Are the Humanities Doomed?

[Wahoo Redux]

So I'm going to ask a really simple question: What does it look like for the humanities to thrive? Is it just more people taking the classes or specifically more majors? If it's more majors, what % of the total student body is the goal? I certainly don't think it's more Grad degrees, given the issues we currently have with their employment prospects.

I would like to see healthy enrollment, dependent on the size and mission of the school, obviously, of people who are not dissuaded by the idea that they will be "baristas" for the rest of their lives.

My father, a practical but very intellectual man, was actually angry when I wanted to major in music and then just plain bummed-out when I switched to English.  He had a great appreciation for the arts and humanities, but he had it in his head that I would be unable to pay for anything.  He apparently complained to a coworker who said that English majors were great because they wrote good memos and business letters, at which point my father was happy about my choice of degree.  So funny that.  And then I got a bunch of jobs and could pay for stuff.

And I would like to see humanities majors actually doing things with their passions.  Very few writers, for instance, make a living solely from writing, but I would like to see our law school graduates and high school teachers and brokers et al. continue to write and publish poetry and short stories and so on as they did as undergrads.  They can make their living however they need to, I would just like to see them actually use their degrees.  I would like them to think of the humanities as a lifelong pursuit, not just a degree as a passport to employment.

[Hegemony]

Poli Sci is in the social sciences, not in the humanities.

I'd guess that even those who deplore the humanities, like some here, read books, or watch movies or TV, or listen to music. Humanities majors created all of those things.

[spork]

The goal is we don't want a bunch of Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs, right, or "business bros!" who we think just look at the balance sheet?

Grossly oversimplifying it, but that is the gist, right?

The undergraduate students at my employer who think they will be "business bros" are, in reality, paying a lot of money for a future career in retail. They are not going to start companies like Palantir. They aren't going to start any company at all. Nor will they be a CFO or CEO. None of them entered college with the intent or ability to major in a humanities field, nor will they change focus to humanities during college.

Edited to add: The smattering of gen ed courses students are required to take in fields like math, English, history, biology, etc. (typically one course per field) does none of them any good from a statistical perspective. They don't learn to be proficient in writing, quantitative reasoning, or scientific thinking.

[marshwiggle]

Poli Sci is in the social sciences, not in the humanities.

I'd guess that even those who deplore the humanities, like some here, read books, or watch movies or TV, or listen to music. Humanities majors created all of those things.

I don't think anyone "deplores" humanities; the question is why humanities should have an unquestioned superior status to everything else.

As far as all of the artistic endeavours above, there will be lots of people who studied other things (or who never did any higher education at all) who have produced each of those things.

[Mobius]

Sigh. Let's all just ignore that rant, ok?

It wasn't a rant. What is the purpose of requiring coursework in the humanities. Don't get me wrong? I think dabbling to check some boxes has merit, even though some humanities GE requirements are humanities in name only, which doesn't help the underlying arguments supporters of the humanities make.

A fundamental problem for some humanities folks is some believe they deserve to be paid to think. A broke forever humanities grad student or permanent member of the adjunct army who thinks that will always believe their genius in unappreciated.

[Caracal]

They don't use baseline knowledge (like what germy hosts little kids are) to think critically about news headlines (little kids do indeed get and spread Covid; any assertion to the contrary is akin to saying that the sky is usually green and should require extreme levels of information before accepting as fact).

Ok, sorry I said I wouldn't engage and Poly doesn't see my posts anyway, which is good but...

What's funny is that Poly is trying to illustrate that she thinks clearly while everyone else doesn't, but in the process is illustrating her own sloppy thinking and inability to adjust to evidence. Kids do get and spread Covid, the question was always about degree. Poly says that kids are "germy hosts." Presumably what she means is that kids are a prime source of spread for diseases. That's true for lots of the respiratory diseases we are used to like RSV and the Flu. That's because those diseases are spread primarily by droplets and surfaces and small kids touch a lot of stuff and then put their hands in their mouths and all the rest.

At the beginning of all of this, the assumption was that COVID worked like this too, which was reasonable enough as a starting point. However, its becoming increasingly clear it doesn't. Covid transmission is mostly airborne. That makes it a lot more transmissible than the flu, but it also means that there's nothing special about kids that makes them transmit it more. They don't breathe more than anyone else. They can and do spread it but unlike with the flu, they don't play a disproportionate role in spread. (The data about whether they transmit it less is complicated and hard to sort out)

So, actually, this idea that kids are germy, so they must spread more COVID is incorrect. Poly just grabbed on to this idea because it fit with her preexisting notions and hasn't let go of it even though its just wrong.

[apl68]

So I'm going to ask a really simple question: What does it look like for the humanities to thrive? Is it just more people taking the classes or specifically more majors? If it's more majors, what % of the total student body is the goal? I certainly don't think it's more Grad degrees, given the issues we currently have with their employment prospects.

I would like to see healthy enrollment, dependent on the size and mission of the school, obviously, of people who are not dissuaded by the idea that they will be "baristas" for the rest of their lives.

That's what I'd like to see too.  It's sad to think that many students who could thrive in humanities undergrad majors are feeling forced into majors they don't like because they've been told it will ruin their lives, when that's mostly a crock.  But since higher education in this country is so horribly expensive, very few students who don't come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds will have the confidence to try to major in anything that doesn't seem to promise a very clear vocational pathway.  And that too is sad.

Saddest of all is how relatively few students in higher education seem to have much interest in learning much of anything, really.  Learning seems like something they do only under duress.

[Caracal]

A fundamental problem for some humanities folks is some believe they deserve to be paid to think. A broke forever humanities grad student or permanent member of the adjunct army who thinks that will always believe their genius in unappreciated.

Yes, let's just go back to our tired stereotypes. I actually think that GE requirements as they operate are pretty pointless, not just for the humanities, but for other subjects as well. Mostly, that's because they are usually done on the cheap without the sort of infrastructure and investment that would make them meaningful and useful.

[apl68]

Poli Sci is in the social sciences, not in the humanities.

I'd guess that even those who deplore the humanities, like some here, read books, or watch movies or TV, or listen to music. Humanities majors created all of those things.

I don't think anyone "deplores" humanities; the question is why humanities should have an unquestioned superior status to everything else.

As far as all of the artistic endeavours above, there will be lots of people who studied other things (or who never did any higher education at all) who have produced each of those things.

They shouldn't have an unquestioned superior status to everything else.  This thread isn't about whether the humanities are superior to everything else.  It's about whether they will continue to exist in a climate where so many seem to think that they don't have a right to exist.

[marshwiggle]

Is anyone aware of any study showing some area of character development or life success where humanities graduates exceed graduates of other disciplines? In principle, if humanities education does a better job of preparing people for "life" in some way, it should be demonstrable.

[Caracal]

Is anyone aware of any study showing some area of character development or life success where humanities graduates exceed graduates of other disciplines? In principle, if humanities education does a better job of preparing people for "life" in some way, it should be demonstrable.

That would seem like a strange and arrogant claim. I'd say that humanities degrees give people useful skills, but also have value in terms of understanding and thinking about the world. I'd say the same, by the way, for STEM disciplines, or social science or anything else.

[Wahoo Redux]

I don't think anyone "deplores" humanities; the question is why humanities should have an unquestioned superior status to everything else.

Is anyone aware of any study showing some area of character development or life success where humanities graduates exceed graduates of other disciplines? In principle, if humanities education does a better job of preparing people for "life" in some way, it should be demonstrable.

Marshy, you have several burrs.  You should talk to someone.

[Hibush]

This list looks like the kind of curriculum that the book criticizes as being all about the professors and not about the students. Changing the focus to something students can relate to, and then using history to explore those ideas is what he recommends.

Do the students know what they want?
Do the students know what they should be learning?

Is there any point in having an expert design coursework?

Students have a pretty good idea of what interests them. Do professors know what that is?
Students don't know the detail of what they need to learn to get the end point, and professors should be prepared to fill that in, as they do now.

The core claim of the book is that there would be more enrollment if there were more overlap between how students look at the concepts taught in history classes and how professors describe them in the history curriculum.

Professors have a vested interest in that goal. But students don't know that they do.

[Wahoo Redux]

This list looks like the kind of curriculum that the book criticizes as being all about the professors and not about the students. Changing the focus to something students can relate to, and then using history to explore those ideas is what he recommends.

Do the students know what they want?
Do the students know what they should be learning?

Is there any point in having an expert design coursework?

Students have a pretty good idea of what interests them. Do professors know what that is?

Some students know what interests them.  Often what really, truly interests them is nothing they will find in college.

Many honestly have no idea----or at least they have no idea why they are in college except that their parents are making them or they have no other idea what to do with themselves.   In part this is why we give them many options.

Some have their brains opened up.  Most leave college pretty much as they came in.

How could profs, or anyone for that matter, "know what that is" unless they know the student really well?

All profs can do is offer up their own interests in as interesting a way as they can.

And the problem with students "knowing" what they want or need is simply that most 18-year-olds actually know very little (and I count myself among these numbers at that point in my life)----even if they know what interests them most do not have any great depth of knowledge.  How could they know what they want or need?  That's why we have profs instead of just having students read Wikipedia from A to Z and then giving them a degree.

[Parasaurolophus]

I still am frequently amused that my five undergrad classes in math make me well above average and allowed to teach math at the college level while my five undergrad classes in philosophy mean I am unqualified to even hold an opinion on humanities gen ed requirements.

Well, for the record, philosophy isn't much like the other humanities at all. We get classed with them for historical reasons, but we have more in common with the social sciences.

(Also FWIW, pretty much everyone who majors in philosophy is someone who had no real prior exposure to it, since it's not taught in HS. So: all of our majors were attracted to it from somewhere else. The downside is that we generally don't get a lot of majors.)