Articles

Colleen Flaherty, "New Career Path?"

Flaherty offers a review and discussion of recently published The Humanities, Higher Education and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, by Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, and Jennifer Ruth, associate professor of English at Portland State University. Bérubé and Ruth argue that the crisis in humanities is not the result of falling numbers in humanities majors (whose percentages have remained relatively steady over the past several years) but the result of the mass employment of non-tenure track faculty. They outline a plan to implement a teaching intensive tenure track wherein an M.F.A or Ph.D. would be a requirement for teaching at college or university, but certain long-term adjuncts would be grandfathered into the new tenure track. Flaherty includes criticism of this proposal from Marc Bousquet, associate professor at Emory University, who has written extensively on the topic.