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Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can't appreciate just howmuch trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything,that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting--not to mention the older professors who didn't receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That's why the mood is so dire--why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee's words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures--or the rest of the humanities--at all?"
Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less e1ite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid- seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students--for instance, women and minorities.
Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges.In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts.Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today's job-market crisis: they're why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren't.
Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: "Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years." That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to "broaden" themselves: to "engage more deeply with technology" ; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.
Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word "dire" in Paragraph 2?
词汇题。根据 dire 所在的上下文“…is much smaller than the report suggests…‘… why even professors are…or the rest of the humanities--at all?”可推知本词并非表达积极向上的意思， 故排除 A 项“愉快的”。上下文分析的是就业形势严峻，找到终身教职很难的现状，由此可推断该专业的人员心情 应该是糟糕的、悲伤的。B 项“沮丧的”，C 项“复杂的”，D 项“奇怪的”。
有“泥土诗人”之称的诗人是（）。
将下列各项按所表示年龄大小顺序排列，正确的顺序应是（ ）。
①不惑②垂髫③花甲④加冠⑤而立⑥古稀⑦半百
钱穆在评论中国古代某制度时说，它“可以培植全国人民对政治之兴味……可以团结全国各地域于一个中央之统治”，这一制度是()。
1931年，一位给人们带来光明的科学家重病的消息牵动着世界人民的心，几十名记者为他守夜。每隔一个小时就对外发布一次消息：“灯”还亮着。这位科学家是（ ）。
明朝初年强化君主专制的措施是（）。
在我国历史上，传统音乐与外族音乐、北方与南方音乐进行广泛交流的时期是()。
下列哪部歌剧是瓦格纳的作品()
乐器“缶”的制作材料属于（ ）。
隋唐至宋，在宫廷宴饮时娱乐欣赏的音乐称为()。
下列三连音中与四分音符等同的是()。
