Academia is, make no mistake about it, currently shooting itself in the foot.  It is signing its own death warrant, digging its own grave, doing all that is humanly possible to make sure that humanities education becomes completely irrelevant in the 21st century.

The mechanism by which it is doing this is quite simple: No one is hiring.  Budgets are being cut, hiring freezes put in place, and the result of this is that aging departments have no one to come in and offer much-needed revitalization (dare I say it, resuscitation?) to the establishment.

Before you jump to conclusions about this post, that it is all about ambiacademic's bitterness about her gross potential for unemployment this fall, I beg you to think about what I'm writing from a different perspective: perhaps even an Ortegan generational perspective.

As professors age, like it or not, they tend to fossilize, be it in the subject matter that they study, or their theoretical approach, or both.  Their interests narrow, they grow more and more distant from the youth that they teach (both in undergraduate and graduate programs) and soon enough it becomes far too late to reinvent themselves in the light of new developments and technologies in their field.

How is this natural progression / intractable problem to be solved?  Easily.  By hiring new faculty.

Graduate students that are emerging now into this nuclear wasteland that is the humanities' job market are incredibly skilled, thoroughly trained, and eager to work.  Often more than eager to work.  Desperate to work because they have been molded by the best minds and have had invaluable mentors that have schooled them in the best methods of instruction and research.  And they are enthusiastic, energetic, experimental, ready to unleash themselves on pools of unsuspecting undergrads and do their absolute best by them.

...Or at least, they were.

Academia's refusal to hire has resulted in the utter demoralization of an entire generation of potentially groundbreaking teachers and scholars.  Those who are On the Market right now have lost all hope of finding a job anytime soon, if at all.  People talk about "maybe next year," but no one believes it.  The air around humanities departments is putrid with bitterness, resentment, and a complete failure to comprehend why it is that academia, beloved academia, has abandoned them, for better, for worse, or possibly, for good.

These freshly-minted Ph.D.s will only wait so long before they take their talents elsewhere.  The non-profit sector will be awash in overqualified grant-writers, and career counselors will have a flood of business as grad students everywhere throw up their hands and say, in essence, "f*** it."

What could academia-- in particular the humanities -- do to itself that could be more damaging?  The answer is, precisely, nothing. Academia has inflicted itself with a wound that will not soon heal, and as for the humanities, they have probably cut too deep to ever claim any further relevance within higher education because departments will freeze, fossilize, and lose all touch with the world of the young people whose interest in art, philosophy, language, and literature, sustains their existence.  The short-sightedness of this refusal to hire is staggering.  And fatal.

And what of us, a lost generation of would-be academics who will soon be trying our talents in other venues?  We are so full of ideas, so full of newness and vigor, and we know our students.  Where will we be?

Once we get over our fear, we will be just fine.  We will go on to careers that will nurture us and give back to us, and help us pay off our debt that we've accrued in pursuit of something greater than ourselves: the life of the mind.  We will be solvent, we will have families, we will go on.

But secretly, we will weep, and continue to long for what we had, a dream eternally deferred, simply because no one had the foresight or the courage to think for a moment about what happens to the proverbial Raisin in the Sun.

I mourn for my lost generation.  I mourn for the humanities.  I mourn for a future that I may never have.  This may be the swan song of academia as it once was.

The only glimmer of hope I can find is that, perhaps, if we raze it to the ground, remove all traces of what it once was -- all the index cards filled with notes, all the card catalogs, all the dusty books and shelves and labyrinthine stacks -- then something shining and binary will rise up in its stead, all memory-chip green and throbbing with new ways of knowing.

Who, I wonder, will be there to see it when it rises anew?

Certainly not my generation.

And certainly not the next, either.

Academia has chosen to allow itself to wither on the vine.  What is to be done?

Strike.

Vote.

And leave.