They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose

https://www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-killing-the-humanities-on-purpose

by Michelangelo11 • 11 months ago

57 114 11 months ago

lbhdc5• 11 months ago

As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.

I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.

techpineapple2• 11 months ago

Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.

nradov8• 11 months ago

Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.

tracker13• 11 months ago

That's kind of my pov, on the funding aspect. Student loans should definitely have an aspect depending on the major/minor chosen.

add-sub-mul-div• 11 months ago

Long shot, but maybe require humanities as a minor for tech and business majors so that our technology might start to be built with humanity.

lukeinator42• 11 months ago

This is what a liberal arts institution is (the university I went to is one). At my uni if you are taking a science degree you need to take 4 social science classes and 4 fine arts/humanities. and vice versa for students in fine arts/social sciences.

nradov8• 11 months ago

Yes, some colleges already require that.

https://www.hmc.edu/hsa/program/

lacy_tinpot5• 11 months ago

Actually I think it's the other way around. Humanities should require math and science in order for people to graduate.

At the minimum Calculus/Stats + a CS class + some kind of science should be the absolute bare minimum.

matthewdgreen3• 11 months ago

At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities. The reason you experienced a bad outcome is because our society doesn't care much about this, despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history. I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.

Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.

viscanti• 11 months ago

It's more like the patient needs some fixed amount of food each day and it doesn't make a lot of sense to create lots more food than they need on the hopes that someday they'll want to eat more than they can.

If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.

nradov8• 11 months ago

What is your solution? Should the rest of us all consume more art? A lot of people are struggling just to pay for housing and food.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 11 months ago

Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.

Ironically, with chronic obesity and the related metabolic disorders becoming absolutely epidemic, people might do well to eat less. I can manage 48 hours at a stretch, it's only psychologically discomforting, I wish I could go 72 hours. It's like we have some sort of racial memory of the famines our ancestors suffered tens of thousands of years ago, and now we can't stop gorging ourselves.

At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities.

Everyone thinks that the thing that they learned to do is what everyone should learn to do. Car mechanics think that people should be able to do repairs, at least know a little more about what goes wrong. And guess what? Our economy relies on them, and they're right... we do need people who can repair them. Janitors think that people should be able to clean things up. And guess what? We do need people who can clean things up. Shipbuilders, steelworkers, construction workers, farmers... we need people who can do those things.

No one was ever in danger and needed to be able to know Titian's third most famous painting. No one was ever rescued by liberal arts graduate's knowledge of third rate classical composers.

I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.

I would agree. People need gainful employment opportunities, and the training to be able to take advantage of those. They need to enter adulthood debt free, and not just student debt, but to also know that the government isn't mortgaging their future paying for a bloated secondary education system today that is wasting years of their lives and hundreds of billions in fortune setting them up to fail. If academia doesn't want to be the vocational schools that it dreads to be associated with, then it should shut up and quit pretending that it has much to offer the vast majority of people. Maybe it didn't claim that these degrees would set everyone up for life, but it certainly didn't protest when others made that claim for it.

despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history.

We're all actually poor. As a country. (Other countries too, come to that.) We remember having once been rich, and we're in denial about it no longer being true. We can't even afford social security, old people will need to start dying sooner. Even the so-called billionaires for the most part just have a pile of stock certificates in the vault. Even on this very website, we see constant links about making people live in pods because it's no longer possible to build housing anyone can afford. You now rent the things your grandparents used to buy outright, and to buy seconds and thirds when they got bored with the first. You tell yourself it's because it's more convenient, but you couldn't afford to pay for it up front if you wanted.

We're that married couple swimming in credit card debt. They deny that it's a big deal, look here we can juggle this one and use that one to pay the minimum payment on the third card. And don't you think we can't keep doing that, we'll be able to do it next month too! But I'm not even allowed to talk about it, because a full 8 or 9 years ago the people on the left told everyone that credit card analogies don't work for a country as big and rich as the United States.

Fewer than 7% of all high school graduates should even go on to higher education. High school should become more strict, willing to flunk everyone who fails to meet rigorous standards. We need our government to make a true effort to reindustrialize.

arwhatever• 11 months ago

Christina P: “I graduated with a degree in philosophy only to discover The Philosophy Corporation wasn’t hiring.”

Analemma_2• 11 months ago

A good point in general but not here specifically: among the various liberal arts degrees, philosophy majors have some of the highest average earnings.

DudeOpotomus• 11 months ago

I'd say that this is a take only for your time, not for all time. For all time, learning about the humanities has shown to further one's ability to reason, create and imagine. IMHO Curiosity paired with an understanding of humanity (social skills) will become the most valuable job skills. The ability to talk and connect with people will outweigh any technical skill. You can only do this by understanding humanity and living in a society that promotes and fosters humanity.

In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.

People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.

Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.

aydyn3• 11 months ago

I agree with your axioms but not your conclusion.

People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.

I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.

Edit:

Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.

That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.

spandrew• 11 months ago

Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.

If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.

I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.

Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.

tracker13• 11 months ago

But that isn't the pitch. "You go to college so you can get a good job..."

The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.

I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.

sandworm101• 11 months ago

> our economy is not built on poetry and painting

Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.

holowoodman11• 11 months ago

Hollywood is part of the economy, but only a small one, around 3% of US GDP. All of arts and entertainment is around 4.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...

And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.

forgotoldacc2• 11 months ago

You're looking for a trade school. Universities have always been about education often for the sake of learning. Generating money just came to be a nice side effect as knowledge work grew in value.

zdragnar4• 11 months ago

That's a nice fantasy that hasn't been true for a long time. Even university websites talk just as much about career opportunities as they do personal growth.

bevr1337• 11 months ago

From a fellow classically trained artist, I too feel disenchanted with my BFA.

I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.

lbhdc5• 11 months ago

I think some of the disconnect is that when people think of humanities they think of the masters, and not attending figure drawing classes while accruing 5-10 years worth of salary as debt.

delichon• 11 months ago

IMHO Outcome Based Funding is a better model for public education.

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/aligning-state-higher-educati...

As you might imagine this is favorable to STEM and unfavorable to the humanities. But I think that expensive private institutions are a better venue to educate students who are more insulated from economic disadvantage in disciplines with a low return on investment. It's a good thing to bias the opportunities of disadvantaged students in favor of greater earning capacity. In higher education, the lower the expected pay for a skill set, the more it should be treated as a luxury good.

k8si• 11 months ago

"Only rich kids should get to choose what they study in school, poor kids are too dumb to make their own choices"

zdragnar4• 11 months ago

The argument is rather that humanities degrees are a luxury item. Neither kids just starting out their adult lives nor society should be burdened propping up departments whose value doesn't match their price tag.

djohnston2• 11 months ago

Good? Encouraging people to go into six-figure debt for a degree with no earning potential is gross and predatory.

Analemma_2• 11 months ago

And making it un-dischargeable in bankruptcy so people are either in perpetual debt bondage or the taxpayer picks up the tab for the inflated costs takes it from gross to downright criminal.

I'd be a lot more OK with student loan jubilees if universities had to pay the remaining principal on any forgiven loans. They'd immediately get their costs under control and be a lot more careful about degree programs which don't have any earning potential.

rayiner2• 11 months ago

I don’t disagree with your general point, but for clarity, student loans are non-dischargeable because they have been federally guaranteed since 1965. Meaning that if the borrower defaulted, taxpayers would be on the hook. And the reason for the federal guarantees was that students are bad credit risks. So without the guarantees, banks wouldn’t lend to students, especially disadvantaged ones.

BobaFloutist2• 11 months ago

It's undischargeable to prevent students, especially doctors and lawyers, from declaring bankruptcy the second they graduate

65• 11 months ago

Yeah, I think the argument for the humanities can only exist if college wasn't outrageously expensive.

The world made college into a checkpoint to get a good salaried position, it's not the same as the old geezers experienced it, where college was thought of as a bonus education, but not solely needed to get a decent paying job.

vehemenz5• 11 months ago

Those of us who came of age in the dotcom era already had the vocational skills to pull big salaries, so college was a bonus education. I (and others in this thread) have a philosophy degree because of it.

rconti• 11 months ago

Which part do you object to more? The policy choice to have the entire cost borne by the student (in the US, specifically)?

Or "society" encouraging people to study the humanities?

djohnston2• 11 months ago

100% on the non-dischargeable debt. I appreciate the humanities and their importance, but encouraging kids to take out loans to study them, with no risk to the lender, is obscene.

mwrmwr• 11 months ago

This discussion would be well served if we separated concerns about the economics of higher education in general (obviously student debt burdens are too high. There has been much written about how this came to be for all major) from the value of humanities program. Where I am coming from (so source of bias) I got a BA and PhD in philosophy, make plenty in software now, and credit to some extent my time in the humanities with the ability of I do that.

garciansmith• 11 months ago

I often see comments here about how the humanities and many social sciences are pointless, should be cut, and so forth, as evidenced by this thread. Though as you say, problems with the insane cost of higher education (especially in the United States), are separate, if partially related since so many people believe that getting educated = getting a job that makes more money than if you weren't and that's education's only purpose.

But I also see how so many of the upvoted and discussed articles and papers on this site are about history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, language, etc. It has always struck me as contradictory, though of course a lot of the people who are into the latter are not those writing the former.

How do we continue to push the bounds of human knowledge and thought in those disciplines, if not through higher education? In my opinion the world would be a whole lot better if, for instance, people learned more history and learned how to more critically approach sources. But I'm biased of course, I have PhD in history.

poszlem• 11 months ago

Good riddance.

The latest chapter of America’s cultural revolution has been driven largely by radical currents in the humanities and by students eager to impose them beyond campus.

It is finally time for universities to reconsider what they truly want to teach. They need to stop producing ideological foot soldiers and focus instead on real learning,including the humanities, when they are done honestly and not just used to push one narrow worldview.

With so much changing in the world right now, we urgently need the humanities to recover their integrity and purpose.

baerrie7• 11 months ago

Sorry but this is what the GOP actually did by weaponizing the uneducated evangelical zealots

gotoeleven• 11 months ago

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5446702-performative-v...

coloneltcb• 11 months ago

All right, let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy. How our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?

exe342• 11 months ago

They need to stop producing ideological foot soldiers

That's right, MAGAs can do that for themselves, and none of them are educated!

and focus instead on real learning

Yep, whatever the Eternal Leader says is real is real. Climate change is a hoax, thus spake the Eternal Leader.

aydyn3• 11 months ago

If your goal is to push back against Trumpism, denial that flagrant university indoctrination doesn't happen... is certainly one of the strategy's of all time.

baerrie7• 11 months ago

People who agree with this happening take for granted the critical ways humanities education contextualizes and guides stem research and progress. By studying the humanities you peer past the present and all of its trappings in the capitalistic race to the bottom. Shame on you humanities graduates that believe there being zero English, History, English, etc majors will lead to a better world.

pakitan• 11 months ago

Zero may not be the optimal number but nobody is arguing for zero anyway. Also, you don't need to be a History major to study history.

"you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"

baerrie7• 11 months ago

The humanities are why the internet exists. Coding is linguistics, writing is the key aspect of most software creation. Why then do we devalue this critical skill and those who wish to pursue its excellence? It seems most of ya’ll are content to make a fat check working a bs job in a marketing/business capacity where no real things of substance are being learned or progressed other than “how do i squeeze the utmost money out of the system”. Is this the world you continue to want to promote?

holowoodman11• 11 months ago

No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.

Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.

einszwei• 11 months ago

Its disingenuous to discard the contribution of humanities. To name a few of the top of my mind:

Chomsky hierarchy is an important concept in programming languages and could be considered as originating from linguistics

Philosophy (which is counted in humanities) has had massive contributions to Logic and formal methods in computer science.

There's even more examples of humanities contribution in HCI and AI safety.

vehemenz5• 11 months ago

Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.

Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.

Juliate8• 11 months ago

No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.

Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.

Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.

sambapa• 11 months ago

No, coding is linguistics.

Qem• 11 months ago

Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything.

IIRC some early programming languages were even tailored to the humanities, like Snobol.

baerrie7• 11 months ago

Coding is not mathematics, mathematics is a deterministic axiomatic system for describing quanta. Coding is the creation of instructions for computational logic that then is persisted in non-absolute matter as state. “Engineering” did not create the internet, the desire to communicate in new ways, as humans have wished to do for millennia, led to the internet. I honestly don’t even know how physics created the web when it was literally created to share text documents

cleandreams• 11 months ago

I think the universities made a mistake in becoming too culturally left wing. The faculty (and students) in the humanities in particular are far to the left of the political mainstream. (I am on the left though more focused on labor rights and good jobs than identity politics.)

The attack on the universities is fueled by this divergence, now that the right is firmly in power. This will just hurt the country in the long run. There was so much group think and silencing happening on the left over the last decade. It seems now to have been self-destructive.

vehemenz5• 11 months ago

This is a popular criticism that is partially true, but it rings a bit hollow because conservatives (rather, Republicans) don't seem to want intellectual career paths. They're nowhere to be found in academia.

And, to pre-empt the usual objection, they aren't being crowded out by ideology. They aren't there in the first place. They're not in the STEM majors outside of engineering, and they're not in the humanities except for law. Otherwise you'll find them in sales, marketing, business, and management.

These people complain about academia but have little invested in it in the first place.

zdragnar4• 11 months ago

They are chased out of academia. I knew professors who were proudly, vocally socialist but the professors who had any conservative leanings were very subtle about it.

You don't get tenure if your fellow professors don't like you, and they've created their own echo chamber long ago.

In contradiction to your point, the conservative professors and teachers that I knew were not in arts humanities at all (with one exception in law) but in crunchier fields like economics. The STEM and maths professors didn't talk social topics at all, so it is impossible to know what their feelings were.

holowoodman11• 11 months ago

The mechanism that lead to this is imho that humanities generally do not have any more grounding in facts, logic or reality. Science, technology and (to some extent) medicine and mathematics are bound to describe existing phenomena that occur in nature. They do this by observation and experiments (except mathematics), proposing axioms and theory, and then bringing those into strict logical agreement. Humanities nowadays reject observation and experiments as biologism. Or they never had those, and always just proposed ideas to be discussed, like in philosophy. They also nowadays reject objective logic and proof in favour of subjective evaluations and a wholly individual-centered world view.

This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.

(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)

Juliate8• 11 months ago

In a similar manner, arts now [...]

Really, it's quite a stance to not have a background in arts and history of the arts, and perhaps epistemology as well, and writing this.

nradov8• 11 months ago

Some university humanities departments undermined themselves by being divisive and exclusionary. Several years ago the University of Chicago made this public statement.

"For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies."

There's nothing wrong with encouraging scholarship in a particular field but when they intentionally exclude other fields it tends to limit public support. Taxpayers will naturally question why they're being asked to subsidize student loans, and wonder whether universities are being used to promote ideologies rather than educate.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/16/university-ch...

galleywest200• 11 months ago

When I was in school we were educated in STEM alongside the humanities, they called this being "interdisciplinary".

One of my undergraduate chemistry professors went to Cal Tech and he told us that his professors encouraged him to ask people outside of his discipline about problems if he got stuck.

I do not understand why people are unwilling to do more interdisciplinary studies. When I took courses on crop botany and plant genetics we also read books and had seminar to discuss the topics of the books - that is a humanities skill, to discuss in a group what meaning you can derive from texts.

As for the people saying you should get a degree that pays well...look at all the folks who got Comp. Sci. degrees who are now being thrown in the wood chipper. Was that worth it? Time will tell.

hx8• 11 months ago

Interdisciplinary is a broad umbrella term that most people fall under to some degree. The benefit of focusing on a primary discipline is that there are well worn career paths to follow. I think the best approach is to brand yourself to one or two disciplines, and look for collaboration opportunities with other disciplines. Study them for enrichment and inspiration. Have friends and colleagues outside of your discipline.

If someone says they are "interdisciplinary" it provides little information about what they actually study and are good at. If someone says they have a Masters in Philosophy with a focus on Metaphysics I have enough information about their background to ask questions they might provide insightful comments on.

nradov8• 11 months ago

Sure, but to be fair to STEM fields, group discussions aren't uniquely a humanities skill. Collectively ripping apart a scientific journal article to find all of its flaws is a common activity.

Interdisciplinary study is great but there can be some friction in the labor market, at least for new graduates seeking entry level positions. When corporate recruiters see a college transcript that doesn't fit neatly into one of the usual slots they don't know what to do with it.

Computer Science also has its own friction with the labor market. It's really a branch of abstract mathematics and only tangentially related to commercial software product development. I think colleges ought to offer something like a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Software Development" for students more interested in practical craftsmanship. There will always be demand for people who can build working software, even if most of them move up to higher levels of abstraction leveraging AI tools instead of directly writing code themselves.

ethbr1• 11 months ago

My CS college told us bluntly: 'We're training you for the last job you'll ever have. Pick up the stuff you need to know for your first one on your own or while doing class projects.'

Worked out pretty well in my case. There's plenty I don't know about the Java Enterprise Edition standard libraries, but I can still walk through computing in decent depth from transistors to algorithms.

(And to the article's point, have probably gotten more CS jobs from my interdisciplinary skills than my CS-only skills)

They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose

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