoliberalism and Academia
It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.
Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.
As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.
Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.
Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.
As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.
Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5
To Read the Rest of Excerpts
Peter McLaren (Editor), Steven Best (Editor), and Anthony J. Nocella, II (Editors)
Revolution By the Book
...
Neoliberalism and Academia
It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.
Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.
As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.
Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.
Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.
As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.
Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5
To Read the Rest of Excerpts
Monday, February 08, 2010
Thomas H. Benton: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'
The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'
By Thomas H. Benton
The Chronicle of Higher Education
...
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
Unable even to consider that something might be wrong with higher education, mom and dad begin to think there is something wrong with their daughter, and she begins to internalize that feeling.
Everyone has told her that "there are always places for good people in academe." She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there's something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What's left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.
Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.
Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school "only if you can't imagine doing anything else." But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.
There should be a special place in hell for the professors who—at the end of an advisee's 10-year graduate program with no job in sight—say, "well, academe is not for everyone."
The main point of another column I wrote six years ago ("If You Must Go") is that students considering graduate school should "do their homework." But the problem is that there is still almost no way—apart from the rumor mill to which they do not really have access—for students to gather some of the most crucial information about graduate programs: the rate of attrition, the average amount of debt at graduation, and, most important, the placement of graduates (differentiating between adjunct, lecturer, visiting, tenure-track positions, and nonacademic positions). Programs often claim that graduates who are working as adjuncts or visiting faculty members are successfully placed in the profession.
Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so. I can see no way for that information to become available unless it becomes part of accreditation or rankings in publications such as U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps departments might start offering details if students started demanding it in large numbers, with support from organizations such as the American Association of University Professors. Maybe it's possible for graduate students themselves to start gathering and reporting this information on a Web site.
Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.
To Read the Entire Article
By Thomas H. Benton
The Chronicle of Higher Education
...
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
Unable even to consider that something might be wrong with higher education, mom and dad begin to think there is something wrong with their daughter, and she begins to internalize that feeling.
Everyone has told her that "there are always places for good people in academe." She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there's something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What's left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.
Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.
Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school "only if you can't imagine doing anything else." But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.
There should be a special place in hell for the professors who—at the end of an advisee's 10-year graduate program with no job in sight—say, "well, academe is not for everyone."
The main point of another column I wrote six years ago ("If You Must Go") is that students considering graduate school should "do their homework." But the problem is that there is still almost no way—apart from the rumor mill to which they do not really have access—for students to gather some of the most crucial information about graduate programs: the rate of attrition, the average amount of debt at graduation, and, most important, the placement of graduates (differentiating between adjunct, lecturer, visiting, tenure-track positions, and nonacademic positions). Programs often claim that graduates who are working as adjuncts or visiting faculty members are successfully placed in the profession.
Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so. I can see no way for that information to become available unless it becomes part of accreditation or rankings in publications such as U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps departments might start offering details if students started demanding it in large numbers, with support from organizations such as the American Association of University Professors. Maybe it's possible for graduate students themselves to start gathering and reporting this information on a Web site.
Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.
To Read the Entire Article
Monday, January 25, 2010
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