I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

Give it a few years 😊 Our scholarly conversations play out at glacial pace!

In fact, if you're lucky enough to get to the stage of writing Book 2, you feel more intellectually generous towards the scholars (some long dead!) with whom you were in - sometimes excessively critical - conversation in Book 1 (as it's all about proving yourself, while Book 2 can be more relaxed).

I’m torn, because on the one hand this could finally end enormous gen ed classes full of students who see them as a box checking exercise and make no effort to learn anything. On the other hand, those gen ed classes are often the final defense against the full elimination of humanities departments.

Given how many students are blatantly having AI LLMs write their essays for them, it will also complete the transformation of the corporate university into a pointless farce: AI-written essays will be graded by AI feedback generators, and humans can 100% avoid any of that pesky intellectual effort.

P.S. If you re-read my post, I was literally saying that it was *never* the case that "Excellent" people always found jobs.

I put it in quotation marks for a reason 😉 And I didn't intend to diminish the difficulty in the 70s and 80s, when many fantastic scholars couldn't find permanent posts. It is statistically undeniable, though, that the 1960s and again the 1990s were an easier time for humanities PhDs.

This was never true, even in the "golden age" of the mid- to late twentieth century. The fact that anyone could assert this after almost two decades of a non-existent academic job "market" in the wake of the global financial crisis beggars belief.

[...] For if the Turks could be subdued beneath the yoke of Christendom merely by the Pope’s tithes, then long ago they would have been vanquished without sword or spear. At last Germany shows sense, sending back the apostolic legate with an empty stomach."

(Ioannes Brassicanus, 1519)

(I understand you wouldn't be visiting as a tourist, but the point is that immigration officers in Florida are keen not to put people off visiting - visitors are the lifeblood of the state.)

I'm a UK citizen living in Florida. What's happening is frightening, but it's worth keeping in mind that hundreds of thousands of non-US citizens enter the US every day without any problems. I've seen huge queues of British people being waved through at Orlando airport this year (FL likes tourists).

Honestly, neither is especially common. I get the sense that they're more a shorthand used in secondary sources than a popular medieval concept.

"Christianitas" or "res publica Christiana" (Christendom) is what I mostly see in my (late medieval) sources.

"We have a $50 million deficit [created by deliberate higher ed budget cuts and executive mismanagement] and salaries are our biggest expense, so we have no choice but to lay off faculty."

-> *proceeds to lay off dozens of humanists on $70k and hire dozens of engineers on $250k*

100% this. The only silver lining to having an overwhelming workload and far too many students per faculty is that the alternative is being a university where enrollment is dropping, which is now a certain prelude to the wholesale axing of humanities departments and tenured faculty.

That was a frightening time to be living in East-Central Florida. We were very fortunate that it veered north in the end. The images from Abaco were heartbreaking.