Are the Humanities Doomed?

[spork]

No, of course not.

"Students are still having their lives changed in our classes." Major fail in the "humanities are essential for learning critical thinking skills" trope right there. Same for "students will have had a richer and more responsible life than they would have had otherwise."

While I agree with this statement:

"If we want students to understand the relationship between what we teach and questions of immense contemporary concern, we should put those matters of concern into our curricular structures."

the matter of most concern for the typical 18-22 year old undergraduate who starts college at a four-year institution is employment. A curriculum with humanities content that is organized around interdisciplinary modules will probably address that concern better than a required ten-course sequence in the history major where courses have titles like "Medieval European History I." But history faculty will fight a truly interdisciplinary curriculum and administrative organization to the death, because a PhD in history indoctrinated them into believing that all undergraduates should, in an ideal world, be trained to be professional historians like themselves via a history major under the control of a history department. And how do they do history? By reading documents and writing about them in arcane venues, just like their forebears forebears did. Meanwhile the average 18-year old is interested in learning how to do animations for Tik Tok videos.

(I'm using history here as an example; people in other fields exhibit the same behavior.)

[Caracal]

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?

Right, but you aren't the target audience. Its like all these programs designed to expose and interest students in STEM disciplines. Nothing was going to make me a STEM major. There were occasional moments in my high school science classes where something piqued my interest, but it wasn't something that I had any particular passion for, and while I could understand the basic concepts, I also knew I didn't have any particular aptitude for it.

Obviously the point of these programs is not to get people without much interest or aptitude to go into the discipline. The idea is to introduce it to people who do have the aptitude and interest, but might not think they do. Same thing here.

[Caracal]

No, of course not.

"Students are still having their lives changed in our classes." Major fail in the "humanities are essential for learning critical thinking skills" trope right there. Same for "students will have had a richer and more responsible life than they would have had otherwise."

While I agree with this statement:

"If we want students to understand the relationship between what we teach and questions of immense contemporary concern, we should put those matters of concern into our curricular structures."

the matter of most concern for the typical 18-22 year old undergraduate who starts college at a four-year institution is employment. A curriculum with humanities content that is organized around interdisciplinary modules will probably address that concern better than a required ten-course sequence in the history major where courses have titles like "Medieval European History I." But history faculty will fight a truly interdisciplinary curriculum and administrative organization to the death, because a PhD in history indoctrinated them into believing that all undergraduates should, in an ideal world, be trained to be professional historians like themselves via a history major under the control of a history department. And how do they do history? By reading documents and writing about them in arcane venues, just like their forebears forebears did. Meanwhile the average 18-year old is interested in learning how to do animations for Tik Tok videos.

(I'm using history here as an example; people in other fields exhibit the same behavior.)

Its amazing to me how people seem to feel like they can opine on these subjects when they clearly have absolutely no idea what a history major looks like.

Actually, my students really enjoy reading historical documents. They are much more interesting that a textbook with a lot of prepackaged information.

I'm tempted to engage with your ridiculous ideas about the discipline of history, but some ideas are too ignorant to even bother with.

[marshwiggle]

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?

Right, but you aren't the target audience. Its like all these programs designed to expose and interest students in STEM disciplines. Nothing was going to make me a STEM major. There were occasional moments in my high school science classes where something piqued my interest, but it wasn't something that I had any particular passion for, and while I could understand the basic concepts, I also knew I didn't have any particular aptitude for it.

Obviously the point of these programs is not to get people without much interest or aptitude to go into the discipline. The idea is to introduce it to people who do have the aptitude and interest, but might not think they do. Same thing here.

But honestly, who are these people? And what are they doing currently? (It's an honest question. I have no idea who this great untapped market is.)

[spork]

[. . .]

I'm tempted to engage with your ridiculous ideas about the discipline of history, but some ideas are too ignorant to even bother with.

Feel free. Unless you have a PhD in history, I probably took more graduate history courses than you did, and I teach some undergraduate history courses.

Assuming that the structure of an undergraduate history curriculum says something about its content and delivery, here is a sample from my employer:

• History of the United States to 1877 (lecture-based, farmed out to adjuncts)
• Western Civilization I: 500 B.C.-1500 A.D. (lecture-based, farmed out to adjuncts)
• Europe 1789-1914
• The American Revolution
• America's Civil War
• Modern America
• Modern Italy

Doubtful that students are engaging in actual research, using primary sources, in any of these. And term papers are probably the norm.

Again, I'm using history as an illustrative example. The same can be said about the curricula for many other humanities disciplines at many colleges and universities.

Edited to add: by the way, most history majors at my employer are majoring in history so that they can become high school teachers . . . who teach history.

[Caracal]

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?

Right, but you aren't the target audience. Its like all these programs designed to expose and interest students in STEM disciplines. Nothing was going to make me a STEM major. There were occasional moments in my high school science classes where something piqued my interest, but it wasn't something that I had any particular passion for, and while I could understand the basic concepts, I also knew I didn't have any particular aptitude for it.

Obviously the point of these programs is not to get people without much interest or aptitude to go into the discipline. The idea is to introduce it to people who do have the aptitude and interest, but might not think they do. Same thing here.

But honestly, who are these people? And what are they doing currently? (It's an honest question. I have no idea who this great untapped market is.)

Well in the same way there are people who are talented at math but think its something weird that won't result in a rewarding career, there are people who are deeply interested in a humanities discipline but don't understand that majoring in it might be a way to develop the skills they possess in writing and analysis in ways that might help them more than majoring in a default subject like business.

[Caracal]

[. . .]

I'm tempted to engage with your ridiculous ideas about the discipline of history, but some ideas are too ignorant to even bother with.

Feel free. Unless you have a PhD in history, I probably took more graduate history courses than you did, and I teach some undergraduate history courses.

Assuming that the structure of an undergraduate history curriculum says something about its content and delivery, here is a sample from my employer:

• History of the United States to 1877 (lecture-based, farmed out to adjuncts)
• Western Civilization I: 500 B.C.-1500 A.D. (lecture-based, farmed out to adjuncts)
• Europe 1789-1914
• The American Revolution
• America's Civil War
• Modern America
• Modern Italy

Doubtful that students are engaging in actual research, using primary sources, in any of these. And term papers are probably the norm.

Again, I'm using history as an illustrative example. The same can be said about the curricula for many other humanities disciplines at many colleges and universities.

Edited to add: by the way, most history majors at my employer are majoring in history so that they can become high school teachers . . . who teach history.

I can't speak to your school's requirements, but where I teach the intro requirements are either half of the American History survey and modern Europe. I actually think there's real value in survey courses if they are done well. I lecture a lot, but it is also interactive and students participate quite a bit. Other than that lots of courses are on topics rather than broad periods.

I don't really understand why you think the Civil War is some esoteric subject. I teach a Civil War course and my students are very engaged in the questions about race, slavery, the United States, memory and all the rest that are consistently relevant.

And why is it a problem that many history majors want to become high school teachers?

[marshwiggle]

Right, but you aren't the target audience. Its like all these programs designed to expose and interest students in STEM disciplines. Nothing was going to make me a STEM major. There were occasional moments in my high school science classes where something piqued my interest, but it wasn't something that I had any particular passion for, and while I could understand the basic concepts, I also knew I didn't have any particular aptitude for it.

Obviously the point of these programs is not to get people without much interest or aptitude to go into the discipline. The idea is to introduce it to people who do have the aptitude and interest, but might not think they do. Same thing here.

But honestly, who are these people? And what are they doing currently? (It's an honest question. I have no idea who this great untapped market is.)

Well in the same way there are people who are talented at math but think its something weird that won't result in a rewarding career, there are people who are deeply interested in a humanities discipline but don't understand that majoring in it might be a way to develop the skills they possess in writing and analysis in ways that might help them more than majoring in a default subject like business.

In my experience, the top notch students in high school do well in all of their subjects, STEM, humanities, and  anything else. But these students also tend to be pretty clear on what field they want to study, and so they don't seem very "convertible". For the middle-of-the-road students, who don't have such clear direction, they tend to be more focused on  outcomes. Specifically, I have a hard time believing many business students could have been talked into humanities. Humanities is increasingly attracting students who want to be "activists", which is quite different from students who choose business.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

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.

Delaying harder courses looks quite deceitful:
essentially, it increases enrollment (and overall tuition collected) at the expense of those students who would take extra years to find out that they lack skills to pass some notorious "gatekeeper"class (or have to graduate without [quite marketable] statistics knowledge)

[mleok]

Let me make an observation, which I think is relevant to some degree, to this discussion. In my field, which is mathematics, it's rarely the case that hiring is framed in a very targeted manner for the purposes of undergraduate curriculuar needs. Maybe we would express a preference for a person in the broad area of algebra, analysis, geometry/topology, applied/computational math, or statistics, but anything more specific than that would be because we wish to fill a particular research need.

My former department chair once said that any mathematician should be able to teach any undergraduate mathematics class, which I don't necessarily agree with, but we are typically expected to be able to cover a significant fraction of the undergraduate curriculum, and we don't really feel any ownership of a specific course except at perhaps the graduate topics course level.

In contrast, it sounds like in some disciplines like the humanities, very targeted searches are justified on the basis of curricular requirements, even for the introductory survey classes. So, while I agree with the premise of the article that an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on methods and skills as opposed to specific course content is likely to improve the relevance of a humanities degree, it feels like this will run up against a much stronger opposition from the humantities faculty.

[Caracal]

Let me make an observation, which I think is relevant to some degree, to this discussion. In my field, which is mathematics, it's rarely the case that hiring is framed in a very targeted manner for the purposes of undergraduate curriculuar needs. Maybe we would express a preference for a person in the broad area of algebra, analysis, geometry/topology, applied/computational math, or statistics, but anything more specific than that would be because we wish to fill a particular research need.

My former department chair once said that any mathematician should be able to teach any undergraduate mathematics class, which I don't necessarily agree with, but we are typically expected to be able to cover a significant fraction of the undergraduate curriculum, and we don't really feel any ownership of a specific course except at perhaps the graduate topics course level.

In contrast, it sounds like in some disciplines like the humanities, very targeted searches are justified on the basis of curricular requirements, even for the introductory survey classes. So, while I agree with the premise of the article that an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on methods and skills as opposed to specific course content is likely to improve the relevance of a humanities degree, it feels like this will run up against a much stronger opposition from the humantities faculty.

There's some truth to that, although it depends on discipline and area. I tend to think people should be able to teach anything intro in their broad area. Outside of that, it gets tricky. Since we keep talking about history, I teach both halves of the US survey, for example. That brings me into all kinds of things I didn't study in grad school, but I feel like I have the broad framework that lets me put things in context. I wouldn't feel like that if I was going to teach Modern Europe or Medieval History. I have seen plenty of examples, however, where schools decide they need a person who does some particular granular subspecialty. That might make sense if you're a big department with a grad program, but its pretty silly if you're a department of ten people and the person you're hiring is going to be the only person teaching American History before 1900.

[Wahoo Redux]

In contrast, it sounds like in some disciplines like the humanities, very targeted searches are justified on the basis of curricular requirements, even for the introductory survey classes. So, while I agree with the premise of the article that an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on methods and skills as opposed to specific course content is likely to improve the relevance of a humanities degree, it feels like this will run up against a much stronger opposition from the humantities faculty.

Hmmmmm, well, kind'a...This is really school dependent.  We, like math, have specialties, but like math we are expected to be able to teach a broad array of undergraduate classes.

In my 20 years of teaching (including grad school) I have taught in my areas of specialty maybe 5 times.  For the last 7 years I have been teaching business writing, composition, film studies, mythology, science fiction, screenwriting, Medieval literature, advanced essay writing, and a grad course in British modernism---next semester, for the first time in my life, I am slated to teach world literature.  None of these are my "specialty."  I can teach these with a fair amount of success, however, because I have very broad knowledge of literature, writing, and film, and because I learned to research. 

The real specialists teach at the big, prestigious R-1s, but all of these, I wager, hit the Intro to...101 classes regularly.

Honestly, this makes teaching more interesting.

[Wahoo Redux]

iBut honestly, who are these people? And what are they doing currently? (It's an honest question. I have no idea who this great untapped market is.)
*****

Well in the same way there are people who are talented at math but think its something weird that won't result in a rewarding career, there are people who are deeply interested in a humanities discipline but don't understand that majoring in it might be a way to develop the skills they possess in writing and analysis in ways that might help them more than majoring in a default subject like business.

In my experience, the top notch students in high school do well in all of their subjects, STEM, humanities, and  anything else. But these students also tend to be pretty clear on what field they want to study, and so they don't seem very "convertible". For the middle-of-the-road students, who don't have such clear direction, they tend to be more focused on  outcomes. Specifically, I have a hard time believing many business students could have been talked into humanities. Humanities is increasingly attracting students who want to be "activists", which is quite different from students who choose business.

Marshy you are like a lot of conservatives in that you have a constant burr under your saddle about "activists."  Maybe talk to someone about that.

I have successfully recruited several good students to our majors.  By and large these are people who never had any meaningful exposure to the humanities until college.  And these are people who are pleased to find that they have a talent for writing, interpreting, or creating generally and were pleased that I had singled them out for having talent.  From my experience, it really is as simple as that. 

We as a discipline should really make an effort to do this more often from our intro classes, but humanities profs are reticent to do so.  I don't know why.

[marshwiggle]

I have successfully recruited several good students to our majors.  By and large these are people who never had any meaningful exposure to the humanities until college.  And these are people who are pleased to find they have a talent for writing, interpreting, or creating generally and were pleased that I had singled them out for having talent.  From my experience, it really is as simple as that. 

I'm truly curious about this.

How did their high school English, history, geography, etc. not provide "meaningful" exposure? (Honest question.)

Were they not planning to go to university, or were they planning to study other things? If so, what? (Again, honest question)

It wasn't at all clear to me from reading the article exactly who they were supposed to be marketing to. Given the size of the enrollment declines they're talking about, it seems like this needs to be more than just the occasional student, so there needs to be an identifiable audience.

[Ruralguy]

Try to convince Business students that money isn't everything.