From The Wall Street Journal:
Colleges across America are beginning to prepare for graduation season, but in some corners of campus, you’re more likely to hear sounds of dread than of celebration. These are the humanities departments—English, history, philosophy, classics and others—where enrollments have dropped precipitously since the financial crisis of 2008. “This wasn’t a gradual decline; it was more like a tidal wave,” as the president of Macalester College, Brian C. Rosenberg, told the Atlantic last fall. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for instance, the number of students graduating with humanities degrees fell from 1,830 in 2008 to 1,025 in 2016. Nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, English departments have lost some 20% of their majors over the last 10 years. Meanwhile, students are flocking to STEM subjects: At the University of Pennsylvania, the number of students majoring in biology went up 25% between 2005 and 2014.
These trends started to spark alarm around five years ago, when observers began to talk about the “death,” “decline” or “crisis” of the humanities. Since then, alarm has turned into something more like panic. “Who is going to save the humanities?” wondered Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books earlier this month, echoing last summer’s headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What?”
Yet strangely, when you look outside the gates of the university, the fate of the humanities doesn’t look so bleak. When it comes to the wider American public, there has been no apparent decline of interest in humanistic pursuits. A Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of Americans who read print books has fallen slightly, from 71% in 2011 to 63% in 2018; over the same period, however, more Americans read e-books and listened to audiobooks. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that attendance at arts activities increased by 3.6% between 2012 and 2017, while the number of Americans who reported reading poetry increased by an amazing 76%, more than doubling among readers aged 18 to 24.
This disconnect suggests that talk of the death of the humanities is founded on a certain confusion about what the humanities are and where they live. Pursuits such as literature, art and philosophy are fundamental expressions of human nature. While they have taken very different forms in different times and places, no civilization has been without them, and there is no reason to think that ours will be the first.
But only in a few societies have these pursuits been formal subjects of academic study, and only quite recently, in historical terms, has the university been seen as the most natural place for them to reside. Universities are not responsible for, or capable of, creating a living humanistic culture. Scholarship is an important part of that culture but not its engine; if anything, it is a lagging indicator, where cultural developments that have been generated elsewhere turn up for formal examination.
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[M]aybe the humanities have simply lost confidence in their mission. In her 2005 novel “On Beauty,” Zadie Smith imagined the experience of a young student who arrives at college hoping to find like-minded people who share her love of Rembrandt. Instead, she has a professor who only wants to “interrogate…the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human.” This is comedy, but it is based on a reality that will be familiar to many students and former students of the humanities.
In the 19th century, the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold defined culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” but few humanities professors would now want to claim the authority to say what is best, or even agree that there is such a thing as “the best” art or thought. For reasons both good and bad, the humanities today are largely focused on critique rather than celebration.
Whatever its cause, the decline of the academic humanities is often understood as a crisis for American culture, even for American democracy. Much of what students of the humanities learn may not be directly applicable to their lives or careers—very few of us need to know how to identify a school of painting or interpret a poem—but a humanistic education is supposed to teach us how to read critically and think independently, skills that are crucial to democratic citizenship. This is what the critic George Steiner once referred to, skeptically, as the idea that the humanities humanize—that studying literature, art and philosophy makes us better people.
Historically speaking, this is a difficult argument to make. It is easy to cite examples to the contrary—highly educated people who were, for instance, devoted Nazis or Stalinists and who used their learning to buttress their defense of inhumanity. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, was in charge of the Nazification of his university after Hitler came to power.
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This is the paradox of culture: It requires knowledge but flees academicization. Friedrich Nietzsche, a professor of Greek who quit his job at the University of Basel to devote himself to writing and thinking, made this point in his 1874 essay “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” where he observed that “Antiquarian history knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate it.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
To a body, all the best software engineers I worked with had degrees in humanities, or background in creative trades. The ones with technical degrees were solid workmen and very necessary, but the ones who could quote Shakespeare, parse Latin, pick locks, light a stage production, or discuss Wittgenstein were the money shots.
Back when computers were the size of refrigerators,the military built their systems with enlisted men channeled into military programming school based on their test scores. Nothing more. Just test scores. They looked for IQ and numerical aptitude. Half of one class I was familiar with were high school dropouts.
The best programmers I ever saw were high school dropouts. These guys were using 2’s complement division in assembler and machine language, and flipped registers in 8-bit systems. There is a frightening amount of talent that passes us by because it doesn’t work well with established academic credentialing.
These guys discussed the Yankees, hemi engines, wiring harnesses, building their own houses, the lunchtime show at the Pirates Den, and how much more humanity would have progressed with eight rather than ten fingers.
The literary Humanties died years ago when the analysis of the text and culture disappeared and was replaced by shallow focuses like gender and social politics. When I read an article on some book or subject, I can always tell the age of the writer who talks about everything but the text they are writing about. Sad.
As I’ve mentioned here before, my own university, formerly famous for its literature and writing programs, just bulldozed the humanties building to build a nursing school. The different departments have been moved into basements and former closets in the oldest building on campus. Jerks.