Bonus material, re: online education

I’ve got a post up at Generation Bubble about online education disintermediating adjunct professors and superfluous graduate students. I was once one of those superfluous graduate students, accepted into a program at a state school basically to ease the teaching load on the professors—who were accordingly cynical for the most part about my potential for performing useful scholarship. I regard the whole experience as a trap that I fell into, so that may explain some of the bitterness in my tone. A lot of people have ended up in English departments who would have preferred to be doing social science of some sort, with perhaps more disciplinary rigor, but instead they ended up having to write dissertations in which half their energy was spent justifying the tortuous methodology that allowed them to do sociology via a few randomly chosen poets.

—Rob Horning