Straws in the Wind - Part 203

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: One of the biggest buzzwords in modern academe is innovation. At Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, it has the force of a mantra. The word has dangled from 50-foot banners gracing the facades of campus buildings. It’s been used to jazz up real-estate ventures, like the university’s new Robotics Innovation Center, which is due to open soon on the site of a former steel mill. So it is perhaps unsurprising that innovation also appears in marketing materials for a new Ph.D. program: “computational cultural studies.” The more apt word might be coup. That’s because Carnegie Mellon already has a Ph.D. program in cultural studies. Or it did, anyway, until February 2024, when Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, placed an administrative “pause” on admissions to the literary and cultural-studies (LCS) doctoral program...

Unlike its [English] departmental sister, the Ph.D. program in rhetoric, the LCS Ph.D. has focused on providing doctoral-level training in both literature and cultural studies — the only such training that Carnegie Mellon offers in either of those subject areas. The suspension of applications to the program, though, has left current LCS Ph.D. students in an awkward limbo. One student has left for another program; others have considered doing the same, or have tried. Those who remain have had to carry out their work under a shadow of uncertainty. Will the Ph.D. program even exist by the time they finish earning their degrees? ...

The new computational cultural-studies program is being celebrated as a means of saving the humanities and improving Ph.D. students’ job prospects. The irony, for current students in the LCS program, is that it is also contributing to the humanities-job crisis. Carnegie Mellon has announced two job openings that are ostensibly being offered through its English department, according to the Modern Language Association’s job list: One is advertised as tenure track, and the other is nontenure track. The two positions are to comprise half of a new “computational humanities” cluster hire focused on “artificial intelligence, machine learning, data modeling, computational linguistics, historical analysis, and cultural analytics.” ...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-coup-at-carnegie-mellon.