/pt/ – Petrarchan

I won't bother impressing you with my qualifications for these observations. In no particular order: 1. Turchin's "Elite Overproduction" thesis is legit. Gatekeeping served an important social function. 2. Gatekeeping is hygienic for inquiry. Modern Language programs should have never abandoned language requirements for advanced degrees -- both because philology is the critical progenitor of critical study, and because language-learning was the last no-bullshit level of the humanities that kept the absolute frauds out. All of the worst-case-scenarios that were anticipated in the 80s (when these requirements were being dropped) have absolutely come to effect. There is no longer any mooring for half of the Arts & Sciences, and all of those fields are completely adrift on a sea of NPR vibes. 3. Literally nobody in the English Department or the Humanities faculty reads *literature*. Something like half of the faculty are completely burned out on intellectual life and do the bare-bones minimum reading to keep up with the profession. A large minority read contemporary lit. Others read absolute shit, fanfiction-level stuff. I was shocked to discover a colleague actually still cares about John Ashberry and wrote a sentimental piece about him for a major literary publication. It's like finding a pure heart in a whorehouse. 4. Every department outside of STEM did hardcore affirmative action hiring for 10-15 years straight and it's absolutely astonishing that a generation of white men with useless PhDs are merely reading McSweeney's instead of becoming Moldbugian right-wing freaks. I can only guess that the Dr. white male Xennial, PhD, was uniquely scarred by the Great Recession and will never go right-wing out of heartfelt contempt for John Boehner-era conservatism. But if you look at the EconJobRumors boards you will see the post-Obama freaks with PhDs in, say, Analytic Philosophy who are becoming esoteric Nazis out of 5. There are some pretty smart, top-decile people (a "talented tenth"?) who are getting affirmative action hires and they're not noticing that they're affirmative action hires. But then you meet top-percentile turbofreaks and they make the top-decile people look like total frauds. If you go to a conference and you run into a real lifer -- a guy who knows he will never ascend the ranks but also has completely invested in his intellectual life -- and if you get him talking about the subject in detail he will absolutely burn the short hairs off of these affirmative action hires. The turbofreaks will just casually ask follow-up questions that are deep in the weeds of the AA-hires' research and the talented tenth will become visibly uncomfortable. In a straight discussion of literature and theory the turbofreaks will burn the short hairs off of anyone, and we've just decided to ignore it because we'd rather use the Humanities for socially engineering an upper-middle class for model minorities. And the funny thing is that the turbofreaks don't even care. You could drop them into a conversation about electrical engineering and in about an hour they'd be keeping up. 6. The biggest tell that none of these people deserve their jobs is this: they don't fucking like the shit they've devoted their lives to. The writing, composition, & literacy people would rather be political activists. The literature people would rather be running a garden club. The philosophers would rather be film critics. And so on.