Guest Post by Scott Sprenger: In the Humanities, How Should We Define ‘Decline’
December 10, 2010, 4:53 pm
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Colleagues nationwide were stunned to learn a few weeks ago that a French department and four other humanities departments at SUNY-Albany were being sacrificed for their “underperformance.” Are these closures a harbinger of our future?
The frame we almost automatically use when interpreting events like SUNY-Albany is that of a narrative of “decline” or “crisis” due, obviously, to the current economic downturn, but also—and this is key—to a general and chronic decline of the humanities that reaches back decades. Read more...