Are the Humanities Doomed?

[polly_mer]

Yes, the problem is exactly being unique in a good way that will attract sufficient students and have all the faculty on board.

The small tweaks aren't enough to save programs that aren't currently competitive for students.

[Hibush]

Even if the market is modest, couldn't they have invested in being the #1 apologetics program in the world ? Not an important goal from the perspective of most philosophers, but apologetics seems to be to a central field to the leadership there. The institution could have taken it as a point of pride.

Those of us in the liberal arts are terrible about thinking in these terms or designing programs that carve a niche.  It's part of the reason our majors are dying. 

I agree with Wahoo that part of the problem for many programs is indeed not investing the resources into carving out a niche that would attract a core of specific students from all over.

Isn't part of the problem intrinsic? Specifically, the big defence of the humanities, general education, etc., that I've seen is that this is timeless, universal knowledge. So the very idea of tailoring the offerings to a specific place and time culturally is anathema to many in those fields.

One aspect that Wahoo brings up is that many faculty in the liberal arts are loathe to engage in strategic thinking about their profession.

It is common for faculty in any discipline to want to buckle down in their specialty and not stress out too much about there large-scale issues. But it does appear [to me] to be more common, or more socially accepted, in the liberal arts. What say you all?

If it is more common, I don't understand why it would be intrinsic to the field of study. There is nothing about the humanities or liberal arts that is inconsistent with strategic thinking. But if the field has reinforced the idea as a meme [Def 1 MW] that has become dominant in the field. Once fixed in the population, the meme would lead to departments eschewing long-term planning, failing to identify strengths in the  new context and dying majors.

We are seeing that phenomenon, but is the mechanism likely to be true?

In my area of biology, natural philosophy and later natural history were the normal modes of study. They became passé and biologists tried new approaches. Today, biology is doing just fine. Its importance as a subject of study and utility for improving society are not questioned by academic leaders. What would have happened if natural philosophers had stuck with nature study rather than experimental approaches?

[Wahoo Redux]

One aspect that Wahoo brings up is that many faculty in the liberal arts are loathe to engage in strategic thinking about their profession.

It is common for faculty in any discipline to want to buckle down in their specialty and not stress out too much about there large-scale issues. But it does appear [to me] to be more common, or more socially accepted, in the liberal arts. What say you all?

If it is more common, I don't understand why it would be intrinsic to the field of study.

We are seeing that phenomenon, but is the mechanism likely to be true?

In my area of biology, natural philosophy and later natural history were the normal modes of study. They became passé and biologists tried new approaches. Today, biology is doing just fine. Its importance as a subject of study and utility for improving society are not questioned by academic leaders. What would have happened if natural philosophers had stuck with nature study rather than experimental approaches?

I've probably done enough damage...but I'll weigh in, partly because I am seeing this phenomenon firsthand for the second time in my career.

The humanities seem stuck in time.

Some of the reasons for this are legitimate, and sometimes biologists and chemists and anatomists etc. appear to think about the humanities as if they are empirical science and thus should pursue experimental approaches once the old approaches become passe, but that's not necessarily what we have in the humanities.  The "old approaches" are still perfectly viable, and we've got generations of new approaches anyway.

I have pointed out to my undergrads that one of the reasons Shakespeare is Shakespeare is that his plays have literally been performed all over the world continuously since they were written.   The same is true for Beethoven and Mozart.  Rembrandt and daVinci, Japanese woodcuts and Mayan pottery etc.   You get the point.  These things form large parts of the fabric of world culture.  What sort of experimental approach should we take with these things? Are they passe if someone in almost every country in the world has performed Shakespeare in the last year?

And actually, if one knew much about the arts, one would see that the humanities have been evolving and expanding and experimenting since, well, forever.  Beethoven faced a great deal of derision in his time because he was way too new for the fuddy-duddies.  Philip Glass anyone?

I also have to point out that Star Wars is a direct result of Joseph Campbell's philosophy----if you don't know what I am talking about, google George Lucas and the "monomyth."

Hunger Games?  Feminist monomyth.  Again, you get the point.

So please, my friends, take a look at what you are posting about before posting.  We are redefining and inventing constantly.  Always have been.

We are also inventive constantly in the classroom.  Lots of examples, but just take my word for it. 

So to put it in a nutshell: most of us don't think we should have to defend ourselves.  We study some of the most venerable aspects of human activity, ideas and expressions that are as old as cave paintings, and actually probably predate them.  It never occurred to me I would have to defend what I do until it appeared that some people wanted me to do so.

So part of the reason the humanities are stuck in time is because we are dealing with the great works that do not need reinventing (what Marshy was trying to get at above) and working constantly with the newly defined stuff.  Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was in his time---many times more actually.  Let biology reinvent itself because we already know what a stamen is.  Philip Glass is the Beethoven of our age.

On the other hand, because we have our heads in the great works of the past, we sometimes miss the genius of our own age.  Hunger Games is a masterpiece.  Many professional musicians will not listen to or perform Philip Glass.  Students love and can relate to Tolkien and Stephen King and J.K. Rowling and Led Zeppelin and Tarantino.  We turn our snoots up at these, generally speaking (exceptions aside).  Big mistake.  Students will come to Shakespeare and Keats and Stravinsky if we meet them where they are the first time around---we just don't have that much time to do so and so brush our own popular creations aside as confectionery. 

But what I was on about is the paucity of marketing abilities in the humanities.  Our grads do fine over the long term, they really do, but somehow people who research and write and perform publicly for a living seem incapable of forwarding their own successes. 

Part of the this is the nature of our professional lives: our profession is quiet and textual and thoughtful----not great training for loud public relations. 

My cousin who is a neuroscientist produces several 1,000 word papers a year on a team of a researchers, sometimes a dozen or so; we spend a year in intellectual isolation to produce 5K to 10K word single-author papers and 5 to 10 years producing 60K to 100K+ word monographs.  Great for grammar and complex expression but not something that makes a lot of headlines.

And humanities professors tend not to be alpha personalities.  I've known two English professors who got into fisticuffs with people, but both these folks were crazy, not alphas doing alpha s**t.   We just don't go around fighting for our right to party. 

[quasihumanist]

You are wrong.  Charles Wuorinen is the Beethoven of our age.  (j/k)

Some tentative thoughts, from someone in a liminal field.

I think one of the reasons that humanities departments don't become niche is that humanists aren't so attached to their own specialties.  We tend to think it's important that students get a broad view of our discipline - not that they have to learn everything, because that's impossible, but that they should learn a wide variety of things.  At the same time, many humanities disciplines (my field of mathematics is an exception) somehow don't think it's appropriate for people to teach outside their own specialties.  So there is a sense that a niche department can't give a proper undergraduate education.

At the same time, the humanities are in some ways much more specialized, though in the less technical parts of the humanities, this is hidden by the lack of specialized jargon.  As time goes on, biologists abandon some areas of study.  The subfield is done, or no longer interesting.  For the most part, humanists don't abandon areas of study, but keep adding more and more new ones.  The size of humanities faculties hasn't kept up, and the size of the undergraduate curriculum can't keep up.  So it ends up that everyone is in their own subsubfield of one (or more like a dozen, worldwide).  Also, because so much is already known and so much needs to be mastered before getting to the frontier of research, research gets detached from undergraduate (or even master's level) education.

[marshwiggle]

So part of the reason the humanities are stuck in time is because we are dealing with the great works that do not need reinventing (what Marshy was trying to get at above) and working constantly with the newly defined stuff.  Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was in his time---many times more actually.  Let biology reinvent itself because we already know what a stamen is.  Philip Glass is the Beethoven of our age.

On the other hand, because we have our heads in the great works of the past, we sometimes miss the genius of our own age.  Hunger Games is a masterpiece.  Many professional musicians will not listen to or perform Philip Glass.  Students love and can relate to Tolkien and Stephen King and J.K. Rowling and Led Zeppelin and Tarantino.  We turn our snoots up at these, generally speaking (exceptions aside).  Big mistake.  Students will come to Shakespeare and Keats and Stravinsky if we meet them where they are the first time around---we just don't have that much time to do so and so brush our own popular creations aside as confectionery. 

But what I was on about is the paucity of marketing abilities in the humanities.  Our grads do fine over the long term, they really do, but somehow people who research and write and perform publicly for a living seem incapable of forwarding their own successes. 

Part of the this is the nature of our professional lives: our profession is quiet and textual and thoughtful----not great training for loud public relations. 

There's the kind of thinking that prevents getting sympathy from other disciplines. The idea that somehow pure thought is the superior way to approach anything. For centuries people believed "heavy objects fall faster than light objects" becuase that's what the Greeks thought, and "experiments" were vulgar; pure reason was the way to establish anything.

Think of the term "digital humanities". Why don't we have "digital physics" or "digital economics" or "digital agriculture" or anything else? Because digital tools have been adopted in all kinds of disciplines for decades since they were useful. There's no need for a special term for using tools that become available and seeing opportunities to do things more effectively.

My cousin who is a neuroscientist produces several 1,000 word papers a year on a team of a researchers, sometimes a dozen or so; we spend a year in intellectual isolation to produce 5K to 10K word single-author papers and 5 to 10 years producing 60K to 100K+ word monographs.  Great for grammar and complex expression but not something that makes a lot of headlines.

And how many people read the neuroscience papers vs. the single author humanities papers?

And humanities professors tend not to be alpha personalities.  I've known two English professors who got into fisticuffs with people, but both these folks were crazy, not alphas doing alpha s**t.   We just don't go around fighting for our right to party.

How many academics do? There are introverts and extraverts in every field I've seen.

[polly_mer]

One problem I see for professors' jobs is that individuals don't have to major in the humanities to get many personal benefits of literature, philosophy, or history while becoming truly expert is hard, sustained effort.

If anything, the insistence on formal classes can hurt the message by being "mandatory fun".  The same is often true for the liberal arts sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics, geology); people really enjoy the outreach activities, but becoming expert is work.  In addition, a bachelor's degree in those fields is no longer an automatic ticket to a middle-class job, especially if one wants to live in a specific small town.

Intellectually capable people have more choices now than they did N decades ago.  It's perfectly reasonable to major in biochemical engineering, continue being an avid bookworm/theatre goer, and then take a middle-class job doing something unrelated to engineering of any type.

A good college education is indeed more than preparing one for the first job, but, for people who entered college with a solid K-12 education and good social capital, the case is weak for any given major if the goal after college is a good middle-class life instead of a specific career.

[Wahoo Redux]

You are wrong.  Charles Wuorinen is the Beethoven of our age.  (j/k)

Shoot.

Don't know him.

Will definitely check him out.

Thanks for the tip.

[Wahoo Redux]

Part of the this is the nature of our professional lives: our profession is quiet and textual and thoughtful----not great training for loud public relations. 

There's the kind of thinking that prevents getting sympathy from other disciplines. The idea that somehow pure thought is the superior way to approach anything.

WHAT?!  Marshy, I ignore you unless I make a mistake because you just say the dumbest, most obnoxious things.

Where anywhere has anyone said "pure thought is the superior way to approach anything"???

Who says that?  I certainly didn't.  I don't know anyone who has.

You just made that up.  Strawmaning like a jerk there, buddy.

You're like a teenager simply looking for a reason to be mad.  Quit being a baby.

My cousin who is a neuroscientist produces several 1,000 word papers a year on a team of a researchers, sometimes a dozen or so; we spend a year in intellectual isolation to produce 5K to 10K word single-author papers and 5 to 10 years producing 60K to 100K+ word monographs.  Great for grammar and complex expression but not something that makes a lot of headlines.

And how many people read the neuroscience papers vs. the single author humanities papers?

No idea.  It was not a lot, I assure you.  This is very specialized science having to do with a particular response in the parts of the brain when receiving sensory input, and these experiments are very narrow in a very narrow specialty as is the nature of science---that much I understand of his work.  Some day I expect it will yield remarkable results, but for now my cousin has been plugging at this for years, since his dissertation.

Marshmellow, you are just one resentful, frustrated, insecure pseudo-scientist, aren't you? 

[marshwiggle]

Part of the this is the nature of our professional lives: our profession is quiet and textual and thoughtful----not great training for loud public relations. 

There's the kind of thinking that prevents getting sympathy from other disciplines. The idea that somehow pure thought is the superior way to approach anything.

WHAT?!  Marshy, I ignore you unless I make a mistake because you just say the dumbest, most obnoxious things.

Where anywhere has anyone said "pure thought is the superior way to approach anything"???

Who says that?  I certainly didn't.  I don't know anyone who has.

By saying Your profession is "quiet and textual and thoughtful" it implies that other professions, (including, presumably, academics in other disciplines), are not those things.

I would guess I'm not the only one who thinks suggesting humanities are the only "thoughtful" disciplines sounds condescending.

For instance, saying many STEM fields have a lot of math in them doesn't imply that only people who do math are "smart"; it's just a necessary skill for those fields. Humanities promote their develoment of "soft skills", but imply that they're the disciplines that "really" do that, without offering any concrete evidence of how they do that so much more effectively than other fields.

So, if you want to suggest that "thoughtfulness" is somehow unique to the humanities, I'd be fascinated to hear the explanation.

(Same thing for "textual" really; every field requires people to be able to read and produce highly complex "textual" material.)

And "quiet"? Other than perhaps music and theatre, what makes a discipline "noisy" or "loud"????

[Parasaurolophus]

Let's maybe take a step back and cool our heads a titch, shall we, friends?

[Wahoo Redux]

One problem I see for professors' jobs is that individuals don't have to major in the humanities to get many personal benefits of literature, philosophy, or history while becoming truly expert is hard, sustained effort.

If anything, the insistence on formal classes can hurt the message by being "mandatory fun".  The same is often true for the liberal arts sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics, geology); people really enjoy the outreach activities, but becoming expert is work.  In addition, a bachelor's degree in those fields is no longer an automatic ticket to a middle-class job, especially if one wants to live in a specific small town.

Intellectually capable people have more choices now than they did N decades ago.  It's perfectly reasonable to major in biochemical engineering, continue being an avid bookworm/theatre goer, and then take a middle-class job doing something unrelated to engineering of any type.

A good college education is indeed more than preparing one for the first job, but, for people who entered college with a solid K-12 education and good social capital, the case is weak for any given major if the goal after college is a good middle-class life instead of a specific career.

A lot of this is true, of course, but since I teach a lot of these classes at a school in a region in which people almost exclusively seek "practical" degrees for future employment, I have a lot of future business people who need an LA credit.  Not to a person, but a great many really enjoy my classes.  I've gotten lots of thank-you emails, great evals, and even a sweet RMP rating.  It is correct that a bookworm with good social capital does not need a class to inspire them to read, yet there are fewer of these folks than you seem to indicate.  For many, my classes are an introduction to things that they did not know existed, or if they did know existed knew it only because of a brief, uninspiring introduction through public schools that did not do the work justice and thus did not inspire bookworms with any depth to their capital.

[Wahoo Redux]

By saying Your profession is "quiet and textual and thoughtful" it implies that other professions, (including, presumably, academics in other disciplines), are not those things.

Doesn't imply anything of the sort.

[Hibush]

One problem I see for professors' jobs is that individuals don't have to major in the humanities to get many personal benefits of literature, philosophy, or history while becoming truly expert is hard, sustained effort.

I don't think that holds up as a distinction. Two of the most popular hobbies in the US, gardening (77% of US households) and bird watching (20% of Americans), are straight out biology, but hardly any of the people enjoying those activities majored in biology. But becoming expert enough in biology, even horticulture or ornithology, to get an academic job takes hard sustained effort.

I'm still favoring the dominant meme model, where the cultural norm has been established by chance rather than being inherent in the nature of the scholarship.

[Hibush]

Eric Hayot, the author of the article that inspired this thread is back with a followup..

It is comparatively optimistic, changing the outlook from "The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed" to the more tractable "The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem".

He addresses many of the issues brought up in this thread.

He basically says that humanities instruction is in fine shape. Low enrollment results from fewer students thinking they want or need it. He also dismisses job-preparation programs meaningful competitors for students.

He sees the main problem being a curriculum as being centered around what professors do rather than what professors can do for students.

What if, then, we reorganized the undergraduate curriculum around a set of concepts that instead of foregrounding training in the graduate disciplines, foregrounded topics, skills, and ideas central to humanistic work and central to the interests of students?

He has just published a book, Humanist Reason, that lays out the whole plan.

The approach is one that I have seen succeed in biology and applied biology.
New students find a lot of fun, rewarding and accessible things in applied biology. Freshman courses need to start with that material. When the students later find that they need advanced statistics, physical chemistry or other classic intro courses, they can take those. Making them suffer through two years of that stuff before they can take the cool majors courses is not a great idea if you want impact.

[marshwiggle]

Eric Hayot, the author of the article that inspired this thread is back with a followup..

It is comparatively optimistic, changing the outlook from "The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed" to the more tractable "The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem".

As someone who didn't take any humanities in university, I can't say reading his article made one iota of difference to my preferences. Since increasing enrollment in humanities requires attracting people not now interested in humanities, if it doesn't do that it's useless. To be blunt, he still seems to be appealing to the kind of people who already go into humanities (such as by repeated references to "social justice").


Is there anyone here who didn't do humanities who was inspired by that article to think that it would have changed your mind if you'd read it (or seen what it describes) when you were contemplating university?