If your professional goals are becoming an English professor (which is what most English professors assume an English major should want), then this is definitely a barrier.
Otherwise, eh. I think colleges have become too vocationally focused and everyone’s trying to put a dollar value on being able to understand and interpret the human condition in way that goes beyond Fascism’s bland and flattened take on the concrete and coming up empty, and then trying to figure out how to dress up what they’re doing as important to The Machinery so they can keep getting their grant money.
There’s a cognitive dissonance where academia can’t decide if it’s for white collar vocational training or for intellectual pursuit to further society and individuals. So we end up with this sort of half baked of one, not quite there of the other situation.
If your professional goals are becoming an English professor (which is what most English professors assume an English major should want), then this is definitely a barrier.
Otherwise, eh. I think colleges have become too vocationally focused and everyone’s trying to put a dollar value on being able to understand and interpret the human condition in way that goes beyond Fascism’s bland and flattened take on the concrete and coming up empty, and then trying to figure out how to dress up what they’re doing as important to The Machinery so they can keep getting their grant money.
There’s a cognitive dissonance where academia can’t decide if it’s for white collar vocational training or for intellectual pursuit to further society and individuals. So we end up with this sort of half baked of one, not quite there of the other situation.
And then in reality it’s neither, it’s a bunch of people drawing faulty conclusions from bad data.