Samad Behrangi

I found this gem on Reddit the other day and I saved it to share with you guys because it is a clusterfuck of horrible. According to the story that came attached to the picture, it was a print add in either a university promotional catalog or the campus newspaper – I can’t recall which. Either way it was an ad for Humanities department, which was clearly written by an idiot.

"The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow.[1][2] Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems."

May 13, 2005 | WSJ |By ELIOT A. COHEN.

"Pentagon accountants have totted up the savings that distance learning supposedly offers and convinced themselves and others that a couple of hours sitting alone, staring at a computer screen after a 14-hour workday, will yield the same educational benefit as a morning seminar with a dozen other senior professionals and an expert instructor."..."Recently, one defense official defended a proposal to shut down temporarily parts of the Army's advanced professional military educational system with the remark, "Some of the experiences they are getting today are better than anything they will get in a classroom. . . . It's not giving up something for nothing. We have a generation of leaders in the Army today that are battle-tested and are much more capable of leading the Army from the actual experience they have."

The stupidity of this last remark is as depressing, in its way, as the cravenness of the Columbia faculty senate's vote. It implies that knowing how to maneuver a battalion through an urban fight is the same thing as crafting a strategy for winning a counterinsurgency. It suggests that at least some at the top of the Pentagon do not understand that the next war will be as different from Iraq 2005 as Iraq was from Somalia, and Somalia from Panama, and Panama from Vietnam. Combat experience can indeed give us an army that can fight and win America's battles; but it is education that provides the intellectual depth and breadth that allows soldiers to understand and succeed in America's wars."

Congratulations, Captain. You are approaching the Planet of Dinosaurs.
But first, welcome to the rather shabby galaxy of
Michael Delahoyde
Clinical Associate Professor of English
Washington State University

History and ethnography are used instead to show the readers what it is like to live in a particular way, to provide those of us who belong to very different societies with a vantage point from which to think about ourselves and our own arrangements. Their purpose, to borrow an old concept, is a kind of understanding that derives from imaginative identification.

This woman is riding two dolphins, in a magical moment of pure joy, feeling like a mermaid princess surveying her kingdom in a glimmering sea chariot. IS THIS FEMINIST?
No. Feeling like a mermaid princess betrays an internalized ideological support of monarchy. Also, animals were not created to be our servants! Read “The Sexual Politics of Meat” some time! PROBLEMATIC. 

Your education doesn't have to stop once you get out of school—being free of the classroom just means you have more control over what you learn and when you learn it. We've put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this summer for our second term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let's get started. More »

"We can’t even be bothered to share our old finished articles, already published and our reputation suitably burnished, by putting them in an open institutional repository:

I honestly can’t think of any other way to read these charts than as shameful hypocrisy."

More important: You do not need to go to graduate school in order to read, to write, to debate, to do intellectual work. You do not even need to go to graduate school to learn from brilliant scholars, though that would be a much better reason to go than any cited in this post, which, oddly, never mentions professors, scholars, or learning. If you want to read, write, and debate, you can do all that for free, and while you’re earning a living and putting money away for retirement. Why should you give up years of your time and earning potential to do what you can do right now, on your own? — and that’s in a best-case scenario, in which you’re getting full funding and therefore at least not hemorrhaging money. But what if you’re not getting that funding, and doing graduate study only by incurring crushing debt?

Using Google ngrams to break down 2-word phrases including "capitalism"

"Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.

I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I've been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride."

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It is an unconference: an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.