Humanities cutbacks hit women.Several humanities courses will no longer be offered at Norwegian universities: linguistics, applied linguistics, Christianity studies and the Master’s degree in art criticism. universities should be aware of the gender perspective when courses are discontinued.

IHaveALargePenis · 2012-03-31T02:30:24+00:00

Some of these quotes are golden.

"So that when we lose students, and we have lost about 500 students since 2005, our income declines by several million. Then it is difficult for us to maintain our course offering," she says.

I'm starting to see the issue.

"By the same token, it is now being argued that men must be given preference in some fields where women are in the majority, for example, nursing, medicine, psychology and veterinary science. Thus there is pressure on women from both sides," says Bjørhovde.

Someone's using feminist logic against you, and now you're pissed? But I'm sure it's probably mainly because they see that money better spent elsewhere.

"When we aren't able to educate new master's students, we lose a major resource in our work. Master's students carry out concrete projects in the field, which are important," she says.

Art criticism? Really? That's a major, never-mind a master's program?

"We can identify good practice based on empirical studies. For this reason many of our master's students are sought after," she says.

Right... Are we only talking about the ones in the classes that are being cancelled or are we talking about all masters programs in the school?

"Nobody is compiling an overview of the kind of knowledge that Norway needs. Everyone is throwing the ball back and forth to each other. Here we have an academic group in health communication. We cooperate with doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. Everyone also talks about the need for cross-disciplinary expertise. When the Faculty of Humanities takes responsibility for this cross-disciplinarity, it's strange that we would get the short end of the stick," says Andenæs.

Unthinkable. It's just not fair to pick doctors and nurses over you. They should be ashamed of themselves.

2012-03-31T03:27:22+00:00

Kind of surprised about linguistics. It's a wildly varied field and very different from most "soft" sciences.

2012-03-31T13:03:53+00:00

Now why would state-run Uni's be cutting back on degrees with zero commerical application in the middle of a global economic crash? Don't they know the current stock of unemployed art critic masters could run out within 30 years?

And doesn't a lack off soft-science blow-off courses threaten to bring female enrollment under 60%?

luciansolaris · 2012-03-31T18:22:18+00:00

YES! Beat back the useless degree programs!

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