Are the Humanities History?

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From The New York Review of Books:

Who is going to save the humanities?

On all fronts, fields like history and English, philosophy and classical studies, art history and comparative literature are under siege. In 2015, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities was down nearly 10 percent from just three years earlier. Almost all disciplines have been affected, but none more so than history. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of history majors nationwide fell from 34,642 in 2008 to 24,266 in 2017.

Last year, the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, facing declining enrollments, announced it was eliminating degrees in History, French, and German. The University of Southern Maine no longer offers degrees in either American and New England Studies or Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, while the University of Montana has discontinued majors and minors in its Global Humanities and Religions program. Between 2013 and 2016, US colleges cut 651 foreign-language programs.

The primary cause of these developments is the 2008 financial crash, which made students—especially the 70 percent of whom are saddled with debt—ever more preoccupied with their job prospects. With STEM jobs paying so well—the median annual earnings for engineering grads is $82,000, compared to $52,000 for humanities grads—enrollments in that area have soared. From 2013 to 2017, the number of undergraduates taking computer science courses nationwide more than doubled. A study of Harvard students from 2008 to 2016 found a dramatic shift from the humanities to STEM. The number majoring in history went from 231 to 136; in English, from 236 to 144; and in art history, from sixty-three to thirty-six, while those studying applied math went from 101 to 279; electrical engineering, from none to thirty-nine; and computer science, from eighty-six to 363.

University donors and public officials, hoping to duplicate the success of Stanford and Silicon Valley, are flooding STEM with money.

. . . .

Few comparable investments are occurring in the humanities. The contempt many officials feel for them was expressed most bluntly in 2011 by then-Florida governor (now senator) Rick Scott: “You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state… I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees,” so that “when they get out of school, they can get a job.” It’s not just Republicans who feel this way. In 2014, President Obama, speaking at a GE gas-engine plant in Wisconsin, extolled the virtues of learning a vocational skill: “I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

Defenders of the humanities generally emphasize what the field can do for the individual: they promote self-discovery, breed good citizens, and teach critical thinking. In a 2017 essay in The Washington Post, “Why We Still Need to Study the Humanities in a STEM World,” Gerald Greenberg, the senior associate dean of academic affairs at Syracuse, maintained that by studying the humanities, “one has an opportunity to get to know oneself and others better.” Such study “opens one to the examination of the entirety of the human condition and encourages one to grapple with complex moral issues ever-present in life.” His argument was recently echoed by a writer for the Harvard Business Review: “A practical humanism, paradoxically, is of little use. When we turn to them for tips, but not for trouble, the value of the humanities is lost.”

No doubt the humanities do broaden the mind and deepen the soul. In one form or another, they have been at the heart of higher education since the founding of the university itself in the thirteenth century, and they remain a repository of a society’s cultural and creative values. But to dismiss their practical worth seems both short-sighted and self-defeating. Far from lacking material value, the humanities are economic dynamos. The arts and entertainment industry that plays such a central part in people’s lives today is largely the creation of people who have studied literature, history, philosophy, and languages.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books

PG respectfully demurs from the Gospel of STEM.

He doesn’t recall disclosing his undergraduate major on TPV on an earlier occasion, so this may be a. historic moment.

PG majored in The Oral Interpretation of Literature. (Undoubtedly, if this major still exists, it includes the word, “Communications” somewhere in its title because “Communications” is a Good Thing. The world needs more.)

For those with any questions, PG’s major was the antipode of a STEM degree then and now.

However, some of the skills he learned as an undergraduate have been very helpful in his legal career. A couple of examples:

  • PG was very effective in a courtroom. (He’s humble about it, but PG is not alone in his assessment. Others paid him very nicely for the benefits of this talent.) Being able to persuasively present a message like, “The quality of mercy is not strained” can come in handy with both judge and jury.

 

  • One of the elements of an assignment in the Oral Interpretation of Literature was a detailed written analysis of the piece to be performed. If you can effectively dissect, understand and analyze the subtleties of a collection of Spenserian stanzas (See, for example, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Eve of St. Agnes and, of course, The Faerie Queene), you can untangle the most complex contractual provisions ever written.  No Copyright Licensing, Choice of Law and Forum or Force Majeure clause can match the linguistic complexity of eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by a ninth line of iambic hexameter in an end rhyme structure of ababbcbcc repeated a zillion times.

One of the benefits of a law degree and of other advanced degrees is that they can serve to take the curse off an undergraduate major that is unfashionable during a certain era.

PG has known enough engineers who were dissatisfied with their work life to state that STEM studies are not an unfailing key that opens the gates of happiness.

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32 thoughts on “Are the Humanities History?”

  1. I made my career in IT (which I did NOT study in college, that barely being even possible in 1975 — I went to college in Math, bombed out of that, and majored in Comparative Mythology — ah, the 70s…)

    One time I participated in a movers & shakers of tech breakfast meeting in Palo Alto circa 2004, where the casual conversation turned to what the participants’ kids were majoring in at college, which was pretty uniformly STEM.

    I asked the whole group explicitly: “How many of you majored in anything vaguely related to computers when YOU were in college, and yet that’s how you’re earning a living?”

    None of them had, and none of them saw my point about the futility of predicting career trends.

    • My Ph.D. is in mathematics. I work as a writer.

      Fortunately, I had a strong grounding in the humanities, thanks to the Montana State University Honors Program.

      Engineers should write in college. Journalists should calculate confidence intervals. Art majors should study trigonometry, and physics majors should read Plato. And everybody should spend a semester studying their government and its constitution. Education is like a vaccine—maybe you won’t need it, but get a little exposure just in case.

      • To add to your list, everyone, and particularly lawyers, should learn about statistics. (I’ve just been reading up on and thinking about a notorious recent British miscarriage of justice which was predicated upon the judge, the prosecutor, the defender and the jury all not noticing that the “expert” witness was talking statistical bullshit.)

        • Second best piece of advice I received from a professor.
          (Ended up causing a bit of a ruckus between the Industrial Eng dept and the Chem E dept but… some things can’t be helped.)

        • I learned a lot about statistics in my first job out of college.

          I was fortunate to work just down the hall from an “all but the thesis” economist who had been taught by Milton Friedman, among other worthies.

          This colleague had a marvelous gift for communicating the foundations of various statistical tests and measures in a manner that permitted me to understand when error bars could be important and how to put together a wide range of numbers to build a big picture of the underlying subject being analyzed.

        • I was told by an advisor in college to take a statistics class. I resisted, because I wanted more foreign language classes, and classes on criminal law. I didn’t want to waste a slot on boring old math. But the advisor pointed out I was going into journalism (hence my interest in the languages and the law).

          “You’ll have the wool pulled over your eyes in no time at all if you don’t understand statistics,” he assured me. “But if you learn it, you can spot the bull.”

          So I took it. I don’t remember much, but the concept of sample size, standard deviation, margin of error and correlations / causation differences proved to be a good inoculation against hysteria. Statistics should be taught in high school, I think. At all the levels. Just to have more informed citizens who are less prone to falling for the bull.

          • Here.
            I was lucky enough to be taught basic Probability & Statistics in high school. It made the Statistics for Engineering in college a breeze. (The professor thought I was a natural. 🙂 )

            Also old-school drafting and Analytical Geometry.
            Plus French and Introduction to Humanities.
            Tracking works.
            Otherwise I would’ve been bored out of my gourd all the time.

            Our Physics teacher made us use slide rules intead of calculators so we would really understand logarithms and orders of magnitude. My younger siblings weren’t that lucky.

        • I highly recommend Edward Tuft’s books on visualizing information, starting with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

  2. I wouldn’t have said the humanities were “under siege” so much as they’re experiencing the natural consequences of fouling their own nest. You can’t debase your own currency and still expect people to use it.

    I objected before to adding Art to STEM — STEAM — because art stopped being about learning how da Vinci composed the “Last Supper” (he used math) and instead degenerated to “Piss Christ.” You can’t pull that crap and still ask for respect for the discipline.

    I don’t believe that real historians or the study of real history is devalued so much as that the humanities pass off this crap as scholarship. Someone is buying those David McCullough books (besides me).

    You can only borrow glory for so long before you have to produce your own.

    Idunno, usually in these articles I see a subtext, where people who are rightly disgusted with Serrano are accused of being Philistines who hate da Vinci. People who show contempt for Click (at the link) are accused of being anti-intellectuals who wouldn’t read McCullough. I want to see the articles acknowledge that there is a difference between the former and the latter of each set. I want to see humanities advocates who pen these columns, acknowledge that elevating the latter of each set doomed them. And that schools have no business charging Ferrari prices for students to be “taught” the latter set.

    I’d love to see humanities clean its own house. My all time favorite class, from kindergarten through college, is still the art history class I took in high school. It did change my perspective: I stopped getting annoyed when history or science textbooks referred to something as “recent” when a thing happened 50 years ago. My art history teacher spent so much time on the Greeks and the Romans, that I was finally able to grasp the scope of time that made it reasonable to say, “DNA is a recent discovery.”

    • 100% agreement. If humanities majors actually received a solid, diverse liberal arts education, then yes, the degrees would have value. But sadly today, at most colleges it’s more like 4 years of trendy indoctrination.

      STEM has a certain level of built-in rigor, with logical thinking required. A good STEM graduate should also be able to quickly summarize large areas – if you can’t see the big picture, you can’t design good systems.

      Disclaimer: I work in real tech (NOT advertising), my degree is in Physics, but I enjoy the liberal arts.

  3. Wouldn’t a better question be whether post-modern “History” is part of the humanities?

    Sometimes it seems a better fit in “creative” fiction.

  4. I graduated from a university that had well-respected humanities and education programs up to a Ph.D. My English Department was tossed out of the humanities building, a few years ago, because it was demolished to build a nursing building. All the humanities departments have been scattered into the basements of older buildings like so much debris. So, rude words to whoever calls me to donate to “my” university which no longer exists. Let the dang science and business majors pay the bills.

    From various friends who work in business and university graduate school recruitment, I’ve heard that English majors as well as other Humanities majors have good prospects in various other fields because they have a proven ability to communicate and think. The kids with business and science degrees, not so much. I know my brother with his degree in computer intelligence and minor in English was chased vigorously by various computer firms because a geek who can communicate with non-geeks is a very rare and precious commodity.

    • Humanities folks continually stress that they know how to think. They tell us they can think critically, and think better than others.

      I question their claims simply because I haven’t seen anything to indicate they have a monopoly on thinking. Nor have I seen anything to indicate they think better than STEM people. I guess I’d ask how English majors have proven they can think, and how they have proven they can think any better than chemistry or accounting majors.

      A chemist who also has an English degree is certainly more valuable to a recruiter looking for a chemist than a candidate who has only a chemistry degree. But he places no value on an English major without a chemistry degree.

      • That’s what those recruiters say, but I agree. Humanities majors learn how to think fast on their feet because being able to b.s. on big topics, not a single problem, is what they have to do on a daily basis. They need to pull a lot of info together really fast and explain it really well.

        • But there is hope. Falling humanities enrollment means a declining supply of critical thinking BS. That should put upward pressure on pay for English majors.

  6. No, but ‘The New York Review of Books’ might soon be …

    Everyone seems to be chasing money – so, is there any money in it?

  7. Maybe we need a tighter control on which institutions can call themselves universities? I find it difficult to take the name seriously if they do not have a History department, though the lack of Mathematics or Physics would be even worse. I’m also sceptical about the supposed STEM shortage and suspect that it’s more a shortage of people willing to take jobs at the salaries employers want to pay: still it helps justify requesting visas for cheaper foreign labour.

    And it would be nice to think that my liking for The Eve of St. Agnes improved my understanding of contracts but I fear that this is not the case. Perhaps if I’d ever got on with Spenser…?

    • “… it’s more a shortage of people willing to take jobs at the salaries employers want to pay …”

      Winner winner chicken dinner!

      • I make more teaching part time at a religious high school than I would teaching at any community college and some four-year schools. There’s an enormous pool of PhDs in my field, so the employer has a strong advantage.

        • “There’s an enormous pool of PhDs in my field …”

          There always seems to be a balancing problem between now needed and twas taught/trained.

          Then there’s those of us that aren’t rocket scientists in any one field but are more ‘jack of many trades – masters of none’ that can sometimes outsmart the experts (or at least see something they missed because their field didn’t cover it.)

        • I have an associates degree. I work in tech. My wife has a PHD in medical research. She works in academia. I make twice what she does.

    • I’m also sceptical about the supposed STEM shortage and suspect that it’s more a shortage of people willing to take jobs at the salaries employers want to pay: still it helps justify requesting visas for cheaper foreign labour.

      An economic shortage is always a function of price. Raise the price, and suppliers produce more widgets. However, it does take time for the increased supply to get to the market.

      A resource shortage means the resource doesn’t exit at any price. It ain’t there.

      We encounter both in labor markets. At the lower end, pay $100 per hour, and the shortage of strawberry pickers disappears overnight. At the higher end, pay has little effect on the number of actuaries and endocrinologists.

      Both effects operate together in the STEM fields.

      • True enough, but complicated by the possibility that the resource shortage – at the price employers want to pay – exists because of barriers to the movement of labour and that the reports of the shortage are intended to remove the barriers so that the price need not rise. Profit maximisation prefers importing cheaper workers to raising wages and can easily confuse a shortage of cheap home grown labour with an absolute shortage of resources.

        • One way to increase supply is by importing a resource, and upward pressure on domestic resources makes lower cost imports more attractive. There’s nothing confusing about that.

          And that’s certainly one observed phenomenon. But it would be a mistake to ignore all other factors.

          Perhaps someone knows if the STEM grads are having difficulty finding work? Are they choosing Starbucks because Intel doesn’t pay enough?

          • I doubt that we should even be talking about “STEM”. The different groups that we gather under this name are not fungible and both supply, demand and salary can vary widely between specialties. Plenty of them lack the qualifications to work for Intel (in anything other than a menial role paying no more than Starbucks and some have expertise that’s in falling or low demand and can only get the minimum wage jobs).

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