What happened to economics is happening to traditional Spanish literature and culture courses now, among others.

Linguistics is a field that I’m interested in, but I’ve noticed that it’s moving to mostly-worthless quantification rather than attempting to find true insight — but had never thought about it in the context of the post I linked above.

But it makes perfect sense that as linguistics becomes more pseudo-scientific while attempting to appear more “true” by mathing everything up, that it’d also be used as a maul to chip away at semi-related humanities-oriented fields like literature and cultural studies.

Well, that explains a lot of other things I’ve been noticing but didn’t really understand until now.

Linguistics is not a replacement of any sort of the wide-spectrum cultural understanding and insight a literature course can bring to students. In no way is it adequate — but linguistics has little visible ideology, and even less so if you make it into (bad) pseudo-physics.

But for the technocratic neoliberals who now have full control of academia, a field that doesn’t make people have any dangerous and unapproved thoughts is perfect.