Are the Humanities Doomed?

[dismalist]

Charging the same price for chemistry majors and humanities majors is a form of price discrimination to increase revenue, something at which universities excel! While the cost of educating a humanities major is indeed lower than educating a chemistry major, clearly the willingness to pay of the humanities major is at least as high as that of the chemistry major.

Why might that be?

--the humanities major likes his field more intensely than the chemistry major;
--the humanities major likes the socio-cultural environment of universities enough to be willing to pay;
--humanities majors are poorer than chemistry majors and get more non-loan financial aid;
--humanities majors have higher incoming SAT's and get more non-loan financial aid.

I do not know the answer, but I do know that colleges and universities are very good at squeezing money out of their students. Once again, to implement cost based pricing, the money then not coming form humanities majors would have to come from somewhere else.

This article, though surely well intentioned, misses much of what higher ed discussion also avoids, including what is being discussed on two other threads at the moment -- the money's gotta come from somewhere!

'Twould be nice if it were specified from whence it will come.

[Hibush]

From what I've seen of the financial mechanisms at work, tuition-funded schools don't use a cost-plus approach to pricing. At all.

It is more, how much will students pay (net financial aid) for this major if we had N students, or 2N students. Could we get that many? Only then do they ask, what would it cost us to offer this to N students, or to 2N students?

The ability to attract students and the cost of the program depends a great deal on non-program resources, reputation and other stuff. So those questions actually take into account institution-level priorities and synergies.

[Wahoo Redux]

I in no way endorse the elimination of the business major----it is a popular major and students should have as many options for study as we can justify and afford----but this article makes the case about the humanities, including the all-important R.O.I., that has been made here before only better and with links.

Of course, by this point the discussion is largely academic (no play on words), perhaps self-serving (on behalf of the author), and quixotic (in that the biz major, like college football, is going nowhere), but this is worth discussion (maybe) in context of this thread.

CHE (2019): Abolish the Business Major!

[lightning]

I in no way endorse the elimination of the business major----it is a popular major and students should have as many options for study as we can justify and afford----but this article makes the case about the humanities, including the all-important R.O.I., that has been made here before only better and with links.

Of course, by this point the discussion is largely academic (no play on words), perhaps self-serving (on behalf of the author), and quixotic (in that the biz major, like college football, is going nowhere), but this is worth discussion (maybe) in context of this thread.

CHE (2019): Abolish the Business Major!

I am compelled to cut-and-paste my previous rant about this same topic.

What I don't get is how a lot of these business programs get a free pass, when it comes to scrutinizing programs.

EVERYTHING is a business. When everything is a business, every and any business school graduate who gets a job--any job--is a "job placement." A business school curriculum is a very generalized curriculum to supposedly satisfy the workforce needs of EVERY business. Common sense tells me that is impossible. Yet, kids and their parents flock to business programs thinking that a business degree* is a practical degree that leads to a job. Well, duh. A business degree leads to a job, because EVERYTHING is a business. There are graduates of our business school who are receptionists at real estate offices, entry level help desk for IT companies, telemarketers, night managers of a big box retail store or hotel, sole proprietors of their start-up lawn service, used car salesmen, and other jobs that where one does not really need a business degree to get a job and be successful. And the business school can call them "placements" or "working alumni in the business field" or "gainfully employed" because EVERYTHING is a business.

But when you try to apply the same logic to Humanities programs, where the graduates are receptionists at real estate offices, entry level help desk for IT companies, telemarketers, night managers of a big box retail store or hotel, sole proprietors of their start-up lawn service, used car salesmen, and other jobs that where one does not really need a Humanities degree to get a job and be successful, all of a sudden those students are seen as unemployed in their field of training in the Humanities.

What's even more unfair is when those aforementioned graduates do go on and get high paying jobs in finance, business administration, marketing/sales, or start their own successful company, etc. they are seen as Humanities folk who succeeded despite their Humanities background and the successful person's Humanities degree program is given no credit for their graduate's success (vs if they had a business degree where the business school can take credit for preparing their graduates for these important high-paying jobs).

I have a similar rant for IT programs, but this post is getting too long.


* I am excluding Accounting degrees in this discussion.

[Ruralguy]

A lot of information on which alums are doing what and how X job correlates with Y major comes from faculty. If you want a student with a certain job to be seen as a successful humanities grad, than you should characterize it that way in assessments for accreditors, in letters to institutional advancement and research people, etc..

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: Can the English Major Be Saved?

Lower Deck:

Have academic professionalization and specialization harmed the study of literature?

For nearly a century, academic critics of literature—from I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and Lionel Trilling to Derrida, de Man, Foucault and Lyotard, to Judith Butler, Stanley Fish and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak today—have been regarded, in large parts of the discipline, as more important than the literature they write about.

Of course, the rise of academic theorists and college-based critics occurred at the very time that public readership of academic literary criticism has fallen precipitously. Maybe that isn't an accident or coincidence. It seems like an ideal time for a stocktaking. Such an assessment has now appeared.

I've heard this argument before, but as someone who has taken and taught a great many classes on literature, the great theorists are seldom taught in undergrad classes, and only as a compliment to the literature in graduate programs unless we are specifically studying "literary criticism."  The theorists do tend to dominate actual scholarship, however, or are considered a necessary component.

And these theorists have said a great many interesting things that deserve a moment or two if one is a serious reader.

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: Preaching to, and Challenging, the Liberal Arts Choir

Lower Deck:

In a conversation with presidents of small private colleges, tech company executives praise graduates' leadership and critical thinking ability but say they need to develop skills for a first job, too.

[marshwiggle]

IHE: Can the English Major Be Saved?

Perhaps as an undergraduate you read Oscar Wilde's mirthful, satiric essay "The Critic as Artist." Subtitled "Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything," it contains some of Wilde's most memorable quips and witticisms:

    An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
    When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong.
    There is no sin except stupidity.
    Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Ironically, it's the essay's major source of satire—the primacy of criticism over the art that it interprets and evaluates—that has, to a surprising extent, been realized. For nearly a century, academic critics of literature—from I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and Lionel Trilling to Derrida, de Man, Foucault and Lyotard, to Judith Butler, Stanley Fish and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak today—have been regarded, in large parts of the discipline, as more important than the literature they write about.

Of course, the rise of academic theorists and college-based critics occurred at the very time that public readership of academic literary criticism has fallen precipitously. Maybe that isn't an accident or coincidence. It seems like an ideal time for a stocktaking. Such an assessment has now appeared.

If there is a more thoughtful, penetrating, insightful, trenchant, acerbic, scathing or original analysis of a scholarly discipline than John Guillory's Professing Criticism, I have yet to see it. Partly a history and in part a sociology of English as a profession, Professing Criticism is an extraordinary book, truly a landmark work of scholarship and interpretation, without a doubt the most important intellectual and sociocultural study of a humanities field that I have encountered.

It should be read not only by the English professoriate, but by its counterparts in art and music history, history and philosophy. Consider it a red alert, a cautionary tale, a fire bell in the night and an omen and admonition about how professionalization, specialization and bureaucratization can damage a field of study, even as it has benefited those with tenure, especially those who teach at the more selective institutions.

The book covers a host of topics:
.
.
.
How graduate training in English might evolve to better serve those without academic job prospects.

[lilyb]

Am wondering if anyone read about the increase in humanities majors at UC Berkeley?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/06/uc-berkeley-sees-increase-in-humanities-majors-is-it-a-trend-or-just-an-exception/?sh=33afcebfd8b4

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/02/humanities-stem-college

The Axios piece also cites a marked uptick in humanities majors for U of Arizona, Arizona State, and U of Washington.

It's obviously too early to declare this a "post-pandemic revival" of the humanities. At the very least, though, it's a glimmer of hope for us in these fields.

[quasihumanist]

(I was a music major in college but haven't studied music further.)

One of the features of music theory as a profession is that is has always stayed fairly close to practice.  (Classical) performers learn music theory to better structure their performances.  Composers learn music theory to help them write music.

If you go through university course schedules and look at who teaches the music theory courses, you'll find most of them taught by composers, not theorists.  Even among the theorists, most of them are also composers and or performers, though perhaps at a less professional level.

The music history courses are mostly taught by people who are music historians, though they are again frequently aimed at performers and composers.  Also, musical philology (is that really an A or an A# in the Hammerklavier Sonata?) is alive and well, though it is a small part of music historical scholarship.

I wonder what literary theory courses would look like if they were mostly taught by writers.

[Wahoo Redux]

I wonder what literary theory courses would look like if they were mostly taught by writers.

Generally speaking, unless they also have a Ph.D., creative writers are unconcerned with literary theory. 

Creative writers tend to do well when they teach literature.  They have a different relationship to literature than do the purely academic experts on literature, although not all creative writers have read broadly in literature.  Writers read to learn to write, so they tend to read based on personal taste.  I remember an interview with Stephen King in which he admitted to having read almost none of the "classic" novels of the literary canon but had read "everything by Dean Koontz."

Overall, the Ph.D.s do fine in the humanities classroom from what I have seen.

[Parasaurolophus]

What I find strange is how divorced literary theory is from the philosophy of literature (the same is less true in the other direction, although I'll admit that there's a certain contempt that tends to flow freely). They intersected a little, briefly, around the mid-century mark, but that seems to be as far as it went. And that's too bad, because the contemporary philosophy of literature has a lot to say about interpretation, story-content, genre definition and formation, and so on, and it's quite rigorous. (That's perhaps part of the trouble, of course; it's more fun to prattle on poetically spouting garbage like literary Darwinism, psychoanalysis, etc.) Even to the extent that literary theorists do engage with philosophical work (/are inspired by it), they frankly tend to do a fairly poor job of reading the philosopher in question (doubtless because they're read in relative isolation).

The same is true in art history and theory, where philosophers of art are quite familiar with work in art history and theory, but art historians' and theorists' engagement with philosophy stops at, like, Kant. (And that's not a good place for it to start, let alone stop.)

The situation in dance and music is, surprisingly, much better, with a respectable amount of cross-pollination in both directions.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Am wondering if anyone read about the increase in humanities majors at UC Berkeley?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/06/uc-berkeley-sees-increase-in-humanities-majors-is-it-a-trend-or-just-an-exception/?sh=33afcebfd8b4

https://www.axios.com/2023/02/02/humanities-stem-college

The Axios piece also cites a marked uptick in humanities majors for U of Arizona, Arizona State, and U of Washington.

It's obviously too early to declare this a "post-pandemic revival" of the humanities. At the very least, though, it's a glimmer of hope for us in these fields.

I wonder if this a sign of labour market strength making post-graduation job search less of a concern. I.e., students are back to looking for a college degree in general (preferably, math-light), as opposed to a specific (if imaginary) path to employment implied by vocationally-branded degrees.

Though, Axios has a curious statement by an MLA official:
"Biology majors aren't making any more money than we do, and they're getting all this press like they're some sort of golden tickets."
Given that biology majors are notorious for their poor pay, it feels that humanities promoters are either delusional, or intentionally misleading.

[quasihumanist]

I wonder what literary theory courses would look like if they were mostly taught by writers.

Generally speaking, unless they also have a Ph.D., creative writers are unconcerned with literary theory. 

Here's one difference.  There is essentially zero non-academic (or at least not academic-adjacent) market for new "classical" music, so most composers have DMAs and or PhDs (in composition).  Most professional composers are university professors.  In addition, these degrees, as well as undergrad degrees in music, tend to have fairly significant music theory requirements (including conservatory degrees for performers).  This means a composer teaching music theory has had significant academic exposure to music theory, even though most of them haven't done research in the subject.

Have most MFAs in creative writing had at least 2 or 3 semesters of literary theory under their belt?  (One might argue that music theory courses start at a more basic level than literary theory, so possibly that number is not the right comparison.  However, it's also true that macro-level structure tends to get taught in music history classes as well.)

[Wahoo Redux]

Have most MFAs in creative writing had at least 2 or 3 semesters of literary theory under their belt? 

Yes.

Literary theory is built into most MFA in creative writing degrees.

But again (and maybe there is confusion on this subject), "literary theory" is generally its own area of study within English lit.  A great deal of academic writing about literature itself involves literary theory / philosophy, but if you go into a class on Shakespeare you generally study the plays and sonnets, not so much the "literary theory" surrounding Shakespeare's work (although history and theories like, for instance, the Monomyth, theories of comedy or tragedy, and "the green world" are often incorporated in secondary reading).  "Lit theory" is not used in the study or creation of literature in the same measure that music theory is part of composition or musical performance.  These two humanities fields are not direct counterparts.