Why the Humanities are Dying

[Anonymous No.21526600]

I know it’s technically about Historian academics, but this articles pretty much explains why Humanities are dying as a whole.

TL:DR - So many college admins roles have been created the past few decades that tenure-level positions have been cut. Also, schools receive more funding for STEM research that they are focused more on that in the spending department. This has caused many organizations to stop giving out scholarships and funding for the humanities.

>The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/opinion/american-history-college-university-academia.html

>Jan. 14, 2023
>By Daniel Bessner
>Mr. Bessner is a historian.

>When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.

[Anonymous No.21526603]

>>21526600
>Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.

>History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.

>The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.

>Yet as Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid — maybe even terminal — decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the A.H.A. released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.

[Anonymous No.21526606]

>>21526603
>The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history. As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note in their book “The Gig Academy,” about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to a 2020 report by the American Federation of Teachers. Jobs that used to allow professors to live middle-class lives now barely enable them to keep their heads above water.

>What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.

>At the same time, in an effort to fund research that might redound to their financial benefit and to demonstrate their pragmatic value to politicians and to the public, universities have emphasized science, technology, engineering and math at the expense of the humanities. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported, citing data from 2019, “spending for humanities research equaled 0.7 percent of the amount dedicated to STEM R.&D.”

>The humanities, including history, are often considered more an object of ridicule than a legitimate lane of study. Look no further than statements from politicians: Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, assembled a task force in 2012 that recommended that people who major in history and other humanities fields be charged higher tuition at state universities. In 2016, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said that “French literature majors” should not receive state funding for their degrees. Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.” And it’s not just Republicans: President Barack Obama remarked in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” implying that if a degree didn’t make money it wasn’t worth it. (Mr. Obama later apologized to a University of Texas art historian for his remarks, clarifying that he did believe art history was a valuable subject.)

[Anonymous No.21526612]

>>21526606
>These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.”

>Private groups, which traditionally provided significant financial support to budding humanities scholars, have taken the hint and increasingly stopped supporting the humanities and soft social sciences. The Social Science Research Council recently ended its International Dissertation Research Fellowship program, which in the last 25 years funded over 1,600 scholars exploring “non-U.S. cultures” and “U.S. Indigenous communities,” declaring that the program “accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself.” The Ford Foundation has similarly decided to conclude its long-running National Academies fellowship program for historically marginalized scholars in order, the foundation’s president declared, “to invest more deeply in movement-building work.”

>It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.

>Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so. Instead, history will be studied increasingly by the wealthy, which is to say those able to work without pay. It’s easy to see how this could lead American historical scholarship to adopt a pro-status-quo bias. In today’s world, if you don’t have access to elite networks, financial resources or both, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in history. In the future, history won’t just be written by the victors; it’ll also be written by the well-to-do.

>If Americans don’t seriously invest in history and other humanities disciplines, we encourage the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies. Many Republican politicians support “divisive concepts” laws that try to regulate what college professors teach. Are they aiming at an easy target in the culture war? Perhaps. But it’s also true that a humanities education encourages thinking that often challenges xenophobic and racist dogma. Progress depends on studying and arguing about the past in an open and informed manner. This is especially true in a moment like our own, in which Americans use history to fight over which vision of the country will dominate politics. If there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph.

[Anonymous No.21526615]

>>21526612
>Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past. Take, for example, Bill O’Reilly’s 12-books-and-counting “Killing” series — the best-selling nonfiction series of all time, according to Mr. O’Reilly’s publishers — whose very framing sensationalizes the past by focusing on “the deaths and destruction of some of the most influential men and powerful nations in human history.” The same could be said about Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush Revere” series for young people, in which a time-traveling and tri-corner-hatted Mr. Limbaugh teaches “about some of the most exceptional Americans.” Or consider Twitter, where debates over history regularly erupt — and just as regularly devolve into name-calling. If professional historians become a thing of the past, there will be no one able to temper these types of arguments with coolheaded analysis and bring a seriousness of purpose, depth and thoughtful consideration to discussions of who Americans are and who we want to be as a nation.

>Americans must do everything in their power to avert the end of history. If we don’t, exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past.

>Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of international studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a co-host of the foreign affairs podcast “American Prestige.”

[Anonymous No.21526617]

archive.is/Zdgze

[Anonymous No.21526628]

Frankly, in it's current state the Humanities deserves everything it gets. Most research centers around trannies in 3rd century Egypt. A certain rigour needs to be brought back (a heavy focus on classical languages, less hyper specialization) and parasites need to be eliminated.

[Anonymous No.21526639]

>have your department become overrun with marxist radicals during the 60s and 70s
>become extremely exclusive, cliquey and nepotistic with other professors who you don't like, even going as far as to blacklist them
>abandon the enlightenment values of reason and objective truth in favor of deconstructionism, critical theory, and social justice
>create a million niche hobby study programs with no real-world value outside of the classroom (knowing everything there is to know about late 19th century ocean liners is not going to put food on the table)
>leave graduates saddled with thousands of dollars of debt and very little job opportunities
>wonder why nobody takes you seriously or wants to fund your research anymore
You get what you fuckin' deserve.

[Anonymous No.21526644]

I am a historian who works as an unskilled manual labourer.

I would never work in a University again.
* It is unethical from the stand point of using my skills.
* It is unethical from the stand point of the purpose to which my skills are used.
* My 12 hour physical days are shorter, and I have a greater amount of time to conduct research in.
* "It is time for a shock to the office block."

[Anonymous No.21526666]

>>21526603
is a 16% decline following the pandemic that alarming? my local school had to cut back operations significantly due to (I guess) lost revenue from undergrad students, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also cut back on new positions until they regain stability.

[Anonymous No.21526683]

So how did universities get money to run back in Kant and Hegels day?

[Anonymous No.21526691]

>>21526644
would you consider an alternative white collar career in the future?

[Anonymous No.21526701]

>>21526644
Come to /his/ and talk about it

>>>/his/14470724

[Anonymous No.21526704]

>>21526666
>He think that 16% is ever coming back

Those cuts are permanent my friend.

[Anonymous No.21526711]

>>21526639

[Anonymous No.21526717]

>>21526711

[Anonymous No.21526718]

>>21526683
afaik, tickets were sold to students to attend lectures.

[Anonymous No.21526721]

>>21526666
>[is the position decline secular]
No. See Australian or British casualisation rates. It is proletarianisation (by feminisation deskilling).

>>21526683
>So how did universities get money to run back in Kant and Hegels day?
Universities were items of prestige for a Prince in the late early modern. They were basically consumption items, rather than capital goods. Contemporary universities produce skilled labour power, and come out of (broadly) capital goods budgets. Compare US "college sports" budgets which are consumption status items, to undergraduate teaching or the library budget. The library and undergraduate teaching need to turn a profit.

Yes I did just declare college basketball to be a higher pursuit, one worthy of the contemplative life, taken for its own benefits. If you disagree kidnap your Chancellor and ransom his joints position for position in new permanent appointments—you'll get as many as letters to the editor would.

[Anonymous No.21526726]

>Daniel (((Bessner)))

https://mobile.twitter.com/dbessner/status/1601988506691063808

[Anonymous No.21526731]

>>21526718
So why don't we just go back to that?

[Anonymous No.21526738]

>>21526603
>>Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative”
Wasn't this some ludicrous quasi-alt-history thing that tried to claim that the American revolution was started, not because of taxes or tea, but because the colonists, before Abolition was even a concept, rebelled so they could keep their slaves?

[Anonymous No.21526743]

>>21526731
That was how the uni system worked in Germany at the time, and I was answering the question in context of the pic posted. It was a bit of side trivia I learned when I looked into the one-sided animosity between Schopenhauer and Hegel.

[Anonymous No.21526752]

>>21526691
>[schlepping white collar]
So you want me to sell you control over my mind, and then expect me to have mind left at the end of the day to contemplate my historiography?

>>21526701
Okay mate.

[Anonymous No.21526759]

Humantiesbros, why don't we just boycott universities, and just get together and form our own colleges and just charge student's directly for the lectures and watch the unis degenerate from lack of philosophy?

[Anonymous No.21526761]

>>21526600
I'll be finishing up an undergrad history degree this year. My opinion of the whole thing is just meh. History is too specialized and pedantic now. I'm not surprised it's going this way. You spend more time learning about sixteenth century Irish agricultural reform laws than stuff that actually matters. No wonder nobody cares about studying history anymore. Some of the stuff I have to read for class is just like, what kind of sad sack dedicates their life to this shit? I love history, always have and always will, but not like this.

[Anonymous No.21526765]

>>21526759
A dissident /lit/ university? Would definitely make the world's leading institution in esoteric philosophy. Maybe we could hire Dugin and Nick Land too.

[Anonymous No.21526777]

>>21526765
Let's do it bros. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526783]

>>21526759
>>21526765
Well for one you have students like >>21526761
too ignorant to understand how c16 irish land tenure directly relates to Nick Land's position on genocide being a good thing.

Another point is that BAs are basically just Secondary Education teaching certificates, so you need to offer enough to get by. A side point is that the market isn't sufficiently distorted yet to allow undercutting. Give it 10 years. (GET IT: TENYEARS)

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526784]

>>21526777
Do you know the history of Working Men's Libraries / Institutes? Because I do. And dilettantism is counter productive.

[Anonymous No.21526793]

>>21526600
They’re dying because humanities are burger degrees that serve zero function these days when all the information is readily available at a moments notice.

[Anonymous No.21526808]

>>21526683
The Prussian state founded the University of Berlin and tuitions fees were charged too.

[Anonymous No.21526818]

>>21526783
>>21526784
What I mean is there's a lot of PhDs without tenure track jobs, experts who have a license to teach and can therefore get together and establish colleges without the middlemen administrators. Something like this guy https://youtu.be/SzSUTaZSH00
but a group of them who can establish a curriculum and committees to recognize students into their ranks. But at their core they will emphasis philosophy and pure inquiry instead of appealing to plebs demands for practical application of their research for consumer products, military use, industrial use, etc. Like a modern Academy or Lyceum.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526828]

>>21526818
Yeah, I've specced this problem. The student staff ratio is twice current to rely on state funding for zero priced degrees. Also the wage rates drop, but I assume we're running the University in West Bumfuck on stolen land.

The kinds of scholars who will be willing to teach for 0.60 of the going rate, in West Bumfuck, with double student load and "innovative" teaching methods are the same kind of people with strong idiosyncratic opinions on curriculum. The kinds that don't match in a faculty meeting.

[Anonymous No.21526829]

>>21526818
I want something like this, more than anything. But I feel like someone has to take the first step and front the money or have the brilliant idea that brings people together.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526834]

>>21526829
As I was saying above, militant skilled working mens' organisations founded equivalent institutions on night class bases. They required incredibly driven competent highly social individuals who were thoroughly dedicated to understanding the structure of the world in order to immediately free themselves from that structure—ie: they were economically interested in how subordination worked practically so as to abolish it.

These institutions didn't last 3 generations.

[Anonymous No.21526846]

>>21526834
But we have the internet...

[Anonymous No.21526848]

>>21526639
>humanities departments were overrun by marxist radicals during the red scare
80iq, brainless post

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526864]

>>21526846
And the internet is great at forming self-certifying anti-professional avocational communities dedicated to work that pays off over 5-10 generations.

[Anonymous No.21526866]

>>21526848
They were, academia was skewing radical in the '30s already. Nisbet's book on the university is good.

>>21526834
I fear your aggressive "I am the thread expert, bask in my knowledge" tone will stifle discourse. Can you take it down a notch?

>>21526846
Not just the internet but millions of bored young men seeking community and purpose and only being handed video games and "adult cartoons." I think the secret lies in a network of journals, like The New Age or the Guenonians' Etudes traditionnelles. In the same way that /lit/ feels like a communal gathering place, journals create a sense of continuity and shared destiny. The problem is quality control and motivating the 4chan demo to do actual work.

[Anonymous No.21526867]

>>21526864
Damn. Why are you so negative?

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21526877]

>>21526866
>Can you take it down a notch?
I can shut up for longer stretches of time, and will. Thanks for asking.

>>21526867
Because I reviewed the field 20 years ago, and I reviewed the field 10 years ago. And the continuing interim result is that back breaking manual labour is the most sensible choice for me to have the time to read archival materials and to publish cogent and timely interventions.

On a lighter note:
Eco _Name of the Rose_
Koestler _Darkness at noon_
Stephenson _Anathem_

[Anonymous No.21526880]

>>21526834
>>21526866
Honestly, take a look at Jehovah's Witnesses. They set up a whole thing as basically structured group bible study or in other words a systematic centralized group of book clubs that runs of donations from it's members. Why can't we do that for philosophy, history, literature, etc.?

[Anonymous No.21526881]

Lobbying within the academic sector damaged the credibility of soft sciences to the point that academics within these fields are regarded by half the population add professional propagandists, whose "expertise" is merely the perspective they are assumed to hold as an extension of their identity.

This resulted in an endless spiral of gate keeping which transformed many academic areas into peak body groups, them peak lobby groups, then ministies.

The professor of women studies is effectively a pope, leading an identity driven body of activists.

[Anonymous No.21526888]

>>21526683
(I don't think it's mentioned enough that Kant made money beating rubes at billiards and cards)

https://users.manchester.edu/facstaff/ssnaragon/kant/professors/profssalaries.htm

[Anonymous No.21526889]

>>21526600
That's not the reason at all. The reason is that woke is garbage and no one likes trannies

[Anonymous No.21526906]

>>21526888
Kant is my role model. Keep dem bitches away. All I want is architechtonic.

[Anonymous No.21526919]

>>21526606
>Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.”
It's true there aren't any degrees offered in zombie studies, but there are unis that actually do offer it as a course. I remember when I went to George Mason 12 years ago that Zombie Studies was offered as a course, and a few years after that, I read in some gaming article that some uni was offering a course in Starcraft. Bessner brings up the DeSantis quote as if it's a ridiculous criticism, but there is some truth to it. He doesn't want to admit that the useless courses Humanities are teaching now is part of the problem. There is a lack of self-awareness in his part.
See:
>>21526711
>>21526717
>Do you think part of the problem is what the professors are teaching?
>N-NO, IT'S BECAUSE THE STATE IS NOT GIVING US ENOUGH FUNDING

[Anonymous No.21526920]

>>21526906
Based and categorically imperative

[Anonymous No.21526940]

>>21526919
I mean, courses like that are always just a way of teaching normies about methods and theory by applying it to something "fun"

[Anonymous No.21526941]

>>21526615
>If professional historians become a thing of the past, there will be no one able to temper these types of arguments
This is the best they could come up with? We need more historians because they'll fact-check twitter threads and attempt to counter junk biographies by O'Reilly and the like with their own *unbiased* work?
What this guy is missing is that Americans don't want to learn, they want to be told what to think. Schools do hardly anything to prepare us for understanding current events (the only practical use of history), and so when we're old enough to vote on these current issues we're completely unprepared to make an assured judgement of them, which is why so many people turn to smarmy media personalities for opinions. Fucking Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly aren't creating a culture of braindead drones with their books, they're filling a niche. It's a broad issue caused by failures at an institutional level, and an uptick in history majors with savior complexes won't fix it by arguing with random twitter users.

[Anonymous No.21526959]

>>21526940
>tfw failed for low apm

[Anonymous No.21526969]

>>21526600
Based. Fuck mainstream historians

[Anonymous No.21526988]

>>21526940
If I was a father and I found out my child was taking a class in a frivolous subject, I would tell him either you will drop the class or come home.

[Anonymous No.21526997]

>>21526752
I don't want you to anything m8 I'm just asking to understand you better. does an education in the humanities cause you to consider every human interaction to have some underlying sinister force of volition?

you're the one who singled out never working for a university again so I was just probing the extent to which your distaste reached.

[Anonymous No.21527000]

I just don’t want to end up like this bros…

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527013]

>>21526940
>>21526919
Zombies are an essential part of class analysis in popular culture. But they need to be linked up to the robot, vampire and werewolfs. Also every undergraduate class is a methods class. Topics don't matter.

>>21526997
The constituent elements of the class relationship act as if they have volition, and we project volition onto collective if unchosen endeavours as if we could master them and cause them to be otherwise. But at the end of the day Universities want me to pretend that everything is fine, whereas my current employer doesn't give a fuck as long as object a goes into hole b reliably and in a timely fashion. I don't have to sell what I consider important to my employer, so that they could do with it what they will for the period agreed. Furthermore, Universities do not have an agreed period: they don't put it away like they found it.

>>21527000
Totally. Husserl isn't worth it. Now Merleau-Ponty is where its at.

[Anonymous No.21527014]

>>21526941
>Fucking Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly aren't creating a culture of braindead drones with their books, they're filling a niche.

I feel this.

[Anonymous No.21527023]

>>21526988
>Is an idiot
>Missed the point

No surprises here

[Anonymous No.21527039]

>>21527013
>Merleau-Ponty is where it's at

Well, I can see why no university wants you...

[Anonymous No.21527094]

we need a dissolution of the universities

[Anonymous No.21527107]

>>21527013
>Also every undergraduate class is a methods class. Topics don't matter.
is this clain to be taken at face value? in my experience most undergraduates have trouble retaining anything but a few keywords in the specific topics, and even those who do have trouble generalizing the methods learned outside the context in which they were presented.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527132]

>>21527107
That's one reason why every class is a methods class. That and we're not allowed to fail them.

[Anonymous No.21527140]

>>21527132
>That and we're not allowed to fail them.
Wuh?

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527148]

>>21527140
We aren't allowed to fail you.

[Anonymous No.21527155]

>>21526600
>History is a lie agreed upon -- Some Frenchfag
It was the GI Bill and 5th columnists retard

[Anonymous No.21527159]

>>21527140
of all the points you could have taken issue with, this one is the most self-evident if you've ever observed the workings of any modern undergraduate class in any discipline, humanities or otherwise.

[Anonymous No.21527160]

would I be wrong in saying that the reason humanities died is because people arent studying the past for ideas.

[Anonymous No.21527168]

>>21527148
Why tho? What's the point of university then? If you can't fail then how does a degree even stand for anything other than a participation trophy?

[Anonymous No.21527169]

>>21527160
yeah that sounds like a gross oversimplification no matter what angle you approach from, but it's a great thesis for your upcoming youtube video essay

[Anonymous No.21527180]

>>21527159
Well this explains why managers, engineers, and basically every college educated asshole at every job I've had is a pretentious idiot.

[Anonymous No.21527182]

>>21526848
Red Scare was the 50s, the 60s and 70s were the age of Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, Black Panthers, Free Speech Movement, Freedom Riders, etc.

Why don't you look into those far-left militant organizations and find out how many of their members became university professors?

[Anonymous No.21527186]

Good. Humanities should be considered like art: a hobby.

[Anonymous No.21527188]

>>21527169
I can do better. check this out
>people study history in order to judge it, instead of allowing history to judge ourselves.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527189]

>>21527168
>Why tho?
Heads of immediate units and heads of supervising units (departments / faculties; schools / colleges) refuse your gradings and send them back.

>What's the point of university then?
Maybe that's what you ought to think more on. I have a set of answers some of which are too obtuse for you, which relate to bottlenecks in quality of labour supply in the mid 20th century.

>…how does a degree even stand for anything other than a participation trophy?
From reputable Universities a I(I) or I(II) mean more than the degree title itself. But the real answer is largely bourgeois networking and marriage games.

Also doing a BA is a sign of disposable income. Doing a BA in Literature or Continental Philosophy is a sign of high disposable income. They're Veblen goods.

[Anonymous No.21527208]

History as a subject is dying because there are too many historians and not enough history. We should put a moratorium on studying history for a few centuries to allow more history to build up so people can study it.

[Anonymous No.21527223]

>>21526600
Too many liberals actually

[Anonymous No.21527225]

>>21526600
I know people hate /pol/ here and I’m not 100% trying to be that, but I view this as a sign of a globalist technocratic elite deliberately trying to trash Western civilization (whether they do it with overt policies towards this end or deliberate neglect pushing towards this end). A deracinated, anti-intellectual, technocratic bugman population primed for the new globohomo BNW, a neo-China, the new feudalism. It’s simply a soft-kill form of Pol Pot outright targeting and killing intellectuals (people with glasses, for instance, in his case) but behind layers of plausible deniability and “standing up for social justice.” This intent also of course being behind the social justice agenda itself (affirmative action, mass immigration, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) cult to turn us into a deracinated, all-equally-poor, homogenous and easily marshaled mass of consumers).

Those who are serious and devoted students of history, might be very good at noting and arguing against totalitarian trends which remind one of history repeating itself (Stalinism and Leninism, Maoism, movements like fascism or Nazism (sorry /pol/-posters — get over it, few overtly want to live in YOUR world just as few want to live in the neo-Leninist SJW dystopia)). Make it both much economically harder to seriously devote yourself to a study of the higher manifestations of culture and the humanities, as well as incentivize success in these groups of super-pro-social-justice diversity hires, and you have the perfect “soft-kill” takeover and deracination of Western culture.

[Anonymous No.21527229]

>>21527208
>Joke post is less dumb than most of the surrounding actual takes

[Anonymous No.21527234]

>>21527189
>refuse your gradings and send them back.
Are you fucking kidding me? How- Just- but what is wrong with this world?

[Anonymous No.21527235]

>>21527225
You know what, anon - you're right.
People DO hate /pol/ here.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527258]

>>21527234
>Are you fucking kidding me?
No.

>How- Just- but what is wrong with this world?
Well I could tell you that, but because I'm a historian I'll just feed you content and methods until you come to your own conclusion. I'd recommend in relation to the decay of the academy any of the work on Professional-Managerial classes. I'd use Djilas rather than Ehrenreich.

Also there's a tendency to reduce the skill performed by workers by generally reducing the quality of the commodity supplied. Engels of rat shit in the tobacco etc. But here it is a case of rat shit in the lower-middle manager who Passed and Credited his way through a sterile Bachelor of Arts of Bachelor of Commerce, where half the Passes should have been fails. Rat shit never contemplated the individual versus the structural, let alone anti- or post-structural positions on networked structures of human interactions, and so lacking a theory of human relations merely bullied his way into a position where he drinks coffee and signs off on sick leave forms with resentment for people who actually love their children.

But why would a company tolerate such wasteful conduct? Maybe you'd need a theory of productive and non-productive conducts?

Maybe you'd need to have an opinion on French non-aristocratic noble debts in 1350.

[Anonymous No.21527265]

>>21526600
I am also graduating this year just like >>21526761 and yes, he is right about this:
>You spend more time learning about sixteenth century Irish agricultural reform laws than stuff that actually matters.

The idea of "microhistory" is a trend where I live, and it's ridiculous, there is this insistence that fragments concerning the "mentality" of a peasant in medieval Europe can offer a better overview of the era than reading a papal bull or an imperial diet decree. At least here, people are still tackling what they call "positivist historiography" or "Rankean history" as an outdated model. Some teachers might criticize Marxist history but most of them are still doing "marxist historiography" like a stopped clock.
Most historians are attempting to write thesis and papers such as "causes and consequences of the wheat crisis in 14th century Aquitaine" or maybe "A social history of native-american gender plurality in colonial Yucatán."
It's not like the books on our syllabus are THAT boring, the problem is that the only people that will read these are academics, and they only read this garbage because they are researching some niche detail that will contribute to a more elaborate bibliography on the pointless publications of their own.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, cares about this shit.
So it makes you wonder... What is the purpose of doing this? And moreover... What private institution would finance this?

>>21527000
People need to remember that you don't need to go to school in order to saciate your craving for intellectual content. You can learn on your own, out of pleasure and focus only in what you like (man, I want all those hours I've wasted watching lectures on """methods of historiography""" back). You still can go to a trade school, learn how to wire a wire, how to mend a pipe, how to fix a car and how to saw a wood. You'll earn a fair amount of money, probably start your own company and hire a bunch of Juanitos to do the worst part of the job, and still come back home to enjoy your readings of Thucydides by the fireplace.

[Anonymous No.21527271]

>>21527258
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Anonymous No.21527276]

>>21526615

>Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past.

I have a BA in history, and I would like to know where all of the unbiased, empirically informed history academics were when I was a student. That was ten years ago, so I can only guess how bad it must be after a decade of Nazis under the beds and the victimhood Olympics reaching the mainstream.

[Anonymous No.21527290]

>>21527265
>Most historians are attempting to write thesis and papers such as "causes and consequences of the wheat crisis in 14th century Aquitaine" or maybe "A social history of native-american gender plurality in colonial Yucatán."
>It's not like the books on our syllabus are THAT boring, the problem is that the only people that will read these are academics, and they only read this garbage because they are researching some niche detail that will contribute to a more elaborate bibliography on the pointless publications of their own.
Is the measure of historical study that it should be interesting to laymen? Of course the only people reading research are academics, who else would?

[Anonymous No.21527293]

>>21527265
>You still can go to a trade school, learn how to wire a wire, how to mend a pipe, how to fix a car and how to saw a wood.

People who say this have never worked labor jobs. After a day of real work you're to tired to do jack shit, let alone real academic inquiry.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527302]

>>21527290
AHR (these all sound decent to me, but I'm interested in reading less than a third of them):

Latest articles
Rand Quinn. Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools.
Vernon L. Pederson. The Communist Party on the American Waterfront: Revolution, Reform, and the Quest for Power.
Jeffrey C. Sanders. Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West.
The Pandemic and History
Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver. An Environmental History of the Civil War.

Most cited
The Myth of the “Weak” American State
AHR Conversation: On Transnational History
Back to the League of Nations
Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World
Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities

Most read
Skull Walls: : The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement
Urdu Ethics Literature and the Diversity of Muslim Thought in Colonial India
Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique
Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty
Seeing Madness in the Archives

Ought any of them be listed against an undergraduate course? I've already said that every undergraduate course is a methods course: so there's no point to ruling out any content. (This also means I don't need to have shitfights with colleagues because I think their area of teaching interest is febrile.)

>>21527293
I work 10-13 hour days as an unskilled manual labourer and I have the time. HTFU.

[Anonymous No.21527313]

>>21527235
For all that we do, it’s not hard to see why they spread the entire internet with their “radicalized” bullshit. Younger generations all have a sense, however cogently or non-cogently they cognize it, of being fucked by elites and the older generations out of their futures by some mixture of corporate greed and apathy to their plight. The two compelling political routes open for them remain to become tankies/far-leftists blaming it on the capitalists, or stormfags blaming it on rich liberal Jews.

It’s a perversely mindfucking experience for some young adults of the recent generations drawn to the humanities, to go through an education system with increasingly institutionalized teachings of how [they’re privileged, guilty and implicit of the crimes of their ancestors for being White/males/heterosexual/cisgender/etc.], with this higher education also simultaneously being much more overpriced considering rising inflation and stagnant wage levels compared to parents and grandparents of a generation or two ago, and with much much less job prospects (a flooded job market) after attaining such education compared to them. Ironically it’s both Republicans and Democrats in the US (to speak American-centrically for now) to blame for this plight, Rs for fighting against funding of higher education in the humanities as “impractical,” “a waste of money and time”, “for air-headed leftists,” etc., and Ds for often simply more covertly believing the same thing, as well as turning it into an increasing social-justice-propaganda-machine.

[Anonymous No.21527317]

>>21527302
>I work 10-13 hour days as an unskilled manual labourer and I have the time. HTFU.
Do you have any human relationships?

[Anonymous No.21527323]

>>21527290
It's not like you are doing a research that will result in a grounbreaking discovery.
This has a point when you are a biologist that wrote a paper on some findings about how an enzyme catalyses certain molecules in a different way, and then a physician reads your paper, do some extra research based on that and has a groundbreaking discovering that applying a different molecule helps to produce some substance that boosts the immune system against measles, or whatever (I am making it all up, but it works somewhat like this)

A study about the "class consciousness of negro basket weavers in New Hampshire" will not make a lot of difference, it will only be quoted in the work of someone that is doing a research on the "class consciousness of negro Basket Weavers of Vermont", that will also be read and quoted in some other obnoxious research ad nauseam.
It has no point. It doesn't inform the public. It doesn't add to the political debate, it doesn't change the perspective of a nation on its own histories. It's just intellectual masturbation.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527337]

>>21527317
>Do you have any human relationships?
Comrades, colleagues, what used to be a wife but has degraded into a fuck buddy I talk to about her problems, a couple of aesthetic collaborants I see every couple of years, and a father who started Hegel far too young. When he dies I'll probably only really be able to talk to myself. I do avoid non-collegiate non-comradely relationships because you end up being that guy they go to for opinions on c16 irish land distributions and it ends up as a really abusive relationship. It is why I like unskilled work. Nobody gives a fuck about my past. Nobody thinks its special (bad) or special (good) that I think these things. Poor Franciscans probably got a similar pay-off.

In any case I don't think I've recommended becoming a historian to anyone in this thread. If you are one, you are one. It isn't an admirable thing. You have to learn to live with it. Don't force Hegel onto your children.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527341]

>>21527323
>A study about the "class consciousness of negro basket weavers in New Hampshire" will not make a lot of difference

Manual, monotonous make work and class consciousness? You know if I worked at Amazon HR what I'd read?

[Anonymous No.21527342]

>>21527293
I used to work in a factory (a slaughterhouse). Then I worked in a school as teacher for a while (In my country, I can replace a teacher with a temporary contract as an undergraduate).
I miss the factory. It was tiresome, I worked with dumbasses with no content, I would come home all sweaty... But I still would be able to remove my shoes and feel my feet released from the oppression of sweaty boots, take a slow shower, cook and eat some delicious meal and still would take a book and read for hours.
Working in a school makes me stressed, teachers are more ignorant about the world that your average factory plebeian and my mind is tired. I come home to eat frozen lasagna and doesn't matter if I take a long shower, I never feel relaxed enough.

[Anonymous No.21527353]

>>21527323
I think you're too optimistic about how much scientific research leads to "groundbreaking discoveries".
>A study about the "class consciousness of negro basket weavers in New Hampshire" will not make a lot of difference
What kind of historical study could make a difference in your mind? By the metrics you use the entire field is a waste of time.

[Anonymous No.21527356]

>>21527341
>You know if I worked at Amazon HR what I'd read?
kek, you're a delusional academic

[Anonymous No.21527361]

>>21527337
>a father who started Hegel far too young
>>21527337
>Don't force Hegel onto your children.

Intriguing. Please- go on...

[Anonymous No.21527372]

>>21527290
That's beyond the point. Knowledge consists in knowledge of higher snd more general causes. Using the other anon's example, knowledge of class consciousness in negro basket weavers in New Hampshire, doesn't contribute much to our knowledge of the world. Not to mention that hyper-specialization is the exact opposite of how good science works. Popper thought science was at its best when scientists make bold hypothesis with falsifiable conditions. But some hypothesis about class consciousness in negro basket weavers is not bold and literally no one has the qualifications to refute such a hypothesis or will even dare look at it. These hyper niches shield academics from criticism and from having skin in the game, allowing them to protect their reputation and live in some ivory tower.

[Anonymous No.21527375]

>>21527148
This is true. It's actually ridiculous how generous universities are with marks. I deliberately/out of laziness submitted almost all my assignments extremely late, often to the extent I'd get a 50% late penalty, and still did reasonably well because with a bare minimum of effort I would get a credit or distinction when they didn't enforce the full penalty. Now, a lot of this was probably feeling sorry for me/liked me enough to not fail me, but the point still stands. I knew I couldn't fail, so I didn't bother. The only units I failed are when I didn't even bother submitting anything at all and one with one of those stereotypical boomers who was actually tough on you. And this wasn't some obscure uni either, it was one that floats roughly around 50th in most rankings.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527384]

>>21527356
I've seen the informal impact studies for the less cretinistic party of power in my state. It is one of the contributing factors to refusing to engage.

>>21527361
I feel there are some conceptual structures which you shouldn't induct children into until late adolescence. Non-duality, ontological pluralism, de-"structured" accounts of social interactions. Its like D&G are only useful if you're stuck on Poulantzas. If you're not stuck on Poulantzas just use socialist humanism and autonomia. You know?

Oh, wait, you're just asking for a child abuse narrative to masturbate to.

>>21527372
>Popper
Feyerabend.

>>21527375
>it was one that floats roughly around 50th in most rankings.
>credit or distinction

Melbourne or USyd, because UNSW ranks around 100, unless you were talking Humanities specific.

[Anonymous No.21527387]

>>21527372
>knowledge of class consciousness in negro basket weavers in New Hampshire, doesn't contribute much to our knowledge of the world.
Compared to what? What is a potential subject that would contribute a lot to our understanding of the world?

[Anonymous No.21527407]

>>21527353
>What kind of historical study could make a difference in your mind?
Well, it depends. Let's take an example, history was very important in the enlightenment era when people started to look in retrospect and wonder concepts of republicanism, constitutionalism, suffrage etc. However, we must keep in mind that are talking about epynomous works that were read by the elites and widely discussed in private circles.

>By the metrics you use the entire field is a waste of time.
The main goal of history is leisure, especially of those who can afford the idleness of such intellectual pursuits. It was always produced and consumed by the aristocracy.
History is not, and will never be, a science. Doesn't matter what French intellectuals say.

[Anonymous No.21527416]

>>21526600
/pol/ is the historian of the future. They collectively archive more data from news papers, government research, leaked emails, and war footage than any single individual could ever do, even with tenure.

I don't know what they're going to write about the Russo-Ukranian conflict of 2022, but I know /pol/ will have videos of Ukranian soldiers castrating prisoners of war and footage of Zelinski dancing in drag, and proof of both Russians and Ukranians trying to avoid the draft because neither side wants to fight.

[Anonymous No.21527425]

>>21527407
>The main goal of history is leisure
How is leisure the goal when leisure is the prerequisite?

[Anonymous No.21527437]

>>21527407
What point are you trying to make here? I'm asking what a "worthy" subject of historical study in the present day would be.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527436]

>>21527407
>by the aristocracy.
by _an_ aristocracy. The production and consumption of history is a claim of aristocracy by that group conducting it.

>but Tankies
Yes, that is my point, thank you for following the argument. ( https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/4284772 )
>So authority at work was buttressed by 'the bribe', i.e. higher wages, available from Imperialism and by the aristocrats' move into their own, distinct culture, marked by temperance, adult education and participation in the co-operative movement.

For the slow, the reason one would engage this question is whether an accommodation may be reached, under what circumstances, and how such an accommodation would decay. Ie: its function is the maintenance or disruption of power.

>>21527425
That's the point of leisure.

[Anonymous No.21527441]

>>21527387
A more general and braver hypothesis. Understanding, say, the general picture of the rise and fall of Ancient Greece is infinitely more valuable than understanding the role of trannies in 2nd cent. BC Sparta.

[Anonymous No.21527448]

>>21527436
>That's the point of leisure
We're talking about the goal of history you dimwit.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527450]

>>21527441
>"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was."

We agree'd not to do that, because what attends "brave hypothesis" is authorial magical realms.

>>21527448
I refer you either to Ranke op.cit. or Diderot on the final clergy and aristocrat.

[Anonymous No.21527459]

History, and by extension, the humanities, are no longer being taught.

By this I mean that History, true history, the study of the truth, historical processes, how and why people did the things they did, etc. is no longer taught. Instead it’s a gigantic mess of contemporary ideology and a near complete lack of understanding of what history actually is on the part of the students learning it. The teacher’s don’t know how to teach it, the students don’t know that there’s more than what they’re currently being taught, and universities at large don’t care. The foundations are simply not there.

The big and obvious issue is that there’s a demand for everything to turn a profit these days, and historical inquiry for historical inquiry’s sake does not produce anything of immediate monetary value. This then means that there’s no real reason to bother having a rigorous historical course because it’s a waste of time and effort. So everything turns into the lecturer’s topic of interest, and you are being taught what they know without understanding the wider point of studying history or why it’s important.

Now, obviously that these subjects are haphazard does not mean that they should not be taught; someone interested in those subjects should be able to study them, if they are interested. But the problem is that that’s all history is nowadays. An examination of areas of interest with little critical thought given to anything else. There’s little more thought put into it other than “I think it’s cool” or “I want to help fight historical oppression of TPLACs and bring about a more inclusive and diverse society”.

[Anonymous No.21527466]

>>21527384
>Melbourne or USyd, because UNSW ranks around 100, unless you were talking Humanities specific.
I might have missed the part where the anon you replied to indicated that he was a fellow aussie

>>21527416
/pol/ has no immune system to defend against belief-affirming hoaxes, and has a strong bias toward belief in subversive and nihilistic narratives

[Anonymous No.21527476]

>>21527450
>We agree'd not to do that, because what attends "brave hypothesis" is authorial magical realms.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. That bold hypotheses might lead to some sort of "everything goes" situation? Not ESL btw.

[Anonymous No.21527478]

>>21527466
He guessed right. Also most of the English-speaking world is asleep right now.

[Anonymous No.21527479]

>>21527437
>I'm asking what a "worthy" subject of historical study in the present day would be.
I think that the value of something is subjective. People interested in African-American history would be excited to have all these very papers going to the minuscious and specific details about the life and times of freed blacks in pre-war america or anything like that.
These researches might contribute to some epomynous book that Oprah will add to her book club and it might end up giving some sense of belonging to a specific demografic of basketball americans.
But most papers will never be widely read by academics themselves and will never be cited in other papers, much less get to some really grand opus that will become a classic in the years to come.
In any case, history inspires. But I insist that only those who can afford idleness will delve deep into these readings, most people don't read non-fiction anyway.

Now, answering your question on my own subjective interests... I believe that any work on the subject of the reasons that resulted in the collapse of the Roman world will interest me. And I appreciate any academic that is collecting bibliographies and collecting minuscious details about the wheat supply in certain provinces or trying to get a framework on what was the morale of the average roman soldier.
Why I am interested this? Hmmm... a surrogate activity and nothing more. I don't think my life, my community or my country will change after this information is available in a book.

[Anonymous No.21527481]

>>21527441
>Understanding, say, the general picture of the rise and fall of Ancient Greece is infinitely more valuable
There is already a lot of scholarship of this subject, and unless archaeologists discover some new evidence the "general picture" is unlikely to change, though such a picture will always be a simplification.
>understanding the role of trannies in 2nd cent. BC Sparta.
The role of gender nonconforming in Sparta would be an interesting subject assuming it isn't already studied, I don't know why you assume it wouldn't be except for a chauvinistic dismissal of certain groups as being unworthy of study.

[Anonymous No.21527486]

>>21527479
>In any case, history inspires. But I insist that only those who can afford idleness will delve deep into these readings, most people don't read non-fiction anyway.
So history should only support the foundational myths of the leisure classes because those are the only people with the time to read history?

[Anonymous No.21527496]

>>21526759
anon, you're talking about a glorified discord server here. The real thing people should do is quit school and just read shit and idunno maybe work in a warehouse nigga who gives a fuck sell weed

[Anonymous No.21527498]

it's pretty much two things
>collapse of systematizing philosophies / grand narratives
>democratization of academia leading to explosion of tertiary literature and commentary
this leads to intellectual meekness, privileges the status quo (article author got this right), and encourages insane pedantry as gorillions of academics try to justify themselves as the real authority for some niche subject EVEN THOUGH they still refuse to make normative statements and always end everything with
>but more research is required
>it is an ongoing topic of discussion
>a multitude of factors
What does this serve to do? Keep the Eternal Conversation going forever. Academics see this as progressive and democratic because it is a kind of investment in the future of their their social class, i.e., it is a guarantee that a systematizing firebrand with some new Final Solution will never arise and resolve every contradiction. That's a guarantee of the end of history right there

[Anonymous No.21527500]

>But since the Second World War, the trend in Western archaeology has increasingly been to “debunk” or “critically assess” national origin stories: to illegitimate vulgar emotional attachments to roots or claims to exclusive heritage. And yet the public are not stupid; it is obvious that these sentiments are political and inconsistent. Compare these two quotes:

>>“As sensible anthropologists and sensible historians have reminded us: cultures are always in the process of changing and reconstituting themselves, sometimes in almost unrecognisable, qualitatively different ways. There is no culture that has existed ‘since time immemorial’ and no people that is aboriginal in terms of their contemporary culture with a specific piece of real estate.”

>>“Indigenous Australians belong to the oldest continuous culture on earth. Ancient artefacts from Lake Mungo help show us what people ate and how they lived thousands of years ago. Today, the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyimpaa people of the Lake Mungo region continue their close connections to the land.”

>The first of these is from Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus (1995) by Philip L. Kohl and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, the second from the National Museum of Australia. One takes aim at the people of the Caucasus identifying too strongly with their ancestors, the second happily accepts that modern Aboriginal Australians are the owners of, and descendants from, 40,000-year-old fossils found at Lake Mungo. The official acceptance that these Pleistocene skeletons are the sole preserve of the Aboriginal people and not the common inheritance of humanity has been securely acknowledged.

https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-rise-of-archaeologists-anonymous/

[Anonymous No.21527502]

Faculty don’t understand that it’s not the number of admins but rather a small percentage of admins spread across the university who receive irresponsibly generous salaries and benefits.

[Anonymous No.21527508]

>>21527498
>some new Final Solution will never arise and resolve every contradiction. That's a guarantee of the end of history right there
So everyone ignores Hegel?

[Anonymous No.21527514]

>>21527481
That the subject is already well explored, is not an excuse to crawl back into one's niche. Academics are pussies a lot of the time and refuse to leave their comfort zone where they can be exposed to new dangers.
>I don't know why you assume it wouldn't be except for a chauvinistic dismissal of certain groups as being unworthy of study.
Because it contributes nothing to our understanding of the world. Inquiry into the past is valuable in itself, but it's still subordinated to the end of understanding reality. Studying trannies in Sparta is an insult to this goal. Instead of treating history as valuable in itself, it subjects it to some paltry political end -- that of grooming our society into accepting trannies. For let's face it, the people researching this shit are more invested in the 24/7 political spectacle and politics than their "area of interest."

[Anonymous No.21527516]

>>21527478
It's not even midnight here in America, and it's Saturday.

[Anonymous No.21527534]

>>21527486
>So history should only support the foundational myths of the leisure classes because those are the only people with the time to read history?
No, I believe history should be a subject to be studied. History was always part of the intellectual life. It was the basis of humanities (if you a you can't study rhetoric, let's say, Cicero, without considering the context of Rome)
But it's not something that you study in order to win your bread. It's something you do out of passion. And people who can afford studying, are those who don't need to win their daily bread.
Which brings us back to the initial point. Student debts and lack of funding. Historians will never be self-reliant on their craft, the only way to make historians to earn something out of it is inserting money and funding them. Since no enterprise wants to fund historians (well, some might find some patrons, some mecenate), and since there is a limit on how much public funding a government can give to such liberal workers, it will always be something for a minority.

[Anonymous No.21527535]

>>21527514
>Academics are pussies a lot of the time and refuse to leave their comfort zone where they can be exposed to new dangers.
You're literally advocating retreating into well worn areas of study because the possible political implications of research focused on racial and sexual minorities threatens you.
>Studying trannies in Sparta is an insult to this goal. Instead of treating history as valuable in itself, it subjects it to some paltry political end
So if we study any group other than Western males it's not valuable in itself and it political? White men and their history is just the default and needs no justification?

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527540]

>>21527466
>I might have missed the part where the anon you replied to indicated that he was a fellow aussie
There were key signals in the text.

>>21527476
History publishes 5-10 kwd articles or 80-100 kwd books. Bold hypotheses require test. History works by reading texts. We know that people read their biases into texts. Therefore with bold hypotheses you get bold readings which distort the text. "Jesus was actually an anime cat girl" grade shit. History does not work like a Popperian science. Popper has external reality to falsify against. Texts are not capable of providing falsification because you can drive a truck through a text. History relies on the hermeneutics of hypertextual interpretation: it is a relative of Law, Theology, or Higher Literary Criticism.

[Anonymous No.21527541]

>>21527500
Yeah this is all because academics went with the "racism was invented in the 1600s" angle in an attempt to argue that essentialist prejudices that shamefully dared to survive the Enlightenment are somehow historically anomalous and thus baseless. Massive Kossinna W great to see regime lapdog academics raked over the coals on this one desu

[Anonymous No.21527545]

>>21527535
Not even going to reply in good faith anymore. Reddit is down the hall and to the left.

[Anonymous No.21527550]

>>21527545
You haven't said anything besides "This group is worthy of study because I like them, this one isn't because I don't."

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527561]

>>21527550
They're presenting with a social ideology that transvestism is essential to current ontologies, but are denying that the study of transvestism in the past can inform the political engagement with transvestite ontologies: they are denying that history is useful at all, despite meeting the political needs that they demand.

Fascism is gestural and doesn't engage in "good faith" because the gesture is power in itself. Don't bother: just glass them.

[Anonymous No.21527565]

everyone is chasing the money is stem

what can you even do with a history degree besides teach

[Anonymous No.21527567]

>>21527561
>they are denying that history is useful at all
Unironically. Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Studying trannies in the past only servers political ends today, not knowledge.

[Anonymous No.21527568]

>>21527516
no he's right I reread the text and there definitely were key indicators like referring to how courses are graded and referring to college as "uni". There's no way it could have been an american, and Europe is asleep.

missed it the first time since I've become acclimatized to both cultures and the brain filtered out that signal.

[Anonymous No.21527580]

>>21527567
>Knowledge is valuable for its own sake.
>Studying trannies in the past only servers political ends today, not knowledge.
This is contradictory. You're saying that knowledge of the past isn't valuable if it goes against your politics.

[Anonymous No.21527596]

>>21527580
I think that's a pretty disingenuous reading of anon's post. reads to me more like certain types of knowledge are more valuable than others, and that defenders of certain "unvaluable knowledge" only do so for political reasons.

I disagree, but willfull misinterpretation only entrenches the opposing party. maybe you don't care, but then why do you engage?

[Anonymous No.21527613]

>>21527535
>because the possible political implications of research focused on racial and sexual minorities threatens
I think the proof that the "identity history" trends are indeed biased schlock is that what could be called the "reactionary lay perception" is in complete agreement with the perception academics that explore these subjects have. Academics do quite obviously think and often proudly state that simply studying the historically marginalized will result in forwarding the ostensible political goals of their descendants. I mean do you seriously think that any academic studying Queer Bodies and Modalities in the Akkadian Empire does not fully believe that their study will unearth trans-positive gems? They study that shit because they themselves believe that they are redressing a historical injustice that privileged
>White men and their history
There is no world where any academic studying Subaltern Otherness actually leads them to cast otherized subalterns in a more negative light. The kneejerk reactionary perception, that the field cannot be anything other than slanted, is thus completely accurate. It's just "not slanted" in a limited sense because it is apparently redressing bias in the other direction

[Anonymous No.21527619]

It's getting late and I should go to bed.
I just wanna say to you guys that this discussion we had here about the "purpose of history" was more interesting than any discussion I had in college while studying subjects such as "historiography", "theory of history", "methods of historical research" etc.

Indeed, history is a passion that many of us serve. However, I insist that it is not something that serves an objective purpose. Except when we are talking about the subject of History in basic education, that serves the purpose of educating a young student in civility, patriotic sentiments and sense of belonging.

>>21527514
>Inquiry into the past is valuable in itself, but it's still subordinated to the end of understanding reality. Studying trannies in Sparta is an insult to this goal.

However, my dear friend, studying trannies in Roman Carthage might shed some light on how North Africa fell so quickly in the hands of the barbarian v*ndal Genseric. (according to Salvian, men would dress and assume the character of women by the time of the attack)

[Anonymous No.21527626]

>>21527580
>>21527561
I agree with that poster >>21527545 that arguing with you in good faith is a losing proposition and you should just be referred to Reddit; but just so you guys don’t have the last word, the point here is that of turning history (and the humanities at large) into a heavily politicized, obviously contemporary-zeitgeist-product of retroactively applying very modern political and ethical ideas of “social justice” and raising up of the significance of specific minority groups, to past eras where they don’t apply as much in the own context of these past eras, leading to scholarship which serves a political agenda and incredibly blatantly applies heavily modern politicized hermeneutics to past civilizations, which can end up actually obscuring an understanding of the history of these past civilizations (inasmuch as we haven’t been totally absorbed into the postmodern relativist epistemology which holds “there is no objective significance in any interpretation or conclusions we come to in any intellectual field besides our own subjectively motivated interpretations we wish to apply to it”).

[Anonymous No.21527629]

>>21527580
I believe that what is he trying to say is that this issue is being magnified in academic production in order to legitimize the behavior a fringe minority.
But you know this very well.

[Anonymous No.21527630]

>>21527596
>reads to me more like certain types of knowledge are more valuable than others, and that defenders of certain "unvaluable knowledge" only do so for political reasons.
Yes I know what he said, my point is that his assessment of what is "unvaluable knowledge" is political and subjective .

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527633]

>>21527626
Did you miss the bit up thread where I suggested that liberals ought to be executed?

[Anonymous No.21527639]

>>21527633
Yes I did. I sympathize with le radical centrism too (I want the majority of humanity executed) but my argument still holds, of my hatred for humanity my specific hatred of modern progressivism stands as a uniquely distinguished, shining subset of this universally-directed-misanthropy.

[Anonymous No.21527654]

The humanities outproduces grads relative to openings in the field. Not to mention the material being taught in history in particular is extremely weak by any metric. My college was doing courses on professional sports, women studies topics, white grievance shit, and history in film. The only thing resembling a real education was european history coming from your stereotypical marxist. Nothing resembling world history ever took place besides rotating topic of interest stuff which got filled very quick

Not to mention, how many reauthorizations of ww2 and ww1 does the public need to consume?

[Anonymous No.21527658]

>>21527630
>Yes I know what he said, my point is that his assessment of what is "unvaluable knowledge" is political and subjective .
Is it subjective, tho?
The thing is, knowledge follow some criteria. You can study trannies in Sparta, but you need to consider how common was it and how the society saw it. I doubt Spartans had the concept of "gender" as it is being developed by academics today. Academics will consider gender as "born this way" or "muh identity". Which is all a fallacy that was never confirmed, nobody would talk about gender identity like they do now.

Now, to your defense, I don't think there are many papers doing this. There is a lot of research like that, but they compose a minority of what is being published.

[Anonymous No.21527659]

>>21527639
>>21527633
what is it with a post-academic career and the tendency to turn into a misanthropic turbohermit? god I wish this doesn't happen to me.

[Anonymous No.21527666]

>>21526600
I think I'm going to continue with my degree. It's valid in most countries and I was able to get it debt free because my parents are well off. I still love history and hopefully will have a few articles published by the end of 2023.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527667]

>>21527639
I've posted AHR's current offerings. They're historiographically middle of the road. As >>21527619 notes the political readings available to the uncovering of subalternarity are not universally in favour of the subaltern when politicised. The actual use of history has been as the kindergarten of The State, primarily, as a way to practice genocide and taxation by proxy, or in more noble fields the ordering of one group of men to go kill another group of men ordered to do so by men like you, or Japs, fucken Japs. Historiographical purposes are primarily the reinforcement of the Bourgeois states' capacity for internal violence. You seem to be upset by a lot of "Team B" behaviour. You could notice my discussion about Team B's rejection of historiography as the school of the state. It is not the corruption of historiography which has made the terrorising sub-alternaity, but instead the rejection of traditional ethos by the elite itself.

The other group that engage in history have been the dominant formations of the exploited, either alternate nationalities or the organisations of the majority working class. The manifest failure of US workers' movements means that US focused undergraduates are underaware of this—on top of their already derelict philosophy of history and historiographical training. For those in areas where parties with Labour, Workers, Socialist or Communist sought to homogenise subjects for their own empowerment the study of history was a tool in the arsenal of a small leadership movement, varying between the insanity of methodism and the inanity of leninism.

Both of these "instincts to historicise" still exist and underlay the avocation and to the lesser extent profession. Getting your knickers in a knot because a bunch of liberal bourgeois have attempted to mobilise a national subjectivity in a fascist recreation of a lost past that involved people with penises wearing women-dresses is really rather silly. They are a minority even in their own historiographical tendency. Their articles on ladyboys are supportable. Their articles on ladyboys tend to support your version of fascism more than their own. And in their own way they are producing an identitarian politics of fascist gesture that _legitimises your own fascism faster than it does theirs._

You both need to dig one ditch.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527672]

>>21527659
>what is it with a post-academic career and the tendency to turn into a misanthropic turbohermit? god I wish this doesn't happen to me.
I get me turbo hermit out online and take the good stuff down to the working men's library. If /lit/ was less shit I'd bother posting anything more than Kuhn/Lakatos/Feyerabend here. Up your game: tankies are better chatters than /lit/ is. And some poor dumb cunt called this a good thread.

[Anonymous No.21527675]

>>21526600
>ph.d in 2013
Tempted to stop reading right there...

[Anonymous No.21527678]

>>21527626
I'd just bite the bullet personally and say it's always going to be and always has been political. That being the case, I only prefer it reflects my politics (the right broadly) instead of theirs (the left). We're always going to have an opinion on things that happened in the past. No one is just going to present a bunch of factoids and then do a mic drop with no further discussion, that's never been the point.

[Anonymous No.21527681]

>>21527667
>The actual use of history has been as the kindergarten of The State, primarily, as a way to practice genocide and taxation by proxy, or in more noble fields the ordering of one group of men to go kill another group of men ordered to do so by men like you, or Japs, fucken Japs.

Patriotism = Genocide
Fuck, I'm out. Imagine getting a degree to write shitposts in eloquent language just to parrot the a bunch of fallacious rhetorics.

>You both need to dig one ditch.
to bury you in?

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527692]

>>21527678
Yeah, but the chief reason why we conduct history using Ranke's rules is so that my output is comprehensible to your reading, so my archival work is sound and the drawn conclusions are useful for your reuse of it, and so that the obvious framing and methodological issues are either discardable or can be read through.

Then after the colloquium one of us dies outside.

>>21527681
Did you hear me make a value judgement that genocide was bad? It sounds like you think genocide is bad.

[Anonymous No.21527699]

>>21527667
Uncharacteristically insightful post. Thanks for the effort. You must have gotten annoyed at the lack of engagement you got when you just told people to read and think for themselves. You are, however, mistaking the guy you quoted for the one who started the discussion.

[Anonymous No.21527701]

>>21527692
>Did you hear me make a value judgement that genocide was bad?
It's implicit, and since you arrived in this thread you are playing an ironic character that pretends not knowing of what was implicity spoken.

>It sounds like you think genocide is bad.
Yes. And?

[Anonymous No.21527709]

>>21527699
>You are, however, mistaking the guy you quoted for the one who started the discussion.
He did. That's why he is probably an outsider here. Anyone knows that, when in an anonymous imageboard, you assume each and every message is written by a different person. And thus you don't debate people, you debate ideas expressed in each post.
Tripfags never understand that.

[Anonymous No.21527711]

>>21527701
>you are playing an ironic character that pretends not knowing of what was implicity spoken.
this is neither unexpected nor uncommon behaviour for a professor

[Anonymous No.21527712]

>>21527667
>>21527678
Your mistake is assuming I’m a fascist/far-right, an understandable one considering where we’re posting, and I find this a common sign of the times and the zeitgeist I’m precisely criticizing (“if you don’t want to hear the ‘social-justice-SJW’ narrative constantly in everything and don’t agree with all of it or criticize some of it, you’re a fascist’”). It’s like a Marxist society.

I’ll give you your points though, and your sharpness which far exceeds my own while sitting here after a few drinks and shooting the shit, as in

>
Both of these "instincts to historicise" still exist and underlay the avocation and to the lesser extent profession. Getting your knickers in a knot because a bunch of liberal bourgeois have attempted to mobilise a national subjectivity in a fascist recreation of a lost past that involved people with penises wearing women-dresses is really rather silly. They are a minority even in their own historiographical tendency. Their articles on ladyboys are supportable. Their articles on ladyboys tend to support your version of fascism more than their own. And in their own way they are producing an identitarian politics of fascist gesture that _legitimises your own fascism faster than it does theirs._

Indeed, I agree “they are producing an identitarian politics of fascist gesture” (you could also call it neo-Marxist, with non-heterosexual-cisgender-white-men as the new proletariat, oppressed class, or revolutionary vanguard) and that there’s a lot more dissent within these fields against this extremism than a Breitbart-pundit will make it seem like. And I agree that perhaps the humanities in general are doomed/destined to be implicitly politicized (compared to a field like STEM) due to their “softer” nature, dealing with gray zones like human values, judgments, ethics and interpretations of historical events and trends. I guess a good debate which gets to these issues is, “Do you believe a field like history can be taught as ‘politically neutrally’ and ‘objectively’ as a field on calculus or geology, or is it inherently politicized?” (And yet ironically, to bring up a Breitbart-style “nativist fascist/far-right” talking-point, even STEM fields are becoming politicized with things like transgenderism ideology’s impact on biology and medicine, and stuff like “math being white supremacy”/we need more women in STEM and as programmers even if we need to lower standards for them with affirmative action, disparities are due to sexism and couldn’t be due to neurological or personality differences between women and men/and so forth)

[Anonymous No.21527713]

>>21527709
That's called autism

[Anonymous No.21527730]

>>21526600
academia is branch of the entertainment industry, DWT.

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527745]

>>21527701
>>It sounds like you think genocide is bad.
>Yes. And?
This is precisely how you get summary works like Goldhagen. When you don't have an opinion as a scholar you end up with magisterial works like Christopher Browning. "Oh I'll just do another unit history, about a secondary policing unit, oh wow, these guys *REALLY FUCKEN ENJOYED THEMSELVES*." Brought the fun back to the field. Just like when Hilberg deliberately desubjectified Jewish organisation's in his narrative.

>>21527699
The quote hierarchy got a bit messy, but I think the point that knickers on head retarded bourgeois liberals are engaging in a poly-subjective fascist identitarianism for a lost nation is worth the print. The workers' movement stuff it old hat, but given that people here barely even recognise the state's uses of history I thought it worth to regurgitate.

Plus I don't expect interaction, this is 4chan, I too am vomiting in a bathtub of vomit.

>>21527709
Meh, I'm wearing it so I can wear the shit you smear on my face in this thread. Some people around here already know who I am regardless. It is "simpler" to be accused of each and every infraction in this thread.

>(you could also call it neo-Marxist, with non-heterosexual-cisgender-white-men as the new proletariat, oppressed class, or revolutionary vanguard)
Apart from the obvious reason for my reluctance to do this, there's the more scholarly one that Marxism bothered to interrogate the proletariat as a subject with some depth (the class may laugh). The attempts to ground a psycho-cultural dimension as equivalent to relations of production are frankly chlamydial: a shallow discharge and surface rash. They've taken the concepts of vanguards, but not the substance of common-relations and second-level-alienation. More Babeuf than Lenin or Big Bill.

>I guess a good debate which gets to these issues is, “Do you believe a field like history can be taught as ‘politically neutrally’ and ‘objectively’ as a field on calculus or geology, or is it inherently politicized?”
No, but we *pretend* continuously and pretend with a fullness of effort to delete ourselves from our own readings, structurings and perspectives. My greatest achievements have been failed readings.

Historiography is best practiced as a failed marriage: we pretend for each other, as a sign of respect.

[Anonymous No.21527760]

>>21526600
The answer to this is the same as the answer to the decline in everything.

1. A general turning away from God - exceedingly noticeable within the major universities
2. Globohomo subversion which has been going on for no less than 110 years.

Everything bad in society is a byproduct of these two things (and the second is only possible because of the first).

[Anonymous No.21527773]

>>21527745
>chlamidial
fuck me how does your brain just come up with this shit

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527792]

>>21527773
I'd just used the metaphor of Leninists fucking the working class.

People view the politics of the literary turn in historiography and of historicising sub-alternaity as "female."

Fascism fears the monsterous cunt as the depths of the oceans of the past, capable of submerging and abolishing the phallus of action.

Chlamydia is an infection which affects women more strongly than men, which is shallow and surfescant rather than deep and cervical; but, which leads to abhorrent and horrific ends for the woman involved if untreated.

Chlamydia is also a sign of a loose, unguarded woman. Witches and Matrons don't get chlamydia.

So by using the existing poetics of what was under discussion I produced an image which fit with the powers, themes and subjects I was about to describe.

Honestly I thought Browning's finding that they enjoyed it, or the vomit play stuff would have caused the reaction, but there you go.

[Anonymous No.21527814]

>>21527498
>Keep the Eternal Conversation going forever.
Unless "truth" somehow becomes comprehensibly proved, this is basically academia's purpose. It's good to keep investigating, but this function has seemed to have been stunted by obsessive politically correct narratives and corrupted scholarly values and principles by university administrations.

[Anonymous No.21527817]

>>21527792
I usually feel pretty proud of myself for squeezing out a shitpost of passable quality but you manage to consistently deliver the goods with all the apparent effortlessness of a high fibre diet.

I wasn't questioning the metaphor so much as your feeling the need to make it at all.

[Anonymous No.21527819]

Why did this thread attract so many faggot tourists and literal tranny defenders? Smells like reddit in here

[/lit/his !!+D3EcghInHs No.21527824]

>>21527814
I think Herman Hesse has a book about this, its called marbles.

>>21527817
I've got a 60 hour week which begins in 11.45 hours. I don't want this inside my head when I'm with my coworkers.

[Anonymous No.21527826]

History is trash and always has been. And im not saying 'reading books from the past' is trash, please read books from the past but if you are writing 'a history book' then I suggest you fucking kill yourself.

[Anonymous No.21527827]

>>21527819
It's not about books so twitter users feel comfortable posting in it.

[Anonymous No.21527835]

>>21527827
Curious since apparently you only felt comfortable posting in it after the discussion turned into an easy to engage meta-discussion. I guess in that sense you bring back the familiar stench of 4chan.

[Anonymous No.21527836]

>>21527835
I was watching the chargers game and saw this thread while scrolling the front page.

[Anonymous No.21527843]

>>21527265
>You'll earn a fair amount of money, probably start your own company and hire a bunch of Juanitos to do the worst part of the job, and still come back home to enjoy your readings of Thucydides by the fireplace.
I work a public sector job managing a group of analysts, but that aside this is how I spend my evenings and it is indeed quite comfy.

[Anonymous No.21527870]

>>21527372
Even calling it knowledge is a bit generous. History is more like a fairy tale

[Anonymous No.21527920]

>>21527619
The most basic purpose of history is seeking the truth and revealing it, but at the same time it should not be a simple accumulation of facts about the past. It explains how the past has influenced the present, and understanding how our present civilisation/society has come about is, in my opinion, the point of studying history.

[Anonymous No.21527984]

>>21527496
>just read shit and idunno maybe work in a warehouse nigga who gives a fuck sell weed
I literally live like this, not a warehouse, but a similar position where I do almost no work and just shitpost and raed

[Anonymous No.21528255]

>>21527265
>Most historians are attempting to write thesis and papers such as "causes and consequences of the wheat crisis in 14th century Aquitaine" or maybe "A social history of native-american gender plurality in colonial Yucatán."
So you are complaining that people in a saturated field that is heavily limited by time and the source materials go into minutiae in order to produce new research? How is that unexpected, unless you think historians should just be reinventing the wheel and write the same macro topics over and over. Even with these these "micro" things it must be hard to not recyle a lot of information. I'm not a History student because my parents would never have let me but the minutiae is all very interesting if its from the area you are interested in. I read some of these articles when I'm free because History is my hobby, btw.
As a forced ST*M student, research works entirely the same way. How a certain type of receptors may be present in a very specific type of cells with, how that receptor's !Lb2r228jsowms+-1"-type subunit actually *may* have something to do with activating a certain molecule inside that very specific cell... and often times with much less certainty and reliability than History. Not even talking about the supposed utility of those suppositions for the future.
Micro IS current academia, no matter the field you go too.

[Anonymous No.21528287]

>>21527459
This.

[Anonymous No.21528307]

>>21526600
I have degrees in history. But I would rather be a teacher than an academic.

[Anonymous No.21528330]

>>21526600
I have a better explanation, which comes from firsthand observations.
The fields make no meaningful advances and are populated by shills.

For the record, History was my favorite subject. Im insulting the people not the discipline

[Anonymous No.21528353]

>>21527870
ITS MYTHS NIGGAS. CONTROL THE MYTH TO FUEL THE NARRATIVE. I’ll trawl around with my fucking spade and khaki shorts talking about pottery fragments and their geographic cultural significance but plebs don’t care and most elites don’t either. >>21527920 it’s about posterity and the longevity of whichever people are orienting their place in reality. Our regime has no use for a history other than New Deal progressive triumphalism, except the progress never goes anywhere and no one can tell you what it’ll look like. It’s an unending blowjob by corpos and bureaucrats using their teeth on kids, bugmen, and other technocrats promising the climax will be everything they missed in the latter 20th century. What does some Harvard nigger unironically hyped on “no war”, global sustainability, and universal equality think about their own sect’s history up to now? nothing, they’re global citizens

[Anonymous No.21528445]

It is pretty obvious that people like the dude who wrote OP's article believe they are far more important than they really are. You, the historian, are not at the university to study how the Incas scraped shit from the bottom of their llamas hooves and you're not there for some great societal mission, preserving history or whatever; you're not even there to even teach people as you can't give out failing grades. You're there to rubber stamp a hoop young thoty mcthoterson has to jump through in order to get her degree so she can get a desk job at THOTSRUS. That's it. And the money is drying up because you don't need that many stamps per student, do you. Just a few will do the job.

Shift back to teaching traditional, practical history and methods to research it, and you might win back some support. Until then, enjoy your principles, I hope they taste good. It's all you'll have to put on your dinner table.

[Anonymous No.21528508]

>>21527302
IT'S ALL FUCKING LEFTIE SHIT
MAYBE THAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM
NOONE WHO ISN'T A COMMUNIST WANTS TO ENTER A FIELD MADE UP ENTIRELY OF COMMUNISTS

[Anonymous No.21528525]

>>21526600
>Why the Humanities are Dying
It's an European concept and Europe and its bastard son America are declining.

[Anonymous No.21528528]

>>21526600
Good. History is not a science. It's basically fiction with some scientific elements. And it ends up being both subpar scientifically and from a literary standpoint as well. Into the trash it goes.

[Anonymous No.21528557]

>>21526880
Stop shitposting.

[Anonymous No.21528692]

The world is changing and the humanities need to establish flexible new ways of contributing and bring itself back into a state of flourishing.

I would start by getting a group of historians to work on the history of the Internet, much of which is already sadly lost. And get stuff down in physical copy, we know digital is too easy to tamper with.

[Anonymous No.21528745]

funny how the post quality changes as the Americans wake up

[Anonymous No.21528752]

>>21526752
That's not what schlepping means

[Anonymous No.21528754]

>>21527000
You left out the best part. He plays Pharaoh (1997) exclusively.

[Anonymous No.21528758]

>>21526848
Lmao
Just lmao

[Anonymous No.21528906]

>>21527225
>Pol Pot
Is that some kind of stoner /pol/ subculture?

[Anonymous No.21528925]

>>21527534
>Historians will never be self-reliant on their craft
Harari is

[Anonymous No.21528943]

>>21527760
based.

[Anonymous No.21528978]

>>21528925
He is a parasite being shilled by globohomo.
His work doesn't ressemble any historiographical work I've ever seen. He is not research and writing history, he is gathering some historical data and adding his interpretations of it.
The historian's craft is to understand the past and expose it. Harari's craft is to gather what historians had written about the past and write his teleological interpretations that point towards globohomo.

[Anonymous No.21528991]

>>21528978
>>>/pol/

[Anonymous No.21529002]

>>21528991
"NOOOO your opinions based on your historiographical studies don't please me NOOOOO harari is a historian okay, and so what he is not using historical methods and turning history in a epistemological playground to make his own falseable assertions? he is graduated in Tel Aviv okay he has a PhD therefore he is right. NOOOOO go to /pol/ because opinions is le offensive."

[Anonymous No.21529003]

>>21527225
The thing you call western culture is just a manufactured narrative that can't stand on it's own. When the US had a cold war and needed to make up some sort of moral superiority to compete with the soviet narrative, they came up with this bizarre tradition that requieres someone constantly explaining it to hold up at all. Once the cold war ended there was no use to it, there was a weak attempt with the end of history to give it a final act, but that should tell you how weird their plan was if they though that they could give it a three act structure.

It's not a global conspiracy to take down western history, it's just a fake concept going away once they stop pouring money on it. Same thing as silicon valley's forever growth now.

[Anonymous No.21529018]

>>21527276
they're still there, maybe more evident when there is a clearer constrast, but in general your isse is being inside the empire expecting the empire to attack itself. It happens, but it won't be the norm. Around the world we don't really respect the US writing about the US

[Anonymous No.21529021]

>>21529002

[Anonymous No.21529027]

>>21527342
have you considered that you are older than you were before?
When I was in my early 20's I could do most thing and reset my head to do something else in like 30 min. In my early 30's any activity feels like a challenge that I have to prepare to face and afterwards I've already done something so I feel like I can and should just drop dead until tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.21529031]

>>21529003
Look, I am not even that anon but saying that the West as a civilization of shared values is an invention is quite a fallacy.
There is a thing called West. It wasn't invented by the post-war USA and we still see the implications of the idea of whatever the West is influencing the world.

Although I agree that there is no conspiracy to take down the West (the West is culturally sick and allowing this self-abasement to happen), there are some values that are being lost and with the decline of these values, the "West" will be something of the history books.

But nevertheless, in one or two hundred years from now, historians will be studying what the West was, how did became hegemonious and how did it fall.

[Anonymous No.21529039]

capitalism of course. imagine taking the time to read any of the replies in this thread kek.

[Anonymous No.21529059]

>>21529027
I don't think it's about my age, since what I feel is not physical exhaustion. It's more like mental exhaustion.
In the slaughterhouse we had timed breaks to rest our legs and even take a nap during the day. Once the machines were off, it simply disappeared from my mind and I wasn't concerned about coming back and doing some work I left behind.
Also, it's strange but being tired makes you feel better when you are tired. The blood is rushing and you still have energy, as if you body feels adapted to always being in movement and therefore you don't need to rest all the time.

Working in a school is different. Once I leave the school or take a break, my mind is thinking about deadlines, problems with the principal's demands, concerns about how some student having a bad performance will drag the average score of your classes down etc. So I am always thinking about it, I can't relax, I can't read because I am already reading obnoxious pedagogical projects the school is trying to implement.
It doesn't even earn that much in relation to my factory job. I actually spend more nowadays. The factory offered me meals, clean uniforms and transport, now I earn more but have to pay for everything, so it's the same but twice more stressful.

[Anonymous No.21529060]

>>21529031
>There is a thing called West
yes, it includes south america. It doesn't include Australia. Meanwhile the East is Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Japan and Thailand. It's obviously stupid way to define culture and most europeans would consider it dumb to put northern european countries in the same intellectual tradition as southern and eastern.

It's a slogan that the US pushed to oppose the soviets during the cold war. That's why NATO is the West even when it isn't in the west, and the other half of that theoretical divide (the East) is a dozen different traditions that couldn't be considered a single identity. A bianry division that can't be divided in two is a dumb concept from the get go, it's a failed distinction.

[Anonymous No.21529069]

>>21529059
I'm probably in better shape than I was in my mid 20's, but my head gave up on so much stuff. Same reason the more you take to finish college the longer it gets, or how you're the most productive in your first few years in a company. It's all in your head, and it's pretty universal.

Still, teaching sounds awful, specially in the US. Maybe it's much harder, for sure it's much harder than I should be. I hope things work out for you, anon.

[Anonymous No.21529079]

>>21529060
You should know very well that, although we use the word "West", it has nothing to do with geographical location but rather politico-economical collaboration.


>yes, it includes south america.
No, because South America is still seen as a colonial and lesser significant place. No wonder there is always a political tug-of-war between populist righties that want to "become the west" and populist lefties that want "authonomy and latino colaboration" in such countries. But in any metrics, they are not the West.
>It doesn't include Australia.
It does because their policies are completely integrated with the west.

>It's a slogan that the US pushed to oppose the soviets during the cold war.
No, but the term West was certainly appropriated to support US policies. (Especially due to neocon readings of Spengler, such as Huntington and his gang)

>A bianry division that can't be divided in two is a dumb concept from the get go, it's a failed distinction.
It's a failed distinction nowadays since what made the west is no longer part of our realities.
The west was basically Christian values, Constitutionalist rights and a Crusader spirit that always wanted to break geographical and epistemological barriers.

[Anonymous No.21529094]

>>21527639
>I sympathize with le radical centrism too (I want the majority of humanity executed) but my argument still holds, of my hatred for humanity my specific hatred of modern progressivism stands as a uniquely distinguished, shining subset of this universally-directed-misanthropy.

[Anonymous No.21529099]

>>21527667
The use and abuse, so much is true. But there are other ways of engaging with history too, ways practiced by people much more advanced and refined than the current goblins.
I specifically like RG Collingwood's idea that history proper is the foundation of all humanities, and history proper is not cataloguing which King Ruckus III totally assraped the King Fuckus XII on the year 1234 of era 5 and why Fuckusians 3000 years later must genocide Ruckusians and take their clay, but specifically why Ruckus and Fuckus had beef in the first place: -how- and -why- they thought so that they behaved like we can reconstruct from the sources present.
Printing made-up narratives about bygone eras to further a local and temporary political goal is fine and dandy, but not capital aitch History, but propaganda.
History is the human mind developing and expressing itself in time. People study History as a way of studying the Mind by interpreting the artifacts and texts left by the precursors so as to understand their minds via their actions caused by their minds. Understanding their minds in development necessarily invokes understanding ours, and developing them too, especially so if our current minds would be found lacking or underdeveloped in comparison with actions and artifacts of more refined and powerful cultures.

Basically one can mine texts to find troons in history to produce pro-troon or anti-troon propaganda, or one may legitimately study how and why people would engage in travesty to know more about people - by way of studying what they were trying to achieve by travestry and/or what gave them the idea.

[Anonymous No.21529117]

>>21529079
>But in any metrics, they are not the West.

>Western languages
>Western religion
>Western political institutions
>Western genetics in 90% of the people
>Western media
>Western affairs dominant in the news
>Diaspora living almost exclusively in western >countries
>Reads Western literature
>Only knows about Western history

Come on man. Btw, the populist lefties that want "authonomy and latino colaboration" are part of the de colonial gauche caviar, have strong links to the european and american left, and their epitome of success is to live in Barcelona and get subsidized by an NGO while fantasizing about the Spanish II republic. That's why, for example, Biden and all the euro leaders wanted Lula to win. What you describe as populist lefties can be partially found in some indigenous people's movements, but those are only strong in countries with sizable pure indigenous populations (Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, and Guatemala).

t.South American

[Anonymous No.21529134]

>>21529069
>I'm probably in better shape than I was in my mid 20's
The decline of our body and strength is part of the human experience, however, you might wonder if you are actually broken or if you are having the feeling that you are broken. I used to think I was physically broken, but then I went a season without any job, started to walk my dog for hours to the countryside, hike in the woods, wake up in the morning without an alarm. I realized that my body wasn't broken, it was rather my lifestyle that was pushing me to the limit.
So try to see the light, Anon.

>but my head gave up on so much stuff.
Honestly, giving up of some things is one of the best things I've done in my life. When I was in my mid-20s I still wanted to be a career academic like that lit/his/ guy shilling this thread. The idea of doing research and getting paid sounded awesome.
But the more I've met intellectual morons, more I felt like they are completely detached from reality, abusing in verbose to me midwit takes and didn't really had a knowledge that was useful for living a better life or making their community a better place. They are not different from a person who graduated in IT and works as a codemonkey in the office. The only difference that they don't code programs, they just assemble a bunch of useless data to write useless papers. It's a repetitive work like any other, these guys don't have more vita contemplativa than a construction worker might have.

>Still, teaching sounds awful
It is, but I am actually making plans to go for a trade school. I'm considering to become a specialized repairman for heavy machinery such as harvester trucks. It's a cool job and there is money in it, it won't stress you over. Also you won't run out of business due the lack of specialized workforce and high demand.

>I hope things work out for you, anon.
WWAGMI

[Anonymous No.21529139]

>>21528557
But... I'm not shitposting...

[Anonymous No.21529142]

>>21529117
>t.South American
you may see yourself as part of the west
but does the west sees you as part of the west?
or do they see you as a colony?
pic related.

t. South American (just like u)

[Anonymous No.21529148]

>>21526644
I tend to wish I had pursued a grad degree right away and become faculty instead of admin, but sometimes I’m happy I ended up in admin because I know I can easily exit to industry or government.

[Anonymous No.21529162]

>>21526600
>What is to blame? In the past generation the American university has undergone a drastic transformation. To reduce costs, university administrators have dramatically reduced tenure. And as the protections of tenure have withered away, the size of nonteaching university staffs have exploded. Between 1976 and 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively,” according to a 2021 paper on the topic. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.
Literally since 1976 we had birth control and stuffed women into everything. It's that simple.

[Anonymous No.21529169]

>>21526628
Exactly this.
I worked in a university for years, following my dreams etc etc, only to watch the most repulsive profs enjoy endless accomodations and upward mobility, and the Real Ones suffering both economic uncertainty and daily existential crises.
Glad I got out before I was too old. Feel genuine pity for my former colleagues.

[Anonymous No.21529177]

>>21526731
Lecturing is only a one part of what universities do now. They also do research, and provide a vacation resort and athletics games for kids.

The two biggest issues in higher ed are the research requirements and ballooning admimistration and operation costs, both of which exist because they exist in this weird sort of public sort of private state where the demand is subsidized by state backed debt guarantees. Eliminate the debt guaranteed and make them fully private or fully public and most of these problems just disappear overnight.

[Anonymous No.21529178]

>>21529169
Let's hope some anons that are still young and not yet getting a graduate debt will read these posts and not jump into this scam.
This thread is serving public utility.

[Anonymous No.21529181]

>>21526759
The university is a basically medieval institution with thousands of years of history at this point. You can start your own universities but you’re not going to replace universities. They’re part of Western culture.

[Anonymous No.21529184]

>>21526759
>Humantiesbros, why don't we just boycott universities, and just get together and form our own colleges and just charge student's directly for the lectures and watch the unis degenerate from lack of philosophy?
You would need ban women students and faculty and that is currently illegal. It's so simple - how do you people not see it's just women?

[Anonymous No.21529186]

>>21527375
Was not the case at my uni. I had courses where the majority of the class was failed.

[Anonymous No.21529197]

>>21527502
This needs to be understand. If you look at any one college, you do have more administrators than you need and that money does add up but in general they are severely underpaid. You might have a staff of 50 people all making 50% less than fair market wage for their job under one supervisor who makes 150% more than fair market wage for their job. All those deans, vice provosts, directors, etc. that make anywhere from $100k to $1m annually add up. The lower rungs don’t really.

[Anonymous No.21529205]

I’m working in a university right now as an administrator. I do regret going into this line of work. I’m not sure what to do now. People who go into graduate programs and faculty unlike me may not have a financial advantage but they do have a biographical one.

[Anonymous No.21529206]

>>21529197
It's because it's illegal to doscriminate against women. How have none of you realized this?

[Anonymous No.21529214]

>>21529142
>pic related.
Well, Huntington himself said on his book that there is a debate about Latin America being Western, and pointed out that the only civilizational relation that it had was with the west, which is kind of outdated now since China is the main customer. We'll see how that plays out.

Anyway, it is true that since WWII, the establishment from Western countries that form the US military alliance has seen Latin America as a backyard whose only relevancy is to be a place where communism should be contained. But that's a narrow minded geopolitical vision based on strategic military interests. Latin American history goes far beyond that point of view.

Going back to topic, the state of humanities in Latin America is exactly the same as in the Western First World. Its academics produce the same irrelevant bullshit based on post modern and post liberal identitarian dogmas, hoping to spend some months at la Complutense, and live their euro academic leftist dream, so there's another link there.

[Anonymous No.21529216]

>>21529206
It’s not. This is just the status quo. Salary inequality between leadership and employees at universities is insane because that’s just how it’s ended up. When the money faucet is on, why not pay the director of whatever a $300k salary? And when they have a bad enrollment year they freeze increases for employees but not increases for leadership. Employee pay doesn’t even keep up with inflation, but leadership pay blows past it. This is true whether they’re men or women.

[Anonymous No.21529231]

>>21529216
Part of the reason for this is that leadership is responsible for their budget. So obviously, they have an incentive to keep their budget low by paying their employees less but not decreasing their own salary.

[Anonymous No.21529246]

>>2152921
Oh, boy. Redpill time
>It’s not. This is just the status quo.
Meaningless.
>Salary inequality between leadership and employees at universities is insane
Because men and women mixed leads to this. How has this happened in every field except the military, police, and construction?
> because that’s just how it’s ended up.
Not an answer.
>When the money faucet is on, why not pay the director of whatever a $300k salary?
Because men have a strong sense that all men deserve basics living needs but not women and women don't think men nor women require them. Look at any field with a mix of men and women and you will find this.
>And when they have a bad enrollment year they freeze increases for employees but not increases for leadership.
Again, because employees are powerless if they have mixed genders. Imagine doing that successfully and easily with an all male administration and professorship versus 50/50.
> Employee pay doesn’t even keep up with inflation, but leadership pay blows past it. This is true whether they’re men or women.
Yes. Hierarchies take on a certain shape when they are all male, mixed, or when all female they stop existing.

[Anonymous No.21529274]

>>21529134
>They are not different from a person who graduated in IT and works as a codemonkey in the office. The only difference that they don't code programs, they just assemble a bunch of useless data to write useless papers
You have described the same thing basically, as human language is also a code that makes your mind think certain things in a certain sequence so you could take certain actions. Academics in the humanities write code for human actions, but they can well write succinct and impactful code, but most of them tend to produce shovelware suffering from extreme bloat.

[Anonymous No.21529276]

>>21529214
I actually don't like Huntington, but since he was very influential in the Bush years (although I would say is somewhat relevant for the media portrayal of the "despotic" Russia and Ukrainian "freedom fighters"), but he pretty much exposes that we are "something else".
Do I like this? No, I agree with you, our values and worldview is shaped by the western legacy, however we need to be aware that we are indeed somewhat different. Even our cultural manifestations such as LatAm Catholicism takes a different shape, which I am not fond of.

My point is, the West exists, but I agree with you that the concept of what is the West is currently under changes and becoming less relevant. Whatever united the West as a cultural block is no longer relevant, it's basically NATO policies, as you pointed out.

I agree about the Latin American humanities framework, with a twist that (at least on my experience), we have this persistent Marxist approach that still sees Latin America as a separate block striving for independence and autonomy (great examples are leftie's must-reads, such as Canto Generale by Neruda or The Open Veins of Latin America by Galeano)
This Marxist view of "we be oppressed, we need class consciousness to be free" is everywhere. And this is one of the elements that is giving support to this detachment of the western world.

[Anonymous No.21529290]

I'm not even sure what's the point of a humanities degree in the age of the internet and therefore easily obtainable ebooks and university lectures uploaded on youtube. Like you don't go to a university to "learn", but to be vetted for approval if you want to work in a humanities-related field, which is, well, kind of a bad deal right now to put it lightly. Why would you want to give up the freedom of thought and the freedom of study that self-education provides?

[Anonymous No.21529333]

>>21529276
The West if a full synonym of the American Empire. And I don't mean a continental empire that forcibly incorporates everyone it conquers into the same entity on same conditions, but an empire like an area of exclusive fleecing. At this point anyone not in NATO but calling himself a westerner is like some tribal who wishes the Persian Empire would finally demand tribute from him and hopefully maybe incorporate into a satrapy like it did to Germany, Japan, Latvia or Panama.
This is the effective meaning of the term, regardless of whatever else it meant in the XIX century in the context of British-Russian in Europe and South Asia or whatever.

The West is whoever gets to live in the US on condition of making your land a satrapy to be used and abused. Hell it was common for visiting European scholars to compare US Americans to either the Native Savages or the Negro Beasts, the locals' European language and religion merely accidents, not to say anything of the 666 mestizo castes.

[Anonymous No.21529344]

>>21527496
>anon, you're talking about a glorified discord server here

I mean, isn't that what universities are?

[Anonymous No.21529353]

>>21529205
They're going to try to make you the scum of the earth. Considering that you're already thinking about "biographical advantages" in favor of faculty just shows how poisoned you're already becoming. It's a Faustian bargain mate. Get out while you can.

[Anonymous No.21529357]

>>21529276
>I actually don't like Huntington, but since he was very influential in the Bush years
He was actually misread, or not read at all. Leftist academia and media in Latin America and Spain (See that Alianza de Civilizaciones counter bullshit sponsored by Zapatero) portrayed him as a neo con ideologue whose work justified the Bush years interventions, when in fact Huntington said that ragheads should be left alone.

>. Even our cultural manifestations such as LatAm Catholicism takes a different shape, which I am not fond of.

The anglo historians where succesful at identifying the west as the protestant west, throguh the Spanish Black Legend. French Jacobines did the other part of the job. That shit was bought by Latin American intellectuals in the XIX century, and then fueled by Max Weber misreadings. It is complex I'll grant you, but it all comes from introjected views that come from other western countries. So there's the west again thinking about itself in Latin America.

Lately I've been reading Antonio Lezama's essays about the permanence of indigenous culture below the mask of western institutions. I find it way more interesting than the "we spanish catholic bad at being western". Shit's been around my head for months.

>This Marxist view of "we be oppressed, we need class consciousness to be free" is everywhere
Absolutely, but now that we are back into topic, how is that manifesting in contemporary Latin America academia? The old class warfare marxism leninism is completely dead. Now it's all decolonial indigenous contradictory reivindications about Latin America being opressed for not being allowed to be developed, while at the same time, decrying developement as an imperialistic tool, all of it sprinkled with Marcusian racialist woke shit all over the place. Marx is revered as a symbolic figure, but no one cares to actually read anything from him any more. Our humanistic academia did never recover from the dictatorships, and post 1989 it became a sub set of the decadent First World universities, which takes me to your final point:

>>21529276
>And this is one of the elements that is giving support to this detachment of the western world.
Couldn't agree more. Literature, history, philosphy and art are how civilizations perdure by transmiting its meanings to their own people, and the West is in the process of killing all four. We won't be part of the West, because the West, through the destruction of its Humanities, it's destroying itself. And we, Latin Americans, have joined the effort.

[Anonymous No.21529365]

>>21529290
The idea is to be paid money to teach and to mentor. Internet personages will never match the hypothetically limitless impact of a human being, the master-apprentice model, the potential for networking, so on. It's a good system on paper, in fact it is one of our human triumphs that we figured it out; but excellent systems do not function when bad actors achieve even a large minority, let alone the vast majority as things now stand. Don't be too harsh on guys who wanted to profess their passion for a subject for a living. Their life is a tragedy.

[Anonymous No.21529378]

>>21529162
It's the obvious solution to the puzzle, but to make that concession would be to undermine the new religion of hollow equality. An entire culture shift would be required to undo what has been done. The turning of that ship would take either the concentrated, tireless effort of two or more generations, or actual, literal spillage of blood.

[Anonymous No.21529389]

>>21529365
Still, how many philosophers and poets/writers who went on to become almost unanimously canonical have been plugged into the academic system, though? Practically no one before the late 18th century and still nowhere near even half afterwards. For every Kant you have half a dozen Marxes.

[Anonymous No.21529410]

>>21529389
I don't know, it's a very interesting question. I was dealing in abstractions, but you're right to question my foundational obsession, that it would work in practice, "if only". I think of the ancients and their methods, the symposium and the tutor system and so forth, and I think of Shakespeare diligently learning his classics in school (not a uni, granted). But these of course have a different character than the college system.

[Anonymous No.21529420]

>>21528445
>practical history

[Anonymous No.21529457]

>>21529410
I'm not really doubting the need and the usefulness for the "academic" framework, but only that we shouldn't let the academic framework we have right here and right now misappropriate the idea and consider itself the only kind of academia there can be, because you can't just monopolize an idea like that. That's why I consider the idea mentioned earlier on in the thread, a loosely connected network of subversive underground "academic" circles made by people with a genuine and honest intention to learn and study a fantastic one, because in our current intellectual climate liberating thought from the tyranny of the powers that be and dilettantes who would abuse it for cynical ends is the number one priority for anyone wishing to preserve or create anything of intellectual value. It's not like this sort of thing never happened during history before, either. When the air gets too stifling above you just head underground.

[Anonymous No.21529460]

>>21529410
The university was also the physical place you were guaranteed to meet gentlemen with interests in learning and arts at. No internet, no telephone, not even a telegraph - either a personal encounter or letters that cost like a bitch and travel a couple month.
Nowadays you can still meet such people in person, but in some esoteric masters at best since the BA is just secondary education by XIX century standards.
It is not like discord servers on Ancient Greek Drama actively advertise themselves plus actively weed out philistines and pseuds with exams, and even then you have zero personal contact and flimsy prospects of a live meeting.

[Anonymous No.21529475]

>>21529457
You are rediscovering Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes etc disconnecting from the Scholastic universities to make an intellectual underground.
However Protestant kings actively supported them, or at least were ambivalent - still Hobbes almost managed to get burned at the stake for heresy, Spinoza was almost lynched for politics and Descartes was tortured to death by Swedish climate and fatuity.

[Anonymous No.21529506]

Minorities and ideologies that favor them over white is destroying everything whites build. No other culture or race has so deeply preserved the history of the world.

Whites needs to collectivize culturally against all non-whites.

[Anonymous No.21529518]

>>21529365
>Don't be too harsh on guys who wanted to profess their passion for a subject for a living. Their life is a tragedy.
True. Dr. SADler and his tranny son spring to mind.

[Anonymous No.21529528]

>>21526644
To do serious research you need access to a research library, resources and you need credentials/affiliations.

[Anonymous No.21529550]

>>21526600
>Daniel Bessner
Ew a Jacobin writer

[Anonymous No.21529554]

>>21529142
It's a racial thing. Even though latin america is culturally western, white people only want to include white (majority) countries as "Western."

[Anonymous No.21529569]

>>21529528
Sci hub gets you the journals.
Ordinary theft gets you the monographs.
Annual leave gets you in archives.

[Anonymous No.21529583]

>>21529528
This is the problem with the "going underground" idea. Someone has to organize it, and that requires money, since no one worthwhile would seriously undertake such a thing if it interfered with their family. Then there has to be some measure of pupils' progress, which would be impossible, because there would be no real hierarchy. And again there would be no social advancement for 'completion' of such a program. Colleges no longer teach; rather, they are tools for socialization and career advancement. We have seen that simply bowing out, as young men have done in humanities, only exaggerates this dilemma -- young women are happy to take their place, and the cycle continues to spiral.
I don't know how, but the academic apparatus has to be reclaimed, or destroyed.

[Anonymous No.21529585]

>>21529181
Universities are institutions of the 1950s. Read ffs. The current BA’s lauded predecessor is a c19 German invention.

[Anonymous No.21529587]

>>21529528
>To do serious research... you need credentials/affiliations.
No

[Anonymous No.21529588]

>>21526600
So surprising that ground breaking
>white man bad
critical thinking is not popular. Shocking.

Meanwhile, because affirmative action doesnt work, and creating fields of ((study)) like afro dindu nuffin studies is unemployable, ((they)) have created diversity jobs at every major corporation, school and government agency. The gibs keep flowing, while society burns faster. Accelerate. Bix nood.

[Anonymous No.21529604]

>>21529585
universities as we know them, federally supported accredited institutions producing peer reviewed research, are a mostly postwar development. skim the wiki for the "higher education act of 1965" for a taste. for extra credit, read about the morrill act of 1862 and 1890 to find earlier federal support.

[Anonymous No.21529616]

>>21529353
Nobody holds it against faculty that they pursue faculty. If you’re a good student, it’s understandable why you’d continue to try to teach and work for the university. Nobody understands the bad student who works for the university anyway.

[Anonymous No.21529618]

>>21529585
Yeah. Armies were invented during the world wars too.

[Anonymous No.21529622]

>>21529604
What you just described is the 18th century Prussian university. You’re plainly mistaken about this.

[Anonymous No.21529628]

>>21529205
yeah i fell into higher ed bureaucracy after the 2008 crash as a way to pay my rent and i've been stuck in this abysmal comfort zone ever since. it's easy, and kind of fun to larp as a faux-academic, but it doesn't pay much and the culture just gets more full of shit every year. there's a big correction coming for higher ed though and some colleges are closing or merging and laying off people. if they lay off my department, i don't care. it might be the kick in the ass i need to get out of this shit.

[Anonymous No.21529636]

>>21529622
there was no such thing as "accreditation" nor peer-review in the 1700s dude.

[Anonymous No.21529707]

A university education is today viewed more as a means of producing future workers. Universities have prioritized STEM as a result and prospective students are largely entering for jobs as programmers, doctors, engineers, and finance professionals. Only law is the professional field where most students are from the humanities. Attending university to learn more about the human condition just doesn't draw students like it used to, nor are you guaranteed an easy, well-paying job like the 50s-80s where a university degree was quite uncommon and an English or history BA was still worth something.

[Anonymous No.21529726]

>>21526731
I wonder if that same form might form outside of uni.
As the cost of going to college becomes more and more prohibitive, there's nothing stopping individual educated persons from offering their insights for sale online.

[Anonymous No.21529779]

>>21529583
>The apparatus must be saved or destroyed
Well, the ladder is becoming inevitable. Or it would be if capitalism were allowed to function as it's meant to.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to speed up the process?

[Anonymous No.21529785]

>>21526600
>Daniel Bessner
>https://danielbessner.com/
>writing for the Jacobin
>Bernie staff
>Trump derangement syndrome in his publications
I don't have a confirmation on early life, he wrote an article (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/3/1/99)) saying that all the social study bullshit of the second half of the 20th century in the IS was Jewish but he obviously sees it as a good thing. Of course the name is suspicious especially in muttland.

[Anonymous No.21529796]

>>21529636
And there was no such thing as tanks in 1500 so armies weren’t a thing either, right?

[Anonymous No.21529828]

>>21529785

[Anonymous No.21529847]

>>21527416
>manipulated content pushed by bots, idealogues, propagandists, and deranged schizos will be the history of the future
Dear God

[Anonymous No.21529854]

>>21529847
Obvious joke: that is also every government and every newsmedia in history

[Anonymous No.21529875]

>>21527496
>got my ba in history because I like history and everything else seemed uninteresting
>find out a ba is practically worthless on its own and I’ll need another 2-3 years getting a masters to do anything relating to my degree
>say fuck that, apply for random state jobs, get hired as a data analyst / court scheduler for a psychiatric hospital
>get paid 4K a month to do like 4 hours of work a day and spend my free time reading and writing
On one hand fuck me for getting a useless degree but on the other hand jobs literally don’t care what you studied and will give you a job for a degree so based

[Anonymous No.21529882]

>>21526738
yes
it's retarded and speaking out against it instantly results in accusations of racism, the worst sin possible.

[Anonymous No.21529888]

>>21529828
I'm disappointed I was the first to do a basic background check at post 260. /lit/'s power level is weak. Do they really let Jews into their mind without protective alertness? The need for a check should have been obvious by the second paragraph, before even continuing the article.

[Anonymous No.21529904]

>>21527416
Well put. Hate or love their conclusions, the evidence gathering alone is a precious asset to society wherein counternarratives of any stripe put a target on one's back.

[Anonymous No.21529915]

>>21529875
I never understood how people think Degree --> Job is some necessary correlation. Why not just disaggregate it into multiple elements like
>studied history in uni
>learned from studying history: (a) historical knowledge, (b) how to analyze complex texts as evidence and incorporate them into arguments, (c) how to use an archive, (d) some foreign languages
then when you apply to jobs after graduating, you tell them about (b), (c), and (d) as relevant. One or two or all three may be relevant to a law position that has you digging around in court records to supplement a brief. Then you go home and continue doing (a) on your own time as a lifelong passion.

Somewhere along the line people got some wires crossed about the purpose of humanistic education. The point of it was always to form YOU as a person to the highest degree possible, while also acknowledging that not everybody can be a philosopher or an orientalist. But you still get to take classes in philosophy and orientalism so that when you get out of university and become a lawyer or even something entirely nonintellectual, you still have knowledge of philosophy and orientalism and can read books about it and contribute to public discourse for the rest of your life. The point was never for everybody to become orientalists, or for orientalism to be "useful" in a dental technician's daily practice. The point is that you're not JUST a dental technician, you're also a guy who wants to take part in civil discourse and keep up with journals and keep learning about the world throughout your life. That was the Humboldtian ideal of the German university model that everyone copied.

[Anonymous No.21529942]

>>21529779
Step one is to choose a single, tangible issue, and to broadcast a message against it as simply and broadly as possible.
>College has been ruined by __x___
or
>College doesn't pay.
Student loans / indentured servitude have been a very useful tool in this; the only counter they have is the empty promise of student loan forgiveness.
That's for the public sphere. Privately, have many kids, home school them in the classical tradition, and send them to tech schools or community colleges. It'll take time, but if every anon here did this, one generation will get to see the end of the university as we now know it.

[Anonymous No.21529943]

>>21529904
Way back in the day when Chomsky was asked what news sources were trustworthy he said none are, you just have to read everything and try to triangulate what the fuck is going on by mutually cancelling all the different biases of the reporting

I think it's a sign of /pol/'s strength that you have absolutely retarded Russia boosters and absolutely retarded Ukraine boosters in two silo'ed threads who all hate eachother, and each group probably has a bunch of wumao-esque fed redditors (fedditors?) who get paid to post on 4chan. Of course I would prefer if atop the 95% of /pol/ that can only comprehend GRUG PRO RUSSIA OR PRO UKRAINE?? GRUG MUST DECIDE... FRIENDS IN DISCORD TELLING GRUG TO MAKE CHOICE OR GRUG CRINGE CENTRIST..., there was also a 5% who can do the Chomsky thing and synthesize both incomplete and fed-infested perspectives

[Anonymous No.21529988]

is this the education thread
I just graduated college. finished my last semester in december
now what the FUCK should I do
I have no fucking clue
(business management and international studies double major, history and french minors)

[Anonymous No.21529996]

>>21529988
>Business major with languages
Umm I don't know anon. Maybe get a job?? At a business???? Just spitballing.

[Anonymous No.21530034]

>>21529854
>every government
Agree, and you dont think it's possible governments are pushing propaganda on social media including /pol/?

[Anonymous No.21530068]

>>21529988
Biz consulting or finance.

[Anonymous No.21530140]

>>21526600
Today I took a walk in town and I saw this art exhibit. I knew it was going to be modernist shit but I went anyway. I entered the place and it was full of modernist shit. It all looks exactly the same. Even fucking AI is more creative than the people who are making art in the fine art institutions today, that's how fucking bad it is. Oh look, there's a badly drawn face. Oh look, there's an "installation" with random shit hanging. Oh look, there's a thing made of cobbled up trash. It's all the fucking same. There were the artists there who were young people dressed in all sorts of wacky clown costumes. I paint too and something in the back of my head told me, hey, if you socialize with these people maybe you can have a corner here along with "Turquoise Sanctimony #5" and "Godhead Assembly" and all this other shit with pretentious names that always looks like a schizophrenic toddler's first encounter with a crayon. And I just can't. I can't even say I paint. I'm like "oh, interesting." They try to explain the art to me and what I want to say is "If you have to explain the piece of artwork to me, you are displaying unfinished artwork". Then I start wondering what the fuck these people were doing with all that spare time and all that passion that (supposedly) they should have muster the courage and self-determination to put their works in a gallery, because none of them can even hold a fucking pencil right. I'm not a purist but for fuck's sake. You're not Klimt. You're not bending the rules, you're just shit. I don't understand how can someone have so much passion for a thing and be completely incapable of doing it. Imagine someone trying really hard to get into music and not being capable of tapping his foot in 4/4. How is it possible, how do these people exist, how have they completely and systematically infiltrated academia. They all dress weird and all their art looks exactly the same. I felt so fucking weird, alienated, like I was in a creepy Body Snatchers situation. Every time I meet "artists" and go to exhibits I have this feeling because it's all so grotesque and unnatural. All the people who come see these things are grotesque. How do they look at the art and not think what I am thinking? How do they listen to the guy in a clown costume as he explains what the trash means and take it all at face value? How is it possible? What the fuck is going on?

[Anonymous No.21530141]

What's the best thing to do with a history bachelor's?

[Anonymous No.21530148]

>>21530140
What kind of art do you like?

[Anonymous No.21530163]

>>21526600
Always been mediocre. Just mediocre in different ways.

[Anonymous No.21530180]

>>21530148
I like Eastern European/Russian art in general. My favorite painter is Repin. I like impressionists like Stepan Kolesnikov and generally speaking, all sorts of impressionist-influenced realism like Sargent etc. I like Beksiński a lot, but less than I did before. But I'm not a purist. I actually enjoy really random art by amateurs sometimes because they made it in earnest and they at least tried to use some knowledge to express something. Even if the anatomy or whatever isn't perfect, you can still see what they were aiming for. I like amateur art but the kind of stuff that is in academia isn't just amateur art, it's inhuman. It's like fake art made by impostor humans to clog all the arteries of art so that it dies.

[Anonymous No.21530202]

>>21530180
>realism

[Anonymous No.21530229]

>>21530202
I like Beksiński? And I like his more abstract figurative expressionist phase more than his early surrealist phase, too. It's just rare to find expressionist artists with anything resembling a technical foundation.

[Anonymous No.21530331]

>>21529988
Are you American?

[Anonymous No.21530335]

>>21529915
You never get to tell them why b and c are relevant because you’re filtered out by software and the girls in Human Resources.

[Anonymous No.21530339]

>>21529875
It’s only public and semi-public jobs that don’t care. Private industry jobs are more competitive so they care.

[Anonymous No.21530365]

>>21529618
Only WWII and then only in the UK and USSR. West Bumfuck Degree technical college is a result of Ming and Cahill in 1950 not Frederick in 1750. Institutional continuity is historical and bureaucratic not symbolic.

[Anonymous No.21530380]

>>21530365
Ming and Cahill is the result of…

You’re wrong about this.

[Anonymous No.21530386]

>>21530380
Ming was a result of imperialist small business urbanism. Cahill was a result of the skilled labour right unions. What kind of dumb fuck are you that you don’t know this? Y2hnj

[Anonymous No.21530393]

>>21529915
>I never understood how people think Degree --> Job is some necessary correlation
Boomers. If a boomer got basic education he'd triple his wage and get all those job opportunities. Of course, that had to go with the firm handshake. Then they brainwashed all their sons with the same idea except it didn't work anymore. If you talk to boomers you legit want to smack them in the face.
>In MY time, at your age, what did I have? Nothing! I worked and they din't payme a penny! That's right. Then I bought a house and married a woman who could afford to stay at home to raise my 2 kids, I started a business, I expanded a business, even if I'm fucking illiterate and I don't know how to do SHIT. Just because I WORKED HARD, thassrite, I woke up EVERY DAY at 8AM and worked those 8 hours erry day!
I fucking want to strangle them. Fucking boomers would be begging in the streets, all of them. Retarded fucking useless buffoons

[Anonymous No.21530422]

>>21530386
This is pointless. You cannot even understand the difference between basic structure of a thing and reforms to or innovations within a thing. The university had been educating people into professions since the Middle Ages. The function being served was and is the same. This is totally indisputable.

[Anonymous No.21530427]

>>21529988
If you’re American and you want to use that international relations degree, consider taking the FSOT and working for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer.

[Anonymous No.21530512]

>>21530331
Yeah
>>21530427
I will look at that.

[Anonymous No.21530578]

>>21530512
There’s a FSOT test in February so if you hurry you can sit for it.

[Anonymous No.21530638]

have any of you guys done the free universities route like they have in Europe? enticing desu

[Anonymous No.21530644]

>>21530578
Yeah I'm doing some reading on their website right now and this does seem pretty neat
Fuck it I'll apply and see if I can't take the test.
Would be funny if I ended up with a job like this because of a /lit/ post.
Thank you brother.

[Anonymous No.21530774]

>>21530229
>abstract figurative
nigger learn the most basic art terminology before you start writing walls of text about it

[Anonymous No.21530971]

>>21530644
It wouldn’t be uncommon as you think. Recruiting is based on the test and that’s almost entirely word of mouth.

[Anonymous No.21530973]

I wish I could have studied humanities instead of being pressured into STEM. The people who truly are enjoy what they studied always make it work and the people who hated it never pay off. Follow your passion has genuine merit especially with how saturated STEM is now anyway. I know plenty of unemployed or underemployed STEM grads and know more than a handful of Humanities grads that made it work and got the jobs related to their fields they wanted.

Bu even studying STEM I grew to really hate academia. College don't really teach humanities very well either. The poor prospects come more from humanities attracting lazier and noncommittal people because its easier to bullshit and most people are told they're bad at math or something. humanities should probably be more strict than STEM. The idea of some dissident education group outside of this stuff is appealing but it'd be at most a discord server of auto-didacts. I'm not really an auto-didact, and its hard to do that in entire disciplines you have no basis in. I'd benefit a lot from a teacher.

I wish college was better. When you read older 20th century or prior books that mention university it just seems superior to anything I experienced using that term.

[Anonymous No.21531072]

>>21530422
The university only taught professions in Italy. Learn what an avocation is. The modern university was born in the 1950s.

[Anonymous No.21531098]

>>21531072
I’ve given up on you.

[Anonymous No.21531105]

>>21531098
If you think Theology is a profession you’re not merely illiterate you are a Simonist.

[Anonymous No.21531150]

>>21526600
I think the humanities is a good field of study, but I don't think you need to go to university for it, as you would for STE (which require expensive apparatuses [hence why I didn't include mathematics] as part of the study). Every humanities graduate I've met has been an insufferable cunt who read zero (0) of their assigned readings. They just went into it because millennials and zoomies were told to go to uni, and the dumb ones picked HUM because it's easy to pass.

[Anonymous No.21531172]

>>21529569
Tell me about the archives.

[Anonymous No.21531179]

>>21526848
You're right as far as History is concerned. It was the most conservative department of the humanities and did a relatively (by far compared to departments like Antropology, Sociology, and even English) solid job of compartmentalizing Marxism and systems of thought in general. However, that all went to shit over the last 20 years as the old guard retired and revisionism wasn't seen as a potential career ender (i.e. something you had to really work toward and invest in if you wanted to remain a serious scholar) but something you're rewarded for in following a trend (which isn't even seen as a trend). It's also one of the last departments that remain male dominated but that's going away too.

[Anonymous No.21531185]

>>21531172
mostly overused and mined of everything interesting over the last 100 years, now it's just a rite of passage for most graduate students. anyone lucky or good enough to find something real and worth writing about is well, lucky

[Anonymous No.21531214]

>>21530140
Only a few times I went to modern exhibitions. You would see these modern dressed people, usually women, looking at those meaningless pictures as if they were the most fascinating thing ever.
Which is interesting, because whenever I went to a classical exhibition, people didn't seem as contemplative as in these exhibitions.
And it makes me wonder if these people really see depth and beauty in these art, or they just gaze at it trying to conceive why it's considered great art. Well, I think I'll never know. The mind of your average shitlib is a great mystery to me, sometimes I wonder if they do have the voice of consciousness or they just have this void of silence going on in their head. As if truth is defined by social discourse rather than self-inquiry and critical thought.
I wouldn't even say it is subjective. It doesn't seem to be subjective because, like you said, people who enjoy this shit look all the same, as if they weren't exactly subjects of their own experiences, but more like socially programmed entities.
It's too weird for me.

[Anonymous No.21531222]

>>21531185
but where do I have access to it?
can I access the archive of any uni?

[Anonymous No.21531266]

>>21531222
if you have credentials or sponsorship of some kind or can convince their head of special collections then probably
https://aspace.library.jhu.edu/repositories/3/resources/490
https://www.dla-marbach.de/find/opac/id/PE00001397/
https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/manuscripts-university-archives/significant-archival-collections/papers-sir

for individuals it all depends where the author's archive or nachlass ended up and how substantial it is

if it's other archives like medieval documents or they are obviously more restrictive. but yea basically any graduate student can go read newton's handwritten letters if they have a reason to.

[Anonymous No.21531306]

>>21531172
I prefer institutional held by research libraries to state archives because states and their components make boring characters. If you demonstrate you’re a genuine researcher (usually by posting your abstract to the chief archivist) you’re good. Most of them are okay with digital photography but remember that you’re there to read not photocopy. If you take adequate notes your secondary reading a year or two later will help make your argument cogent.

>archives are about big finds
Archives are like cunts. Subtle understated. But if you work them persistently and cleverly…

[Anonymous No.21531309]

>>21529888
I thought it was obvious so I didn't check. Nice trips by the way.

[Anonymous No.21531311]

>>21531222
University archives tend to be the archives of that university plus a couple of “special collections” like dog fucking pamphlets of the 19th and 20th century. Tijuana bibles tend to be boring. Good special collections are basically civil society organisations: counter-states. What finger wouldn’t I give for a good Country Women’s Association?

[Anonymous No.21531330]

>>21531150
>they just went into it because millennials and zoomies were told to go to uni, and the dumb ones picked HUM because it's easy to pass.
That's basically what I did. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life and I just wanted to stave off adult responsibilities as long as possible. I have an okay job now and I read history in my spare time, which is something I never would have done while I was getting my degree. I feel guilty about the money my parents spent and I regret not taking it seriously. If I could go back in time I would have studied something like math, which I was actually good at but didn't pursue because it would have involved too much work.

[Anonymous No.21531454]

>>21527416
>but I know /pol/ will have videos of Ukranian soldiers castrating prisoners of war and footage of Zelinski dancing in drag, and proof of both Russians and Ukranians trying to avoid the draft because neither side wants to fight.
And better theories and models of explanation
Lol

[Anonymous No.21531463]

>>21527466
>/pol/ has no immune system to defend against belief-affirming hoaxes, and has a strong bias toward belief in subversive and nihilistic narratives
Its immune system is arguably better than the one in academia. To the point that only insane amount of shilling, psyops and gpt3 bots can push an hoax in /pol/.
Accept it, /pol/ is better than academia.

[Anonymous No.21531475]

>>21531463
where does your confidence come from?

[Anonymous No.21531498]

>>21531475
A sub generational community that doesn’t reference apposite texts, has no method, uses eisegeses as proofs and refuses nymity as it refuses To bear responsibility for its utterances.

[Anonymous No.21531876]

>>21531498
you're just reiterating my question in a more provocative manner

[Anonymous No.21531992]

>>21531498
>has no methods


the method is calling someone a jew and/or spamming copypastas and memes instead of counterarguments

[Anonymous No.21532083]

>>21531992
If you count that as method I’ll count that as an invitation to ad bacculum.

[Anonymous No.21532161]

>>21531876
By the time he's forgotten he wanted to swing, you ought to have killed his family. Admittedly this is less to do with historiography, and more the history of effective politics of anti-gestural politics.

[Anonymous No.21532271]

>>21530140
>Oh look, there's a badly drawn face. Oh look, there's an "installation" with random shit hanging. Oh look, there's a thing made of cobbled up trash
not modernism, actually the opposite

[Anonymous No.21532431]

>>21531992
>>21531876
>>21531498
Academia pushed the idea that a if you cut the penis of a man and put a wig on it, then it becomes a woman.
Please, academia has no immune system.
Thats exactly the pro lem. You were the weakest link in the chain.

[Anonymous No.21532453]

>>21532431
Dude, "Behold: a man."
We've done this before.

[Anonymous No.21532537]

>>21531214
I feel so alone. The only answers I get are from trannies who attempt to invalidate what I say by nitpicking on the terminology, which they're always 100% incorrect about because I am using terms used by gallerists.

[Anonymous No.21532601]

>>21532431
I understand your position, but prefer you answer >>21531475

[Anonymous No.21532684]

>>21526941
Yeah, history sucks at the college level because it sucks at least as hard in high school and middle school. And it sucks there because the textbooks are basically just propaganda written by committees with political ties. It's a deep problem.

[Anonymous No.21532689]

>>21527140
It looks bad so there is lots of pressure from deans and department heads not to fail students, especially since they are the paying customer these days and they're not paying frivolous money. This effect is substantial in STEM fields so I can only imagine how strong it is in humanities.

[Anonymous No.21532697]

>>21532684
Academic history sucks because textbooks suck? Wow man, your causative arguments must be wild.

>>21532689
You just read a sample from a prospective doctoral candidate. Also any which don't come with a well formed achievable research project that has the capacity to articulate into a programme isn't worth engaging for non-financial benefits.

[Anonymous No.21532706]

>>21532697
>Academic history sucks because textbooks suck? Wow man, your causative arguments must be wild.
When was the last time you read a high school history book? You think they are ever exposed to primary sources? Text book contents are quite literally determined by think tanks and political committees. This is common knowledge.

[Anonymous No.21532717]

>>21532706
>history sucks at the college level because it sucks…in high school and middle school. And it sucks there because the textbooks

Academic history sucks because secondary textbooks dictate academic conduct? Your drinking has reached delirium levels.

[Anonymous No.21532718]

>>21532717
>Academic history sucks because secondary textbooks dictate academic conduct?
Uh, yes? Do you not know how curriculums work at the school district level?

[Anonymous No.21532722]

>>21532718
Yes. The Texas School board has no influence over the research programmes of British, Canadian, Australian, French, German, Kiwi or, for that matter, American historians.

Secondary text books do not cause disciplinary conduct.

Student head ratio funding and paid research days do.

[Anonymous No.21532726]

>>21532722
I am talking about high school, not college. (You're accusing me of being drunk?) Because high school and middle school history are taught horribly, actual history courses with discussions of historiography are foreign and difficult for the kid who is paying $200k to get his history from liberarts college #345. Colleges cater to the students now, and when the students can't hack even humanities work, the criteria for evaluation has to change.

[Anonymous No.21532736]

>>21527323
>and then a physician reads your paper, do some extra research based on that and has a groundbreaking discovering that applying a different molecule helps to produce some substance that boosts the immune system against measles, or whatever (I am making it all up, but it works somewhat like this)
Close enough but physicians don't do research. It would be some big pharma salaried scientist who comes up with the idea and sends a proposal to R&D.

[Anonymous No.21532747]

>>21532684
>Yeah, history sucks at the college level because it sucks at least as hard in high school and middle school. And it sucks there because the textbooks are basically just propaganda written by committees with political ties. It's a deep problem.
>>21532726
>>21532726
>I am talking about high school, not college.
>>21532684
>Yeah, history sucks at the college level because it sucks at least as hard in high school


No. You are making a clear causative claim via chain that "middle school" text books dictate the quality of disciplinary historiography. None of my colleagues ever lowered the quality or standard of their teaching. They just passed people who shouldn't have. Everyone except the dumbest cunts in HR knows that a transcript full of 50-75s means. Fails are better than 50s: fails said you rejected the subject fundamentally.

[Anonymous No.21532786]

>>21532747
Ah, so your university doesn't have any classes on zombies or the economic latitude of bay area women of color during WWII. Interesting. What college or university is this where none of your colleagues have lowered the quality or standard of their teaching?

[Anonymous No.21532794]

>>21532786
I like how you're ignoring being caught. If you could read you'd already know. Stop gesturing by the way, its a give away.

[Anonymous No.21532802]

>>21532794
What the fuck are you blithering? Show me the course offerings in your history department.

[Anonymous No.21532804]

>>21532802
And a hearty dox yourself to you too mate.

[Anonymous No.21532809]

>>21532804
Like I'd know which guest-lecturing nobody you are. All I want is the undergraduate course list.

[Anonymous No.21532825]

>>21531463
>Its immune system is arguably better than the one in academia.
That's not saying much.
>To the point that only insane amount of shilling, psyops and gpt3 bots can push an hoax in /pol/.
Accept it, /pol/ is better than academia.
/pol/ is deplorably and embarrassingly the easiest board to troll, so getting them to believe hoaxes isn't even necessary. Just derail discussion and bury anything that should be getting more attention.

[Anonymous No.21532831]

>>21527498
There's a great bit about this in Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita.

[Anonymous No.21532865]

>>21526600
>why are humanities dying?!?!?!11!1!1
>remembers that time my final exam asked why or why not I think Marxism will prevail
>write about why marxism will not prevail based on the sources provided
>lose 33% of my points because the professor claims marxism will prevail
>email her and remind her I cited sources she assigned for us to use and that her opinion doesnt justify bombing my GPA
>she emails me back that "conservative ideology" and "conservative theory" was assigned to show the flaws of these beliefs
>department does nothing when I complain
>change major to comp sci like a boss
huh, wonder why humanities is full of fucking retards and layabouts these days, almost like anyone with work ethic, morals, and critical thinking skills is actively weeded out...