Are the Humanities Doomed?

[mleok]

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

Yes, this sums things up nicely. It is also worth noting that the STEM subjects that are least financially rewarding, like biology, tend to be the ones which are least quantitative or mathematical. At least in the United States, the reason why STEM majors tend to have a better ROI on their degree is because quantitative/mathematical skills seem to be so poorly emphasized in K-12 and college. This is also reflected in part in tests like the SAT and GRE, where the verbal part of the GRE is harder than the SAT, but the mathematical part of the GRE is easier than the SAT, suggesting that mathematics is relatively deemphasized in college.

[mleok]

This is a really good point. Obviously students can pick up all kinds of useful skills from any class or major. However, it isn't like humanities has some lock on writing. I like the model that some schools use of teaching writing "throughout the disciplines." This can involve STEM faculty teaching some sections of the intro writing course focusing on scientific topics. Most of the principles of good writing are the same whether you are writing a scientific paper or an English essay.

A required writing course can be incredibly useful, but only if it is done correctly. Writing courses work if you have small class sizes that allow instructors to assign multiple drafts and give extensive feedback throughout the process. If you have somebody teaching 4 sections with 30 students each, it won't be very useful.

The same applies to lots of gen ed requirements. I think it would be very useful for engineering students to take courses that exposed them to different perspectives on the disciplines from the humanities. There's lots of environmental history, for example, that is very relevant to engineering fields. You could imagine sequences of courses or team taught courses where faculty from different disciplines collaborated to give students a broader perspective on their fields. However, gen-ed requirements often are just done on the cheap and there's no reason for students to view them as anything but hoops to jump through.

I agree with everything you've said here. One can have writing intensive courses independent of the subject matter it is framed in, and there is certainly a strong case to be made for more "writing in the disciplines" type courses, involving a collaboration between subject matter experts and writing specialists. I also like the idea of a well thought out sequence of general education courses that show how different disciplines interact, as opposed to the traditionally siloed approach to general education. This is something which I think would be valuable to all students, be they in STEM, social sciences, or the humanities, and go a long way towards dispelling the often accurate perception that general education requirements are just hoops to jump through.

[Wahoo Redux]

By contrast, in lots of STEM disciplines, it is common to have constant re-evaluation of curricula, addition of new more relevant courses and removable of outdated ones, and replacement of infrastructure for labs and computer software and hardware in order to provide up-to-date practical experience.

Oh Marshy, you know so little and are yet so sure of yourself...Dunning-Krueger.

The constant reevaluation of curricula in the humanities is one of the things that drives conservative thinkers nuts.

One can find all sorts of information on the performance of humanities degrees without much effort:

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/Economics/deloitte-au-economics-value-humanities-111018.pdf

You, Marshy, are simply an example of someone who, for some strange reason, resents the existence of the humanities disciplines.  You are not interested in honest debate or reflection, you just want to attack based on misinformation and bias.  You are not alone, and it is not something I understand.

[Wahoo Redux]

I also like the idea of a well thought out sequence of general education courses that show how different disciplines interact, as opposed to the traditionally siloed approach to general education. This is something which I think would be valuable to all students, be they in STEM, social sciences, or the humanities, and go a long way towards dispelling the often accurate perception that general education requirements are just hoops to jump through.

I think a lot of us would like this approach.

What would it look like?  I see this frequently, but I see very few actual suggestions of how to literally, on-the-ground do this. Maybe that deserves its own thread. 

[mleok]

If a student takes stats 1 and gets a B or above, then s/he will have learned something useful.  If s/he has been frog-marched through with a bare pass, s/he has probably learned essentially nothing, and the course was a waste of time.

Surely the same is true of a student who gets a B or above in comp or any other writing- and reading-intensive class.

It also, as you note, doesn't amount to a ton in isolation. But, as I'm pointing out, this seems true across the curriculum. The humanities are not some specially-deficient outlier here. If you want mathematical skills, then there are several different paths to obtaining them, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. If you want reading and writing skills, then there are several different paths to obtaining them, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. If you want critical thinking skills, etc.

By the by, when I took stats 1 it was pretty much just duplicating HS-level content. Stats 2 introduced some new stuff, but now we're talking about the value of having taken two classes, not just one.

I think at most colleges, most of the introductory classes are duplicative of high school level material, which in combination with the fact that one only develops some worthwhile understanding of the material through a substantive sequence, goes to illustrate that general education requirements, as they're currently framed at many US institutions, have little or no lasting effect on the vast majority of students. While they might have originally been motivated by lofty ideals about molding the well-rounded individual, it has quickly devolved into creating a captive audience for otherwise poorly subscribed courses. Put another way, in practice, I have not seen extremely popular general education courses which have a significant amount of intellectual rigor, unless the general education requirements are very specific about the classes which satisfy the requirements. In areas where a laundry list of classes can satisfy a given requirement, students tend to gravitate to fluff classes, with only minimal writing (even in humanities subjects) and easy grading.

Just go to your institution's subreddit, and you'll find students sharing information about what are the easiest, least intellectually demanding ways to fulfill the general education requirements. This is certainly true at the public R1 where I teach, and the only general education classes which seem to be able to demand a high level of rigor are those that are explicitly required without any alternative ways of satisfying the requirements.

[mleok]

I also like the idea of a well thought out sequence of general education courses that show how different disciplines interact, as opposed to the traditionally siloed approach to general education. This is something which I think would be valuable to all students, be they in STEM, social sciences, or the humanities, and go a long way towards dispelling the often accurate perception that general education requirements are just hoops to jump through.

I think a lot of us would like this approach.

What would it look like?  I see this frequently, but I see very few actual suggestions of how to literally, on-the-ground do this. Maybe that deserves its own thread.

I think a big part of the problem is that, in practice, we don't interact that often across disciplines ourselves?

[Ruralguy]

First of all, a particular school would have to be clear on its gen ed goals, whether its an engineering school that wants to teach engineers to be good writers or more culturally aware, or whether on a grander scale, wants to be a SLAC that presents students with a heavy core that is supposedly making students well rounded. The gen ed goals should probably be limited in that there shouldn't be too many of them, and should be expressed as a sentence. So, for instance, just as examples, 1. students should become clear, grammatical writers 2. students should be "numerate" and be able to understand presentation of numbers in social and natural sciences  and so on.

Next, create courses that match the goals rather than create goals that match the courses unless there are pre-existing courses that are a very good match.  This may lead to deleting some courses and adding others. Some probably need to be interdisciplinary.

Some practical challenges will be in creating schedules and such across departments and programs, but there are schools that do that already. It just takes some doing.

I've seen some programs that originate this way, and the devolve into hiring adjuncts because the tenure track profs want to teach either similar courses that are more specific to their discipline or just upper level stuff that has nothing to do with the gen ed goals. So, there have to be long term commitments.

[mleok]

By contrast, in lots of STEM disciplines, it is common to have constant re-evaluation of curricula, addition of new more relevant courses and removable of outdated ones, and replacement of infrastructure for labs and computer software and hardware in order to provide up-to-date practical experience.

Oh Marshy, you know so little and are yet so sure of yourself...Dunning-Krueger.

The constant reevaluation of curricula in the humanities is one of the things that drives conservative thinkers nuts.

One can find all sorts of information on the performance of humanities degrees without much effort:

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/Economics/deloitte-au-economics-value-humanities-111018.pdf

You, Marshy, are simply an example of someone who, for some strange reason, resents the existence of the humanities disciplines.  You are not interested in honest debate or reflection, you just want to attack based on misinformation and bias.  You are not alone, and it is not something I understand.

I'm looking at that list of transferrable and soft skills in the report, and I'm thinking to myself that a STEM focused education is equally capable of delivering on most, if not all, of those skills. Sure, there are STEM students who lack those skills, but I am sure the same is true of humanities students. In particular, it's unclear to me where one learns things like self-management, teamwork, and innovation explicitly, and why it would be the unique to humanities majors. The only evidence presented on this issue is Figure 2-5 and 2-6, which surveyed graduates from their bachelors and graduate programs, and asked them to self-rate their critical thinking, problem solving, communication, ability to tackle unfamiliar problems, and self-management.

There is also an argument being made that humanities graduates are better able to handle multidisciplinary policy problems, but that seems to be an unsubstantiated assertion. In particular, policies regarding public health, for example, have a multifaceted aspect that also requires an understanding of more technical fields like epidemiology and mathematical modeling, as well as the social, historical, and political aspects of the issue. I am not suggesting that STEM majors are necessarily better equipped to handle such complex problems, but I don't think that humanities students are either. In fact, it is common in engineering to have capstone design courses that are intended to force students to draw upon the entirety of their engineering education to address an interesting problem, and that is a critical way of addressing some of the siloing that is prevalent in our extremely modular system of higher education.

[mleok]

I've seen some programs that originate this way, and the devolve into hiring adjuncts because the tenure track profs want to teach either similar courses that are more specific to their discipline or just upper level stuff that has nothing to do with the gen ed goals. So, there have to be long term commitments.

Yes, a well thought out and meaningful general education sequence requires strong commitment from faculty. In particular, as you say, a willingness to continue engaging students who will not major in their field and will never take enough classes in the subject to justify engaging at length on a professor's pet topic.

[spork]

The fact is that STEM people don't spend remotely the amount of time trying to force people to take quantitative classes to improve their numerical analysis skills that humanities people spend arguing that STEM people must take humanities courses. (In lots of places, students don't even have to take math in their last year or two of high school, and that's considered to be completely reasonable, as though to require them to do so would be placing some onerous burden on them.)

So when humanities people are as insistent on the "hard skills" that STEM requires as they are on the "soft skills" that they promote, then they'll have some credibility in explaining why their own courses are so important for everyone.

I am curious about the venues where you experience this intense insistence. At my university I don't see it at all. That said, I am in a fairly science-oriented college and the traditional humanities faculty are in a different college. Their influence on the curriculum in my college is nil. Nor do opinion pieces in CHE or IHE by hopeful humanities professors have any influence. To the extent we have humanities requirements, or expectations of competence in things offered in the humanities, it is because faculty in my college think they matter.

I get the impression that your context is different, and would like to understand it better.

Here is my context: small enrollment university, no separate colleges. Math graduates ~1-2 majors per year, chemistry ~ 5, biology ~ 20. We do not have any engineering programs. Most students major in business, criminal justice, and nursing.

The general education requirements that all students must complete to graduate included 1 course each in English literature, history, math, a natural science, a social science, philosophy, and religious studies. There are other check-the-box requirements in addition to those.

The nursing majors are by far the best students we have. They gain zero benefit from taking 100-level U.S. history, a subject they've already taken multiple times during K-12, and in fact many of them take it online from a community college over the summer and transfer the credits.

The gen ed requirements add time and money to a bachelor's degree, which is deliberate on the university's part, because, given the business model, eight semesters of tuition and meal plans generate more revenue than six semesters. Faculty in particular departments support the gen ed requirements because for them the requirements function as job security.

[marshwiggle]

The same applies to lots of gen ed requirements. I think it would be very useful for engineering students to take courses that exposed them to different perspectives on the disciplines from the humanities. There's lots of environmental history, for example, that is very relevant to engineering fields. You could imagine sequences of courses or team taught courses where faculty from different disciplines collaborated to give students a broader perspective on their fields. However, gen-ed requirements often are just done on the cheap and there's no reason for students to view them as anything but hoops to jump through.

On a slight tangent to this, I've thought that courses designed specifically would do a better job than picking from existing options.

In another thread, I suggested what I'd create as a a science literacy course for non-STEM students. If I wanted to create a useful humanities course to engage STEM students, I'd do something like this:

Take a subject like climate change, and then have units looking at it from the perspective of different humanities disciplines. For instance

• historical; i.e. how environmental damage and environmental stewardship have shifted over time
• geographical; how climate change affect various regions and communities
• anthropological; how the relationship between people and their environment has developed

(No doubt many disciplines could be involved; since it's not my area, I'm just thinking of ones that occur to me.)


In each case, some focus could be on how the way research is done in each discipline gives the insights that it does. Note: None of these require going into flag-waving environmental activism mode; allowing students to see the complexity and the importance of unintended consequences has the most potential for them to think, rather than allowing them to just adopt a specific simplistic political viewpoint.

As Caracal said above, this can't be done "on the cheap" if it's going to actually work. As a general rule, academia is often backwards on this; courses for people outside a discipline tend to be done as cheaply as possible, which virtually guarantees it will undermine whatever minimal interest they may have had originally.

[Caracal]

I've seen some programs that originate this way, and the devolve into hiring adjuncts because the tenure track profs want to teach either similar courses that are more specific to their discipline or just upper level stuff that has nothing to do with the gen ed goals. So, there have to be long term commitments.

Yes, a well thought out and meaningful general education sequence requires strong commitment from faculty. In particular, as you say, a willingness to continue engaging students who will not major in their field and will never take enough classes in the subject to justify engaging at length on a professor's pet topic.

The other piece of this is a strong institutional commitment. If you wanted something like that to work you would need to have small class sizes, encourage faculty collaboration and innovation, and perhaps give faculty full credit for teaching team taught courses. Given the choice, I would never teach the gen ed humanities course at my school. It isn't much fun to teach a big class, mostly filled with students who are only there because the course fit into their schedule.

[downer]

Did anyone else get an email from the National Humanities Alliance asking for a donation to promote their work? It included a link to their toolkit -- I guess trying to appeal to the language of utility.

https://www.studythehumanities.org/toolkit

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm looking at that list of transferrable and soft skills in the report, and I'm thinking to myself that a STEM focused education is equally capable of delivering on most, if not all, of those skills. Sure, there are STEM students who lack those skills, but I am sure the same is true of humanities students.

it is common in engineering to have capstone design courses that are intended to force students to draw upon the entirety of their engineering education to address an interesting problem, and that is a critical way of addressing some of the siloing that is prevalent in our extremely modular system of higher education.

See, this is the objection so often.  No one says that you only get transferrable and soft skills ONLY from the humanities, simply that the humanities are very good for these.  Posters have acknowledged this on this very thread.  I've acknowledged that on this very thread. Last time I pointed this out you got snippy, but here we have it again.  It is a strawman argument.   

Why?

I disagree that high school offers enough quality "exposure" to a variety of subjects, and I am dubious that this is really accomplishable----but that's been gone over.

I am reading people's observations of what a non-siloed, focused gen ed and I am not sure how what people suggest are particularly different from what we now have.

Do we have a good example of a school which has retooled gen eds so they fly free of their silos? 

[mleok]

I've seen some programs that originate this way, and the devolve into hiring adjuncts because the tenure track profs want to teach either similar courses that are more specific to their discipline or just upper level stuff that has nothing to do with the gen ed goals. So, there have to be long term commitments.

Yes, a well thought out and meaningful general education sequence requires strong commitment from faculty. In particular, as you say, a willingness to continue engaging students who will not major in their field and will never take enough classes in the subject to justify engaging at length on a professor's pet topic.

The other piece of this is a strong institutional commitment. If you wanted something like that to work you would need to have small class sizes, encourage faculty collaboration and innovation, and perhaps give faculty full credit for teaching team taught courses. Given the choice, I would never teach the gen ed humanities course at my school. It isn't much fun to teach a big class, mostly filled with students who are only there because the course fit into their schedule.

Definitely, setting up the right incentive system, and providing the resources to encourage sustained engagement by faculty in different disciplines is critical to the success of such an endeavor. But, as others have alluded to, general education is typically done on the cheap, and has the net effect of driving out what little enthusiasm there is for a subject in non-majors, as opposed to sparking an interest.