From Rzepka's blog (at the "insane" link): "In the Trump era, we’re familiar with the idea that Stage IV capitalism has collapsed satire into reality. This is easy to see in the provisional names given to the administrative units replacing departments (the 'School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions' is the one I’d be in), which cheerfully liquefy any solid content professors, students, parents, or future employers might be able to identify.... In an announcement launching that process, our then-Provost explained that its success would depend on 'people who truly "visioned" the potential synergies and multipliers in opportunities' and who possessed 'a mindset for new imaginings of function in important and more creative ways.'... Every looming reduction of resources promised 'thriving' and 'flourishing,' and every degree of alienation fostered 'belonging.' ... It’s not just that this rhetoric exemplifies the cruel optimism of a profit-ensorcelled managerial class that should be anathema to scholarship and art. It’s that it presents so starkly the vacuousness that would replace the exact—and exacting—values whose erasure they are justifying. Turning research, evidence, argumentation, depth, richness, clarity, and sense into liabilities, they are the rhetoric of a future world freed of rigorous inquiry."
November 20, 2025
"The departments of English, classics, philosophy, world languages and Spanish and Latino studies... will be grouped into the tentatively titled School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions."
"The psychology, linguistics, social work and religion departments will make up the School of Human Behavior and Well-Being.... Is the move, as college administrators argue, designed to get professors to collaborate more across disciplinary lines, and share administrative burdens? Or is the end of academic departments, and elected department chairs, a way to weaken the rigor that makes areas of study distinctive, making the humanities easier to shrink and ultimately push out? Adam Rzepka, an English professor who specializes in early modern literature, suspects the worst. The plan is 'insane,' he said in an interview, and is a fundamental attack on the university’s core mission: expert-led education."
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85 comments:
Instead of lumping them altogether, if the administration had tried to power wash every department some federal judge would have stopped all of this on a dime.
So long as none of the ladies see dangling penises on campus, it's all good. Facts mean nothing to the women now. Ammirite? Critical thinking is for survivors, not grifters. Hit the tip jar, boomers...
I especially love the part about “research, evidence, argumentation, depth, richness, clarity and sense” in fields that such terms are totally alien to and actually anathema to.
Considering the spew from his blog, I'd say putting him in the School of Creative Narratives is probably exactly where he fits.
The divisions between the different humanities concentrations were always somewhat arbitrary, and with significant overlap between fields. I’d have more interest in his complaints if he stepped away from the high-falutin generalizations and made some specific objections.
The TDS doesn’t help—sure, college administrations take their marching orders from Trump.
In other news, the graduates from these programs will receive a degree in "Effete Dilettantism". This form of training is essential for entry into country club lounges, and it provides the core KSAs needed for hiring servants.
Humanities and soft science degrees simply do not provide economic value these days. Negative ROI. Religion and philosophy graduate students have had to self fund their degrees (i.e., no research or teaching subsidies) for a long time.
We have way too many colleges today, as the family sizes shrink, as foreign students face immigration challenges, and as technology supplants more and more stuff. War of retrenchment.
“School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions.”
Obviously, MSM journalism is included in there.
In the Trump era, we’re familiar with the idea that Stage IV capitalism has collapsed satire into reality
more evidence humanities would never be caught dead in the economics department. They ignore history, too.
Why not lump them all into a Political Strategy department?
“School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions.”
The School will be housed at the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Don’t Read So Good.
Think of all the administrators they’ll be able to fire after this simplification of the school’s structure!
What on earth would we do without these departments?
No more lit crit.
Enigma said..
"We have way too many colleges today, as the family sizes shrink, as foreign students face immigration challenges, and as technology supplants more and more stuff."
remember this next time a school (or university) board asks for MORE MONEY for whatever..
The number of 18 year olds is projected to fall off a cliff
(their words, not mine)
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cliff-fewer-college-students-mean-fewer-graduates
"..This comes after colleges and universities already collectively experienced a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021.."
but tell the Professors,
NOT TO WORRY, they can Always LEARN TO CODE!
(unless those jobs get taken by H-1Bs or AI )
Thanks Althouse! "Ensorcell" - I learned a new word today. You make me catch my breath, I am ensorcelled! Sadly I can't use it. I'm not on eHarmony and it isn't five letters long.
Throw in history/poly sci and you’ve pretty much got what used to be called liberal arts I do find it interesting that they lumped philosophy in with languages. Kierkegaard smiles..
Rzepka: ""In the Trump era, we’re familiar with the idea that Stage IV capitalism has collapsed satire into reality"
Trump didn't create all those departments. And if asked, he probably would want the English department to stay separate. The kids not signing up to be English majors are reacting to market forces that pre exist Trump, most of which he is fighting against. If we reshore our industries and keep foreigners out of the workforce, there will probably be more jobs for citizen English majors. CC, JSM
If Rzepka's language exemplifies the result of the quality of instruction he and his department deliver, maybe they should simply abolish the English department.
Are foreign students who are here to study legally facing "immigration challenges"? Or is this one of those creative narratives that they teach. Sorry for my Orwell kick lately but that gentleman said a lot of things that are really relevant today, and one of them is that all art is propaganda. Of course, academia now views Orwell as a "how to."
Sad. We wouldn't have literature or especially literary fiction without the body of English Lit that made up the ONE course college students had to take that explored our history in our language. If one is unaware, "English Lit" includes works translated from other languages into English that contributed to the rich body of work we still draw on.
People quote classic lit every day, whether they know it or not, especially if you quote bits of from cartoons, movies and TV shows, many of which drew on Shakespeare and Wilde and Chaucer etc. Who can forget Gilligan's production of Hamlet!
Confusion of the idiocy and foolishness that is modern liberal arts education is now... Trump's fault? What can't the man do?
The new department should be called "School of the Norwegian Blue Parrot, both Dead and Alive", to honor the great literature works of Monty Python. That's a more informative and honest department name than "School of Human Behavior and Well-Being."
Yeah, well, Mike, Shakespeare's stuff is full of cliche's.
@Justabill: I do find it interesting that they lumped philosophy in with languages.
Philosophy reasoned itself out of a job with the invention of science. It's role "was" to inform other disciplines about possible ways forward, but when fMRI machines examine "thinking" in real time and when physics projects require billions of dollars and space telescopes to find anything new...the armchair deep thought crowd doesn't have much relevance anymore...mostly historians who keep an eye on logical fallacies...
"They lumped philosophy in with languages"
Well, it will all be done by Large Language Models in the near future, anyways.
…that would replace the exact—and exacting—values whose erasure they are justifying.
This is the central lump of horseshit in his statement. No such exact and exacting values exist or are enforced today in the classroom except perhaps conformance to the leftie woke liturgy recited in the faculty lounge.
- Krumhorn
A sure ticket to a good job is a degree in Fashionable Opinion.
Or cliches. Oof.
Apparently just calling the entire thing "The School of Theoretical and Applied Marxism" was a little to on the nose.
The cult of handmade tales and production.
What could go wrong?
the armchair deep thought crowd doesn't have much relevance anymore...mostly historians who keep an eye on logical fallacies...
That has utility - it's good to have a means to tell when you go wing!
Also. I enjoy Christian apologetics, which sometimes leave heavily on philosophy to ensure that B follows from A logically and necessarily.
Montclair state that employed stalinist grover furr (holomodor deniar) use willy wonka gif
…a departmental restructuring plan is igniting concerns about the future of the humanities" (NYT).
Oh, the humanities!
I might be different than many posters here but I would actually be disappointed if some of those departments get collapsed into one smorgasbord department, namely English, Classics, and Philosophy. While I'm not a fan of the other various grievance studies that have proliferated over the past couple generations in Colleges and Universities, I don't think they are a top tier problem for higher education. The two root causes of the problems in Higher Education are Administrative bloat and accepting unqualified students.
Administrative bloat leads to spiraling tuition costs, (education subsidies also are a big contributor), plus it breeds a horrible mindset in students that there ought to be some ever-present bureaucracy to manage people and their normal social interactions. It creates an expectation that if something bothers you, you can can and should be able to complain to someone else about it instead of resolving it yourself. There is probably a causal link between omnipresent schoolmarm administrators in K-Grad School and the rise of the Karen-types.
Accepting unqualified students leads to less rigorous curricula, with decreases in the complexity of topics covered as well as the breadth of topics covered. I have no numbers but I'd assume over the past 75 years or so the number of works covered in the typical first semester English course has decreased by more than half. Accepting unqualified students also diminishes the economic value of a 4 year degree. A large part of the benefit of a 4 year degree is that it was a secondary indicator that a graduate had a certain level of intelligence and could handle a certain level of complexity and workflow. If Higher Ed is now designed so that the average High School student, or even the below average High School student can complete the program that sheepskin loses some value as a secondary indicator. Fewer people, as a percentage of the population, should be attending Higher Education. Honestly, if a student is 115 IQ or below maybe college isn't really a good fit for them. There are millions of people in this country that are carrying large amounts of student debt that would have been better off not going to college at all.
The English department was an abomination since its inception. The idea that literary theorists were even able to teach the useful college skills of composition and rhetoric is laughable. And the English department was "occupied" and co-opted 40+ years ago.
What the college English department promoted 10 years before became the basis for the high school English teaching which then became the model for the lower levels until we reach today where schools don't teach basic reading much less writing.
I did just listen to the Econtalk podcast "Primal Intelligence (with Angus Fletcher)", Nov 3 2025. Fletcher
"What do Shakespeare, Hollywood storytelling, and military special operations have in common? They all excel at inventing new plans, or improvising when we're facing radical uncertainty. Listen as professor of story science Angus Fletcher tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts how we've misdefined intelligence, equating it with data--driven reasoning in place of what he calls "primal intelligence"--the uniquely human ability to think and plan in situations with incomplete information"
It's an interesting premise about how we learn to think with minimal information, which is common in situations of combat. I've ordered the book.
Toward the end of the discussion, they look at anxiety, a state of having to many paths, and anger, the state of seeing only one path, and how this is dealt with by dynamic thinkers. For anxiety it is "Now+One", that is pull back how far you try to project events till you start to see a dominant path. For anger it is to force yourself to increase your options so when the preferred path gets blocked you are already open to alternatives.
Change the English department into the Writing department and it can live on. No matter what you do, you need to be able to write. STEM people need to write. Arts people need to write. Social scientists need to write. Businesspeople need to write. Etc. Even if you are relying on AI for your writing, you need to write prompts, and you need to understand what the AI just dumped out so you can tell if it actually answers your question. English majors could guarantee their incomes for life if they change their focus from Derrida & Co to understanding different writing styles and how to use them. CC, JSM
Deconstructionism was already creeping in the mid 80s not to mention other grievance studies 'western culture's got to go' mission accomplishef
Montclair State High School
Purify and homogenize the human narrative. It's all just messaging, right? This how we reach complete consensus.
They could get rid of the garbage studies but that would make too much sense
It has nothing to do with 'late stage capitalism' an gramscian motif
Poor guy has been left standing on the sidewalk while stage IV capitalism parades by. Are there no safe spaces anymore?
Econtalk has been feminized, even among the traditionally great regulars like Mike Munger. Anything after about 2015 has been worthless.
No more teaching of unintuitive side effects and more teaching about feelings.
..."our then-Provost explained that its success would depend on 'people who truly "visioned" the potential synergies and multipliers in opportunities' and who possessed 'a mindset for new imaginings of function in important and more creative ways.'...."
Well, one thing's for certain, they have already gotten rid of the English Department
Those words you are using (thats just babel, that ai could improve upon)
Translated from romulak
Received my L.A. degree in ‘75 and graduated with two solid job offers. Didn’t matter so much what you studied as long as you’d done it. The expectation was that college was rigorous and you were worth taking a chance on. But I could see even then that the rot was starting.
KKKommunism's long march thru our institutions.
What stage? Middle?
Historically, both art and scholarship have been largely funded by the wealthy who could have spent their money on other things.
Tell me about the great art and scholarship that was achieved under Communism.
People do still need to know how to write ... prompts for AI.
So much of what people once believed and took for granted now qualifies as "luxury beliefs." But college was a luxury for a long time. We tried to democratize it. Between that democratization and the general trend of the economy, colleges -- and liberal arts in particular -- lost the mystique that gave them value in people's eyes.
Very few people are going to be paid to pass on a cultural heritage that society doesn't value anymore. Even fewer are going to paid to demean that heritage which we no longer care about.
In the Trump Era, some professors can't see that all their political allies are morons.
Instead of reimagining the academic labels of college departments, maybe the administrators could figure out how to cut the price of a college education by 80%, so at least kids could get an education without being saddled with a 50 year mortgage at 12% interest that's not dischargeable in bankruptcy
Trump famously sets aside 8 hours a week to make academia dumber. We all know that.
Maynard you are a fool. Ever see the movie Dr Zhivago? Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn had huge influences on literature in the 20th century. Did you realize that some of the most groundbreaking filmmakers in the history of Cinema that heavily influenced Hollywood were practicing during the depression in Soviet Union. Also socialist realism is considered a significant School of art that was fostered in the Communist era. I believe MAGA Hero Jordan Peterson is a huge collector of socialist realism.
"Think of all the administrators they’ll be able to fire after this simplification of the school’s structure!"
But this isn't what is going to happen- it was the administrators that simplified the structure and they will want their paychecks to continue. I suspect the driving force here the fundamental lack respect all the new victim studies programs have when they have to compare their titles to "Professor of English Literature" or "Professor of Philosophy". It is simply a leveling downward so that respect may be redistributed.
Those department meetings are going to be epic.
Why not go full on Pol Pot and just end all education at basic numerical and read/writing? Specialists can be imported and then deported when their expertise is no longer needed. Intellectuals as a class are a terrible thing because they possess influence without any corresponding responsibility. Set up some kind of rumpspringa mechanism to ID and cull out the square pegs like the Mennonite & Amish do. Psychologist BF Skinner wrote about things like this his perfect society novel Walden 2 and i think it's worth a look perhaps.
Every time a new regulation is promulgated by the government, a new administrator gets his wings. How does a college comply with regulation without administrators? It can't, is the answer. Blame colleges if you like, that's what they want you to do, anything but shine a light on the real culprit.
Howard said...
“…maybe the administrators could figure out how to cut the price of a college education by 80%, so at least kids could get an education without being saddled with a 50 year mortgage at 12% interest that's not dischargeable in bankruptcy.”
Those administrators are a very large part of the reason those kids find themselves in such a pickle. They and their idiot politician buddies conspired to push the student debt system as a means to fill their own rice bowl, with no consequences to anyone except the indebted and the taxpayer. It will take a strong force from outside the university system to bring about change, and the beneficiaries of the system will fight like hell to prevent it.
Maynard you are a fool. Ever see the movie Dr Zhivago? Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn had huge influences on literature in the 20th century. Did you realize that some of the most groundbreaking filmmakers in the history of Cinema that heavily influenced Hollywood were practicing during the depression in Soviet Union. Also socialist realism is considered a significant School of art that was fostered in the Communist era. I believe MAGA Hero Jordan Peterson is a huge collector of socialist realism.
And tell me Howard, about a basis for comparison, say to the Italian Renaissance (funded by the wealthy), as only one example. You have cited a few examples of art and literature (not scholarship) under Communism. Don't you think that your examples are rather pitiful in the grand scheme of things?
You do know that Solzhenitsyn wrote about the horror of Communism, I hope. Maybe you should read "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich".
David lean made brother zhivago the bolshevik general a hero
Back to the chimps and the obelisk
You would think an english degree would be a valuable credential after all its still the lingua francs for the rest of the world but not if you bulldoxing it into oblivion
It was invaluable to me.
Law firms went in opposite direction. Replaced half a dozen departments with many practice groups. Trying to be client arrested.
The Italian Renaissance is not a shining example of free markets or a free society. The point is that even highly repressive regimes, including call me Bolsheviks, cannot completely control the artistic expression of the masses that are dominated by a small cabal of powerful people:
"Governments of the Italian Renaissance were not democratic in the modern sense; they were primarily a mix of oligarchic republics and autocracies. While some cities, like Florence and Venice, were called republics, real power was concentrated in the hands of a small, wealthy elite (oligarchy), not the general populace. "
Alec Guinness wasn't a hero, he was just not totally evil like strelnikov
Certainly the book had a more anticommunist flavor the film really doesnt grasp the tragedy that the great devouring did to Russia
Hawkeye: yes, exactly right. To me it's the biggest stain from the boomer generation who enjoyed an almost free higher education at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world.
Why do they need so many adminjstrators even in curriculhm development
My old Norton Anthology of English Literature helps me reach the books on the top shelf.
They don't. But administrators make more so everyone wants to be one. Five competent managers could run any University.
Ugh.
Change the English department into the Writing department
Why, so they can muddy the waters teaching them to write in txt linga or Arabic? Being able to write clear English prose is the goal, after all.
clearly thats not the goal
Howard,
I think you need help with reading comprehension.
No doubt, counselor. Words are the feminine realm of intelligence that I struggle with mostly.
Howard,
You try too hard to be quick with clever quips rather than thinking things through a bit more.
Sounds more like The Post-Modern Era than The Trump Era.
Excuse me, sir. This is a Wendy's. I mean, Montclair State.
'you teach a class in this, you know nothing of my work'
In related news, Your kids can’t add or read.
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