My chorus is singing excerpts from Les Miz, so revolution is on my mind for about a half-hour every Tuesday night. The rest of the time, I do what I usually do — which includes scoping out enough academic news that of course I ran into Rebecca Schuman’s Thesis Hatement and some of the articles discussing it.
My take on the issue would be worse than useless, since I’m an older, tenured science professor who never aspired to anything other than the small-college teaching position I now happily hold. But as I read the article, tunes from Les Miz started floating through my head. I thought about the meeting I had been in the day before, in which one of my humanities colleagues did what I take for granted from humanities faculty — questioned an institutional sacred cow — and I wondered mightily. ‘How is it safe,’ I wondered, ‘for a country to fill itself with unemployed humanities PhDs? Aren’t savants and intelligentsia just the sort of people who cause trouble for the ruling classes, whenever they are allowed to plot and mutter in the hidden corners of society?’
Well, I’ve thought this sort of stuff before and been wrong before. A few years ago I was thinking the same thing about unemployed middle managers. ‘Is it safe for the bosses,’ I thought then, ‘to have a large class of unemployed, angry, educated people who know how to work Excel, use Linked-in, and manage a database? Won’t unions of the unemployed spring up and overturn the status quo?’ I am always expecting things to overturn the status quo, and they never do.
We’re ineffective that way. I think it’s something in our water.
But I don’t have to put up with ineffective American academics when I can make up effective ones in my novels. In the work in progress, my protagonist is just an undergraduate student at the University of Selanto. She doesn’t know anything about the life of a freelance magician outside those walls, or what kind of trouble the disaffected, underemployed, and overeducated may cause. Neither do I — yet. But I’ll find out.
I wish I had any hope that real-life events would overtake me. I’m not a fast writer, folks; there’s still time!
