Some Hard Questions for my Profession
In The American Scholar Thomas Mallon has some tough questions about the future of the humanities. Here's one:
How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web
page?
For the other nine, click here.
Labels: academics, humanities, scholarship
posted by Clemens @ 11:42 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I liked that one. I also liked 2, 6, 7, 10. I don't know if you're aware of this, but #10 has gotten so bad that math departments in this country are starting to drop the foreign language requirement for a PhD.
No - I didn't know that, but only because I assumed it had been dropped years ago. We get the same thing even in history. It is no longer assumed, even for books intended ONLY for specialists, that your readers can understand any French or Latin. My editors and reviewers sternly admonished me for using too many foreirn terms. In a book about 11th France! Which was only expected to sell about 300 copies or so, mostly to research libraries!
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