Thanks, Mary! And sorry it took so long to respond. What we're seeing is there are 2 interrelated things happening with hostile colleagues - first an obsession with "majors" as a level of interest, because course enrollments remain robust and in many cases seem to be growing. Second, within departments (perhaps not English, but certainly History, Art History, Philosophy, Religion, other Humanities) there's a general devaluaing of the pre-modern world as not a subject worth studying. This impacts medieval Europe but also antiquity, and every other geographic region!
These 2 things, I think, reinforce one another, wherein we buy too readily what legislators and administrators say has "value" but then we have no solidarity to fight back because our modernist colleagues are arrayed against us.
There are, of course, exceptions to this but it is a trend we see happening.
Thanks, Mary! And sorry it took so long to respond. What we're seeing is there are 2 interrelated things happening with hostile colleagues - first an obsession with "majors" as a level of interest, because course enrollments remain robust and in many cases seem to be growing. Second, within departments (perhaps not English, but certainly History, Art History, Philosophy, Religion, other Humanities) there's a general devaluaing of the pre-modern world as not a subject worth studying. This impacts medieval Europe but also antiquity, and every other geographic region!
These 2 things, I think, reinforce one another, wherein we buy too readily what legislators and administrators say has "value" but then we have no solidarity to fight back because our modernist colleagues are arrayed against us.
There are, of course, exceptions to this but it is a trend we see happening.
-- Matt