Are the Humanities Doomed?

[polly_mer]

However, it's entirely possible that some humanities subjects will continue be reduced at the university level through demonstrating that required classes are not leading to the desired education, even if we leave the first-job-after-college metric off the table.  We can add leadership to the list of critical thinking, communication, and other soft skills that are helped by a solid university education, but aren't limited to the humanities-version of a university education.

This is where I sense a difference in attitude; for instance, in STEM subjects it is much more common to acknowledge to students that the classes themselves are not essential to learning the material. If they can pick up the knowledge on their own, then it's perfectly fine. However, it seems in many humanities disciplines there is a strong feeling that participation in the class itself is vital. It's not uncommon for 20 or 30% of the final grade to be based on it, which would be extremely unusual in STEM.  If one starts with the assumption that participation in the class is assumed fundamental to learning, then it's a simple step to concluding that only those specific classes can produce an "'educated" person.

Some of this is a difference in feedback mechanisms to students. 

For something that has a mathematical solution or other one right answer, I can look up the answer or feed the answer back in to get a gauge on how I'm doing.

However, for something that has a range of correct enough answers and a whole slew of wrong enough answers, one needs a different type of feedback.  That's why peer review in scientific research is important in a way that simply doing textbook problems or lab exercises is not.  Running humanities classes that do a lot of discussion functions as teaching people to do the exploration of ideas and peer review that helps develop ways of looking at things and forces examination of evidence.

Yes, learning the plot to one novel can be done in isolation alone--that's like working a textbook problem in physics.  However, discussing what that plot means and examining how characters were constrained by social conventions and legal requirements at the time/place is more like a design problem in engineering--you don't get nearly as much out of it if you do it alone instead of having many meetings with people discussing options, choices, and exploring possible consequences.

Out in the world, where we need engineers are the situations where we need many people with different backgrounds willing to engage in the lengthy discussions that are supported by calculation, but generally the hard part isn't the calculation.

The same is true of the humanities application of knowledge; we need people willing to do the extra reading and bouncing around ideas in a group.  The handful of facts is often far less useful than the ability to pull together various different ways of thinking to examine the topic from multiple sides while listening carefully to people who bring in even more different ways of thinking with different emphasis on desired outcomes.

[spork]

Part of the problem here is the way in which humanities are presented in K-12, a message that is often reinforced in the "take a 100-level course in each of these X subjects" standard gen ed curriculum of distribution requirements. E.g., art history translates to students as "tell me which painters/paintings to memorize and the symbolic meanings contained therein so I can pass the exam." Philosophy becomes "tell me why Aristotle is famous so I can write a term paper the night before it's due, that only the instructor will ever see, in a format not used anywhere but in college." There is little to no actual application of ideas to problem solving, and the whole exercise is correctly regarded as irrelevant.

[ciao_yall]

Part of the problem here is the way in which humanities are presented in K-12, a message that is often reinforced in the "take a 100-level course in each of these X subjects" standard gen ed curriculum of distribution requirements. E.g., art history translates to students as "tell me which painters/paintings to memorize and the symbolic meanings contained therein so I can pass the exam." Philosophy becomes "tell me why Aristotle is famous so I can write a term paper the night before it's due, that only the instructor will ever see, in a format not used anywhere but in college." There is little to no actual application of ideas to problem solving, and the whole exercise is correctly regarded as irrelevant.

Then, where are the college faculty in this? Are they...

• ... presenting the material as Scantron-able factoids, or as part of a broader history/context/meaning?
• ... relating it to current events and influences?
• ... learning the demographic/social backgrounds of different student groups and showing how the subject relates to thought and tradition in different cultures?

Or are they dragging out their old lecture notes from college and blabbing on, same old same old, semester after semester?

Yeah, yeah, busy adjuncts, research requirements, blah blah blah.

[Hegemony]

I review the syllabi for the wide range of courses in my program, and I don't see anyone drily droning on about factoids and dates, or recycling decades-old material, or any of the old clichés.  I do think some of the material is challenging, and requires students to dig in to the subject -- ethical questions, and historical questions, and a lot of it presented without fancy PowerPoint with animated graphics and stuff.  A lot of professors are still teaching as if entertainment culture had not subsumed most of what our students experience outside the classroom.  Is that good or bad?  Opinions differ.

[polly_mer]

I review the syllabi for the wide range of courses in my program, and I don't see anyone drily droning on about factoids and dates, or recycling decades-old material, or any of the old clichés.

You've mentioned being at an R1. 

How many class sessions have you observed with minimal to no notice for intro classes that are being covered by the warm-bodies-obtained-from-who-knows-where, as Wahoo described?

How many of those sessions have been at places where the average ACT score is below college ready and, if the institution is not officially open enrollment, then the bar for enrollment is generally not very high as long as the check clears?

I ask because Wahoo is not the only one with stories of the in-class situation being very different from what's advertised.  I've observed classes at various times in various places (regional comprehensives, community colleges, tiny rural college on the ground and online, and specialized STEM institutions).  The discrepancies between the syllabus, the written description of how the class will be taught to get approved by the curriculum committee, and the reality in the classroom can be huge.  That discrepancy is not limited to humanities courses, but it turns out not to be that hard to write a great syllabus (or be assigned one for a shared class) and then default to covering the basic facts of the material through lecture because actual discussion and exploration can be very time-consuming, especially with underprepared, undermotivated students with complicated lives.

Having substantial experience at an elite institution with students who can do college work really isn't the same perspective as having been places that "covering the required gen ed course to check the box" is an administrative practice of which no one is proud, but isn't all that rare at places where the humanities courses are mostly required gen eds that are championed by no one, but are kept from some vague sense of broader education.  That situation is one contributing factor to low enrollment in humanities majors (why would anyone want to take more of those check-the-box classes?) and then eventual discontinuation of the major at many institutions.

Yes, many people are doing wonderful things in the humanities.  The problem is that's not everyone everywhere.  Good teachers can be found at all types of schools, but check-the-box for students and for overwhelmed adjuncts is not a rare situation at institutions where college-level material is more an aspiration than an accurate description.

[Hegemony]

Well, I'm at an alleged R1 (barely hanging on to its status by its fingernails), but it's a state university in a state that funds its higher education badly, so I'd say we're far from elite.  Our students are very definitely far from elite.  It's basically open enrollment here for applicants from out of state.  One was so illiterate that I looked up his record to see how he could possibly have been admitted; he had a D high school average, but he's a foreign student.  And not from a place where a D is a respectable grade.  In fact we scoop up the foreign students that other universities won't admit, by the trick of requiring a lower TOEFL score than all the other places.  The in-state students are a mixed bunch, but on average their level of preparation is dismaying.

So I can vouch for the fact that it's not the case that our students are prepared to do college work.  Maybe 5 or 6 of them per 50-student class. It's a challenge for us, all right.  Nevertheless the instructors I've seen, at all levels, are almost all trying to do their best, with the usual handicaps: classes too large, students underprepared, distracted, and often unmotivated, and all the usual challenges.  But the job market has been so tight for so long: when 400 people apply for the same job, how do these dull, uninspiring, and repetitious instructors you mention win out over the other applicants?  I haven't seen much of it in my time.

[spork]

[. . . ]

how do these dull, uninspiring, and repetitious instructors you mention win out over the other applicants?  I haven't seen much of it in my time.

When two weeks before the semester begins, one adjunct backs out because of a better-paying, more convenient gig elsewhere, then a second, and you're left just trying to find an available warm body the weekend before classes start.

Or, just as likely, the instructor was tenured long ago despite never obtaining a terminal degree or producing any form of scholarship (because that's the kind of people who were hired back then), uses the Scantron-able factoid method of teaching mentioned upthread, and thinks, despite evidence to the contrary, that he/she does an excellent job. And the administrative powers that be refuse to institute post-tenure review or an incentivized voluntary separation program.

[polly_mer]

[. . . ]

how do these dull, uninspiring, and repetitious instructors you mention win out over the other applicants?  I haven't seen much of it in my time.

When two weeks before the semester begins, one adjunct backs out because of a better-paying, more convenient gig elsewhere, then a second, and you're left just trying to find an available warm body the weekend before classes start.

Or, just as likely, the instructor was tenured long ago despite never obtaining a terminal degree or producing any form of scholarship (because that's the kind of people who were hired back then), uses the Scantron-able factoid method of teaching mentioned upthread, and thinks, despite evidence to the contrary, that he/she does an excellent job. And the administrative powers that be refuse to institute post-tenure review or an incentivized voluntary separation program.

There's also the problem of pay and location. 

If we actually put in the job ad that the pay is $32k per nine months for a 5/5 load, then we don't get 400 highly qualified applicants willing to relocate to the remote cornfields, Appalachia, or the reservation.  Full-time hires in the humanities tend to end up being pretty good, but we've had failed searches because the top N people turned us down or were already off-the-market by the time we made an offer.  We've also been burned several times by hiring people who could talk a good game, but came to us, focused on research productivity to go to a better job, and let teaching be mostly a fabulous lecture hour in the classroom with essentially no grading except the one midterm exam and one final paper.  That's a problem in a class that was supposed to be writing intensive for general education requirements with a lot of feedback to students, especially when it turns out the midterm exam was testing mostly on footnotes in the reading.  The syllabus looked great, though, and we only discovered some of this by unannounced classroom observations upon several reports by good students who were annoyed at the discrepancy between the reality in the classroom and the message of "a liberal arts education teaches you to think critically".

In terms of adjuncts, even if we're not looking to hire someone to start on Tuesday, every time we try to hire new, we get a crapshoot on quality because the local adjunct pool is so small.  The long-established part-time folks teaching one or two specific courses for us tend to be very good, sometimes better than some of the tenured, full folks who were hired decades ago and have been lowering their expectations to the point that the essentially open-enrollment students with only a ninth-grade education can meet the expectations.  However, every time we have to get a new adjunct, we cross our fingers and hope really, really hard for someone who will put their heart and soul into a course to enhance their CV and teaching experience as a trailing spouse, stay-at-home parent, or new degree recipient instead of someone who has done the calculation that $1800 per term is $20/hour for 3 hours of classroom time and 3 hours of prep/grading time per week so that's all the time they will put into it.

Even in places that have a decent size adjunct pool because they're in a major city, when the institution needs to cover enough general education courses for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of students, at $2k per instructor, my bet is quality is not the primary hiring characteristic.  For example, https://splinternews.com/the-revenge-of-the-poverty-stricken-college-professors-1835381061 states that Miami Dade College has 165 000 students with 2800 adjuncts with the whole point of the article being those adjuncts do not make a living wage at a couple thousand dollars per course and no benefits.  When one is looking at hiring literally hundreds of people every term willing to work for $2k/section, my bet is that the bar is pretty high for non-renewal based on student complaints and "boring" from non-majors taking a required course is not going to clear that bar.

Full-time folks are probably excellent; it's that army of adjuncts that probably have much more variability in teaching because 6 or 8 sections per term spread over a couple three institutions is a huge amount of time and effort to even be OK, let alone excellent.

[apl68]

It's a terrible paradox that we have so many highly qualified people who can't seem to find work teaching, and yet so much work being done by under-qualified and under-supported instructors.    Our institutions of higher learning appear, for whatever reasons, to have created an awfully wasteful system here.

We see some of that in other professions as well.  Small, rural libraries like ours have long had trouble recruiting degree-holding librarians.  I didn't have a degree when I was hired here, and I came from an academic library background that made my experience a poor fit for a public library setting.  But I was still the most qualified applicant they got, and I indicated that, due to my origins in a very similar community, I understood the region's culture and was prepared to stay and grow into the job.  I finally finished my degree and became fully qualified eight years or so after my original hire.

Meanwhile, I know of urban library systems in more trendy areas where many of the circulation clerks have degrees or are working on them.  They're going to face a real challenge working their way into a professional-level position where they are, because the region is now saturated with qualified people.  They keep at it because they don't want to live somewhere less trendy, and because the rural places don't pay well (I'm still, despite some improvements in recent years, one of the lowest-paid librarians in the state with my level of qualifications and experience.  And believe it or not, as City Librarian I'm actually now our highest-paid city department head!  That's how low pay scales are in this town.).  The low pay is largely compensated by lower cost of living.  The cultural fit issue is a more challenging matter, though speaking as someone with many years of experience in both urban and rural settings I have not found that rural people have any monopoly on unwillingness to try taking a chance on something outside their comfort zones.

And so we have this problem of too many qualified people chasing too few jobs in some places, and too few qualified people to go around elsewhere.  I will say this--it is possible to do something about redressing the imbalance if there is some willingness to redistribute resources.  In order to receive state aid to public libraries in our state, a library must be headed by a professional, degree-holding librarian.  A small town that stops treating library leadership as a glorified clerical position and recruits a qualified professional can receive a small but meaningful amount of per capita state aid, AND an $18,000 a year MLS grant meant to go toward the professional librarian's salary.  This means that even though I make somewhat more than the Chief of Police, I'm actually costing the city less.

This use of state aid as a carrot incentive to hire professional librarians has done a lot to increase the number of rural libraries in our state with professionally-qualified leaders over the years.  If academia and its funders could somehow address its resource-distribution issues, it might help some of these problems.  Beats me how that could be done, absent somebody willing and able to spend a lot of money on it.  But it's surely not impossible in principle.

[mamselle]

Am I also correct that there aren't very many MLS programs that are easy to get to?

My sister is a librarian--had to go back to live with our folks for 2 years to attend the only program in a 3-state area for her degree.

I looked into the idea a long time ago, and there were two in my area; since then one has died and the other is a fair bit away (over an hour's drive each way from me, for example) which, along with other factors, made me look at other options.

When these discussions come up, I'm reminded of the teaching/learning model that launched the Sorbonne--students attending lectures in small private spaces by those who set up shop in a nearby area along, say, the Left Bank/St. Andre, and gradually coalesced from that.

I wonder if some of the things I work on, which don't really fit into the boxes offered in many of the more established places (or which did, until those established places started dying out--three in the past 5 years, here, for example), need to be taught like that--I already do private music teaching, maybe a private interfaith liturgical arts program would be grantworthy, but...ooof, the work to put it together would be daunting, I know.

So...onwards we go...excelsior.

M.

[apl68]

Am I also correct that there aren't very many MLS programs that are easy to get to?

M.

That is correct.  Many states, including ours, don't have a single accredited MLS program.  Which is why in recent years most of us have been doing online-only degrees.  It helps that MLS programs usually seem to offer in-state tuition to students from neighboring states. 

I'm very grateful for online education and the way it made it possible for me to get my needed professional degree.  But I have to say, I'm skeptical whether too many traditional-age students would have the necessary self-discipline to thrive in an online-only educational environment.

Incidentally, our state has also worked to remedy the librarian shortage by giving scholarships to library staffers who need to upgrade their credentials.  If you're working for a public library in-state, and pledge to continue to do so, and have already completed two semesters toward the degree at your own expense, you can put in for reimbursement of your later semesters.  It's a huge boon for rural libraries that are trying to grow the kind of degree-holding librarian they may have trouble attracting from out of town.  The state has been known to let a library continue collecting state aid while the new librarian was in school.  Although the MLS grant part has to wait until the degree is actually completed.

[marshwiggle]

Does library science actually count as "humanities"? It sounds to me uncomfortably close to <shudder>"job training"</shudder>. I was of the impression that the humanities purists valued the unfettered life of the mind above pedestrian vocational education.

[mamselle]

Umm....clearly you don't know some of the librarians I do....

M.

[apl68]

Does library science actually count as "humanities"? It sounds to me uncomfortably close to <shudder>"job training"</shudder>. I was of the impression that the humanities purists valued the unfettered life of the mind above pedestrian vocational education.

I'd be curious to know what you think we study in library science.  My library science education included courses in fields like literature and ethics.  I found the library ethics class as intellectually stimulating as most of what I studied in my PhD program in history.

Then there were the more STEM-y fields involving database evaluation, IT, and web design.  I made considerable use of my training as an historian in my major collection development assignment--which I used to actual collection development at our library.  We even had a management class, though that proved mostly a waste of time due to a slacker instructor.

[marshwiggle]

Does library science actually count as "humanities"? It sounds to me uncomfortably close to <shudder>"job training"</shudder>. I was of the impression that the humanities purists valued the unfettered life of the mind above pedestrian vocational education.

I'd be curious to know what you think we study in library science. My library science education included courses in fields like literature and ethics.  I found the library ethics class as intellectually stimulating as most of what I studied in my PhD program in history.

Then there were the more STEM-y fields involving database evaluation, IT, and web design.  I made considerable use of my training as an historian in my major collection development assignment--which I used to actual collection development at our library.  We even had a management class, though that proved mostly a waste of time due to a slacker instructor.

My point was that it's pretty common to hear humanities faculty get defensive about the value of "soft skills" versus "hard skills" on the basis that a humanities education is not job training, with the implication that such an education is somewhat inferior. I'm truly curious about how something like library science is viewed since, as you point out, it includes developing actual "hard skills" in the service of a specific kind of job. To people from STEM and professional programs, it makes total sense.

Does the fact that library science is typically a graduate program somehow make its incorporation of "hard skills" for a specific job more acceptable?