首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
职业资格
Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re
Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re
admin
2019-06-08
60
问题
Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything,
that’s wildly optimistic
: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so
dire
—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?"
Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students—for instance, women and minorities.
Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today’s job-market crisis: they’re why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren’t.
Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: "Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years."
That
will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to "broaden" themselves: to "engage more deeply with technology"; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.
Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word "dire" in Paragraph 2?
选项
A、Cheerful.
B、Gloomy.
C、Complicated.
D、Queer.
答案
B
解析
词汇题。根据dire所在的上下文“…is much smaller than the report suggests”“…why even professors are…or the rest of the humanities—at all?”可推知本词并非表达积极向上的意思,故排除A项“愉快的”。上下文分析的是就业形势严峻,找到终身教职很难的现状,由此可推断该专业的人员心情应该是糟糕的、悲伤的。B项“沮丧的”,C项“复杂的”,D项“奇怪的”。故本题选B。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/N83v777K
本试题收录于:
英语学科知识与教学能力题库教师资格分类
0
英语学科知识与教学能力
教师资格
相关试题推荐
诸侯互相争战是东周时期历史的一大特点。下列战争中发生在春秋时期的是()。
阅读下列材料并回答问题。材料:以下是某教师在讲授“辛亥革命”的相关内容时,对辛亥革命的思想基础内容的教学片段。思想基础:民主革命思想广泛传播(板书)。教师:在辛亥革命爆发前,资产阶级革命党人做了大量的思想宣传和动员工
简述历史教师在进行课常导入语设计时应遵循的基本原则。
Atahigherlevelofwriting,whichofthefollowingcognitive,skillsshouldNOTencouraged?
WhichofthefollowingisNOTasuitablepre-listeningactivity?
AccordingtoNoamChomsky,humanbeingsarebornwithaninnateabilitytoacquireandproducelanguageknownas______.
WhenmyfamilymovedtoAmericain2010fromasmallvillageinGuangdong,China,webroughtnotonlyourluggage,butalsoour
Inthe1962movieLawrenceofArabia,onesceneshowsanAmericannewspaperreportereagerlysnappingphotosofmenlootingasa
Thatexperiencesinfluencesubsequentbehaviorisevidenceofanobviousbutneverthelessremarkableactivitycalledremembering
40yearsagotheideaofdisabledpeopledoingsportwasneverheardof.Butwhentheannualgamesforthedisabledwerestarted
随机试题
下列关于ASP.NET的WebService理解错误的是()。
女,31岁,摔倒后左手撑地,手腕部肿痛,活动障碍,鼻咽窝处明显压痛。若当时X线片未发现骨折,复查X线片最适合的时间是
我国卫生标准按约束性可分为
王琪琪在某网站中注册了昵称为“小玉儿”的博客账户,长期以“小玉儿”名义发博文。其中,署名“小玉儿”的《法内情》短文被该网站以写作水平不高为由删除:署名“小玉儿”的《法外情》短文被该网站添加了“作者:王琪琪”字样。关于该网站的行为,下列哪些表述是正确的?(2
某房地产开发公司拟获得某城市规划区内A乡所有的集体土地从事经济适用房的开发建设。A乡原耕地面积为100公顷,农业总人口为800人,现征用基本农田以外的耕地40公顷。该地前3年每公顷年产值分别为4.3万元、4.7万元、4.9万元。经商定土地补偿费为该耕地前3
工字钢桩围护结构适用于()。
2006年参保退休人数数量比上年增加了()2005年全国基本医疗保险基金支出额为()
肌肉收缩中的后负荷主要影响肌肉的
培训部会计师魏女士正在准备有关高新技术企业科技政策的培训课件,相关资料存放在Word文档“PPT素材.docx”中。按下列要求帮助魏女士完成PPT课件的整合制作:在每张幻灯片的左上角添加事务所的标志图片Logo.jpg,设置其位于最底层以免遮挡标题文字
BabyBoomersAreKillingThemselvesatanAlarmingRate[A]Ithaslongheldtruethatelderlypeoplehavehighersuiciderat
最新回复
(
0
)