1) There was a recent round of severe cuts to Humanities majors at a long-renowned (European) university, including programs that not only intersect with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past number of years, but also employ a number of specialists with whom I've personally interacted with, on stuff in their specializations that affects what I research.
2) A recent article crystallized something that I myself had come across -- that the Humanities in (a lot of Europe) are moving to a 3-to-5 year grant model, where there's a head researcher who starts an initiative and gets grants, takes up doctoral students to work on that specific project and write their dissertations off of it, and then lets them go afterwards... Only, it's not like every Humanities researcher has an endless number of big-scale projects like that that are amenable to that style of research design and staffing, so (as I think this article observed) it's a "boom or bust" / "feast or famine" situation for both the head researcher and any doctoral students, where you get this big project providing a few years of stability, but then you're let go as part of an identical-looking cohort who had been forced into someone else's vision, and it's not clear if you'll ever get anything like that again.
. . .
(In terms of a profession with this sort of skill-set that I have, I really was born at a bad a time -- it seems like I could just squeak through that profession in decline, but it declined too rapidly for that, and, moreover, other professions got more rigid and you couldn't cross over as easily... Any little bit later, and the writing would have been on the wall and I simply wouldn't have entered, and I would have been able to locate an amenable sector where I could have advanced more easily... Still, though, it just kills you to see so many of these lug-nut baby boomers who have poorer training and worse teaching skills, and just have this stranglehold on these dwindling professions because of their lifetime jobs -- just appalling, and so sad, both for the younger generations, and for the creation of knowledge itself. No institution is perfect, but the less positions and the less chances for advancement that exists, the more that such glaring mediocrity comes into focus, especially since it's combined with rhetoric of "meritocracy" due to these people having tenure and their having supposedly been vetted as the best of the best.)
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