The Believer - In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower
Check out the whole piece. It's long, but it really seems to get at some important truths about the plight of the English professor today.
Here's a sampling:
"But what are English professors for? They teach, of course, but they don't help out with economic policy, they have little to say about natural disasters, and they can't build futuristic prostheses. And the better the applied sciences get at answering these lurking purpose-questions—'Hey, check out this new laser-equipped invisibility frock we just made in the lab'—the more their colleagues over in the English building seem like starry-eyed, impractical romantics, or, less charitably, anachronistic buffoons. Despite her clotted jargon and fustian grammar, Ghazoul is making a serious point: more and more people are wondering what the hell English professors are doing and why they should be allowed to keep doing it, and they need to reformulate their answers."
Sunday, July 25, 2004
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