Devastating …

… Back in the MLA | A survivor of academia returns to a troubled field. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As the humanities decline in the United States, the country is losing the craft of understanding, losing its capacity for citizenship. Even educated people are increasingly unable and unwilling to distinguish between fake and real information, becoming a community that cannot understand itself as anything more than a circulation of figures. Self-righteousness takes the place of substantive discussion. Narcissism and outrage become the dominant techniques of self-definition. And the cure for all these problems is the same: read widely, read deeply, read.

Credentialed assholes are no substitute for passionate scholars.