Said a 2021 Harvard grad, quoted in "The End of the English Major/Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?" (The New Yorker).
March 1, 2023
"My parents, who were low-income and immigrants, instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job..."
"... 'You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving' was one of the things they would say.... So, when I came, I took a course that was, like, the hardest course you could take your freshman year. It integrated computer science, physics, math, chemistry, and biology. That course fulfilled a lot of the requirements to be able to do molecular and cellular biology, so I finished that, for my parents. I can get a job. I’m educated.... I took courses in Chinese film and literature. I took classes in the science of cooking. My issue as a first-gen student is I always view humanities as a passion project. You have to be affluent in order to be able to take that on and state, 'Oh, I can pursue this, because I have the money to do whatever I want.'... I view the humanities as very hobby-based."
Said a 2021 Harvard grad, quoted in "The End of the English Major/Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?" (The New Yorker).
Said a 2021 Harvard grad, quoted in "The End of the English Major/Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?" (The New Yorker).
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It always amazes me when people discover something that would have been obvious to any educated person 6 centuries ago. The arts and humanities have for millennia been dependent on a variety of things, including the patronage of royalty or aristocracies, slavery and the support slavery gave to persons like Thomas Jefferson to pursue the arts and sciences, and in the more recent past the modern university. This both limited the number of participants in these fields and in my view increased their quality. Meanwhile, the rest of us got to toil away producing our subsistence and no one -- at least until Marx's fantasies -- thought there was anything unexpected in this state of affairs.
Serious Question:
What is it, that they now teach in 'humanities courses'?
The short answer:
Why study, read and revere the history and literature of an oppressor culture?
Funny, I was often asked about qualifications for law school, and my pat response was that you can major in basket-weaving so long as you have good grades and do well on the LSATs.
The humanities have loooooooooooooong been self-indulgent hobby-oriented degrees. For example, one can get funding to pursue a social science graduate degree while philosophy and art and music and religion students often must pay their own way. Retirees and trust fund kids find a way to keep themselves entertained as dilettantes.
Enrollment freefall perhaps follows from the rampant spread of 'critical theory' (CT) across the humanities. As recently as 20 years ago CT was a political/ideological offshoot of French existential philosophy, sociology, and political science. But now, one must spout all sorts of post-modern-Marxist-Woke-snowflake proverbs to get in or get attention across the humanities. And by now we've all heard a million versions of the same song and dance and understand its core silliness. And these degrees still don't result in a self-sustaining career or pay off student loans.
Only wealthy dilettantes need apply.
What happened? Simple: The humanities, all of them, were reduced to the simplest, crudest, most puritanical politics, which bores all but the dullest. I consider it a miracle I completed my English degree a year or two before the darkness descended.
I had a similar attitude. My brother who graduated college 4 years before I started got a history degree. He became a carpenter, in later life, a land conservationist. And he benefitted from the writing ability he developed in college, but that was the mid-1970s. I one the other hand was looking at needing to better myself. The life insurance in trust from our parents was eroded by 1980. To the point I went to that bank on my 18th birthday took the money and put it in a CD at 13% interest. I started in engineering and almost messed up by switching to the "liberal arts" of science, Physics. And was less employable when I graduated, but the Calculus and Physics were a requirement for the job I eventually found.
Even by the mid-70s, the old any college major set you up for a good job as on its last legs. Ironically, I would say a woman who desired to be a stay at home mother could take the most advantage of a classical Liberal Arts degree if she did actually become educated. She could be a daily example of an educated person in her interactions with her children. But not if she remained simply a college graduate.
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"In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship."
Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
"Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal"
Way back in the 1960s I thought as this kid did, though I did it as part of my own thinking, not something done to please my parents. Because I chose accounting as my major I would learn something useful for future work, simultaneously allowing me to study other humanities courses. I gave this advice to my own son. Letting him know that I would not pay for a degree in Elizabethan Sonnet Writing, he wisely chose mechanical engineering. Has worked out.
Tea, crumpets, and humanities.
Same goes for specialized degrees.
My friend is going back to college in the fall to take the classes he missed out on when he was pre-med (he's a recently-retired doctor).
He said pre-med was a grind, and that he didn't have the luxury to take the 'fun' classes...
This doesn't seem very rational. Most Harvard grads go to graduate or professional school. You don't have to be a STEM major to get in, and humanities courses can help raise your GPA.
Mom got a BA in English from UW-Madison in 1948. Many of her letters talk about another Ring on the Floor -- as in the number of engagements kept going up.
How many women go to College for an Mrs. Degree these days?
My son went the liberal science physics degree side, pretty useless except that he was a wizard at math. Then got into an engineering statistical science masters, tremendous difference in employment.
I tried so hard to get him into the engineering branch ( he would have aced it ) but nope. Maybe that home-schooling wasn't the best after all, taught him too much independence. :)
That was always my take on the 'soft' majors.
Things you can study because you dont need a job.
Art studies and such.
If you can get jobs in the field great, but its iffy. Better have a source if income first.
In the 19th century posh Britons took degrees in the Classics--Latin and Greek. They then went off to rule the colonies. There was some objection when English courses were introduced. The ruling class had their own accent and their own arcane knowledge. The study of English diluted the brand. I don't think America's college were ever that elite.....I was an English major and a Philosophy minor. I enjoyed the courses, but I can't say that they ever gave me a leg up in the business world. On the plus side, I gained a layer of wisdom and moral grandeur that makes me the envy of all the CPA's I know.
"The End of the English Major/Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?"
Reality.
I am studying the humanities through one of these institutions. Despite the humanities' reputation for being all about DEI and CRT, I haven't encountered any of that. All of my classes have been excellent and non-political.
This is not relevant to my situation, but you can major in whatever you want and go to work in business. I even asked around among people who hire at some Fortune 100 companies. They all said they didn't care about people's majors. They need hires to check the box for a degree.
An acquaintance fairly often expresses amazement that his son has managed to make a career with a BA in English. He (the father, not the son) is a retired professor of English.
Humanities aren't entirely a waste of time. Very useful if you plan on going on to a writing related field or professional graduate study like law school, seminary, teaching, etc. Not so good at all if your goal is to get a well-paying career with advancement right out of undergraduate.
I earned a BA in English in the 90s. It was useless for employment, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm pretty good at crossword puzzles and Trivia Nights.
The way things are going, subsequent generations won't be able to read and write without technological assistance. In one of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout stories, there is an alien who communicates by farting and tap dancing. This is our future.
He said pre-med was a grind, and that he didn't have the luxury to take the 'fun' classes...
I took my pre-med courses while an English major. There were no student loans for pre-meds at the time. "Not a useful major."
I majored in Philosophy, a field with hardly any employment possibilities. But it helped me get into law school, and it taught me to reason and think logically. So my BA in Philosophy ended up being good for me and for my career as a lawyer.
The subject matter changed to something few students want.
Earlier ages had an upper class that didn't need to work, and people lower down -- if they had the opportunity -- emulated that class. Today's upper class is different. For the most part, they aren't a leisure class anymore or an especially cultured class. Young people emulate our new rulers in going after high-paying jobs. Universities don't push back against that. Could they? Would it make any difference if they did?
It also seems that the emphasis on race, gender, and sexual orientation is a confession on the part of the humanities (and to some extent, the social sciences) that they really don't have anything to say or do. Once you get the ideological message, what else is there?
When people get so much information every day without opening a book, who has time to read literary works? Increasingly, people only read "literary fiction" in college, and there are only so many teaching jobs.
It was very strange and disheartening to go from thinking that the humanities were everything to realizing that they didn't count for anything in the real world, and realizing too, that so many of the people in graduate school who did manage to get jobs were second or third generation academics or people from overseas who had had a more rigorous secondary education.
Technology is going to do away with a lot of jobs. That it hit writing before the calculating is the last bitter pill for the humanities.
I majored in English, in the '70s, and it served me well, but at that time it was a rigorous major, not as rigorous as electrical engineering, certainly, but you expected to work hard, do the reading, all of it, and write your own papers, cheating was frowned upon, even by fellow students, and papers were expected to be logical and evidence based. Those things served me well in my career. Of course, so did the math I learned in finding out that I did not really want to be an engineer, just because I could.
I think that the English major part helped in my career because having read widely made me comfortable in dealing face to face with senior management at companies I worked with, improved vocabulary, for one thing, if that makes any sense.
One type of degree that I would absolutely hate would be the kind where you are basically doing the same thing the day you retire as you were doing your first day of work after college, even if such careers are lower risk in the short term.
Re Vonnegut, I bet his stories couldn't find a publisher today, and yet he nailed the future in so many ways. He was an engineering graduate who became a writer.
When there are no truths, only equally-valid individual lived experiences, why go to college at all?
"I tried so hard to get him into the engineering branch ( he would have aced it ) but nope."
People who have confidence have choices.
The clip you posted takes the tack that the humanities is not a path to an actual living and that's the reason English/Humanities are dropping off everywhere. Yet, gender studies are flying along. Class studies, ethnic studies majors dropping off? I doubt it. There's a lot of HR and DEI director positions to fill out there. So somehow, these empty categories have come into a strong labor market for themselves (which, by itself guarantees they'll be around for some time to come).
I ended up as an English major back in my era because while I had other declared majors that ran the gamut, I always took English and/or writing courses because those were what I liked and I tended to round out my schedule with something I liked. So it was my hobby. I knew from the start that declaring English gave you options of (a) teaching in K-12; (b) possibly teaching in higher ed; (c) getting a job as a writer/copywriter, or (d) getting paid to do something that had nothing to do with your degree. In the end I got my degree in what I had accumulated the most and was offered a job while still finishing school, in a field that had nothing whatsoever to do with English or the Humanities. And I never stopped working until 1 1/2 years ago.
While I would be the first to question the merits of an English degree, I do believe that the Humanities, or the teachings of Western Civilization are crucial to all generations. That is, if you intend to keep your civilization. My example would be this: We've ceased to teach civics or government in K-12. Just how knowledgeable do you think our young people are on how our governments- local, state, and federal- work? I would tell you 9 of 10 cannot tell you who their representative is, or how many Senators come from their state.
As a major- English and the Humanities are useless unless you love them and want to teach them. But as societal knowlege, I think they are both incredibly important to our civil society and should be maintained as requirements (even though I know our best schools are dropping them, or already have. (Stanford, for one.)
I think liberal arts in the past meant researching from different sources, documenting sources, and writing a paper that develops and defends your conclusions. I'm not sure that's what it means today. I feel that a lot of students now are just spoon fed information.
American higher education has marketed itself for decades now, "To get a good job, you need a college education." That's what young people expect out of a college. But recently, it's become obvious to lots of them that any old degree won't be enough. So, of course, they stay away from courses that 1) they aren't really that interested in, 2) they don't need for the degree, and 3) they don't have much of a connection to any job.
I would feel sorry for the people in higher ed if they hadn't made lots and lots and lots of money from marketing that verges on fraudulent--and screwed lots of kids in the process.
I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb
My wife is a business law professor at a large state university. I hear a great deal from her about the lack of real work 80% of the students are generally willing to do. Probably, the biggest defect is that most of them are completely unwilling/unable to read the written materials. Rather than do the analysis required in the course, their briefs are "I think, I feel, I believe". Nobody has ever challenged many of them to perform, and they are entitled to passing grades.
Interestingly, the biggest problem is among those for whom English is not a second language. The shy Chinese girl will work ceaselessly with her very limited English skills to read and understand an 1899 opinion from the Kentucky Supreme Court about the purchase of mason jars.
- Krumhorn
Unless you're good at math and science and like them enough to want to go that route in your career, it probably doesn't matter that much what you major in. There are plenty of careers that don't require you to be whiz at technical stuff. If you know how to write, express ideas, think creatively, and work hard, you'll be fine. The problem with humanities is that at most colleges they've gone woke and lost whatever value they've had in the past. You can still find classes on Shakespeare or great literature and ideas, but to major in English inevitably involves dealing with woke faculty and wokified versions of lit classes. People who might otherwise major in English stay the hell away and instead veer toward softer social sciences like Psychology, Sociology, or Poli Sci (Economics being more mathy and technical). So the humanities have committed suicide.
I was lucky to have studied in the humanities (foreign languages) in the early seventies. Unless you were in a specialized field [i.e. Medicine, architecture, etc.], a good GPA in anything was accepted as proof of ability and tenacity. And employers fully expected to train you in the particulars of their field.
I was offered a full-time job with good benefits by the company I’d worked part-time for during college and did rather well.
"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts.
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
John Adams
As others have noted, the humanities have always been a luxury.
Also, English departments are dropping Shakespeare and adopting Buffy the Vampire Slayer studies.
I'm not kidding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_studies
My theory is that we are still suffering the after effects of the decades of lead being released into the air via leaded gasoline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA
What happened? I'll tell you what happened:
One, the "humanities" basically performed an Auto-da-fé on itself, simultaneously trivializing and beclowning their fields at the same time. Why get an English degree that is essentially meaningless? Look at all the various university and college English programs which chimed in on and agreed with that lunatic professor at the University of Washington who said that "grammar and spelling are racist". What? And, now you tell me that people are eschewing degrees in your subject? Do tell, do tell...
Two, the academy in general has lowered standards to the point where most university degrees are basically what passed for high school diplomas and trade school certificates of generations past, only at a much higher cost. Good God, somewhere around my mother's papers, I have a copy of my grandmother's high school transcript from a good Portland, Oregon high school back around the beginning of the 20th Century. She had things like Greek, Latin, high-level calculus, and all the rest as basic requirements on that. I've seen copies of the textbooks she still had (having had to buy them, and keeping them for her career as a teacher) and a lot of that stuff was at the level we teach in college, these days. If you go and look, many entry-level jobs in modern corporate America which require 4-year degrees used to require graduation merely from "business schools" and "secretarial schools" that were, at most a year or two in length. And, ohbytheway, affordable. The things those schools taught were basically the same things a lot of schools consider themselves successful to impart to modern scholars in four years, to include how to put together basic business correspondence. I'll point out that a lot of today's "scholars" can't even hack writing your basic email without resorting to what amounts to illiterate mumbling. The crap I used to see coming out of commissioned officers that weren't grads of one of the academies... Yeesh.
So, yeah. Most "higher education" in this country is actually no such thing.
The department where I got my BA and did the course work for two MA's in History (I only wrote one thesis, so garnered only one degree) was accused by its new Black chairperson of having become a refuge for housewives and hobbyists. This would have been the early '90s.
Harsh, but not entirely wrong. The reality was that a two-tier system had evolved--the top quarter or so of students and grad students were expected to perform well for A's and good letters of recc for PhD programs at better schools or for jobs; the rest were tolerated and
expected to keep up and not waste too much of everyone's time.
The Humanities may be a luxury, but they are portable and really rather inexpensive in the context of modern American culture. Nobody studies them for Fame and Fortune, though they seem to spur a lot of (hopefully cathartic) resentment for some reason.
Both sons graduated with majors in English. Oldest making in the low 300 thousands. Youngest, just beginning, makes 200 k at 25 years old. Medieval lit for him. Carl Ichan, billionaire, philosophy major. Jon Gray, billionaire, English major. Michael Eisner, English major. Jack Ma English major.
There is a larger market than one might think for educated men and women. Educated. Not trained.
One thing about a lit degree is that literature is about emotional manipulation, you are happy to pay the writers who are really good at it to manipulate your emotions. It's good to have the ability to recognize when your emotions are being manipulated.
Writers do it, politicians do it, courtroom lawyers do it, advertising agencies do it.
I had two sisters who majored in English. One is a lawyer today and the other works in computer science- the latter one graduated from Harvard, but did a second degree a few years later at UMass in CS. Sometimes it takes people time to figure out what they want to do for a living. When I started college, I was going to go to medical school, so I majored in Chemistry and Biology. I figured out the middle of second year that I preferred chemistry by a wide margin, and though I finished both majors, I did the minimum effort for the biology part, though later in my career I ended up learning a lot more biology than I did in college (learned a lot more chemistry, too.)
If I had children, I would encourage them to work for a while before going to college, like starting at age 16 or younger. I wish I had done so.
"In one of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout stories, there is an alien who communicates by farting and tap dancing. This is our future."
This is our present!
Dad was a laborer; mom a stay-at-home housewife. Neither finished high school, but they sent me to Yale. I definitely can relate to the quoted passage. Any time I wanted to yank my dad's chain after I got to Yale, I'd tell him I was thinking of majoring in History instead of one of the "hard" sciences.
FWIW, I'm glad I went through the crucible of the sciences and made my career there, but I think my calling actually was History.
"The subject matter changed to something few students want."
Very likely true.
It is only a recent historical phenomenon for so many people to attend colleges. Colleges were essentially finishing schools for young men from affluent families. It was considered necessary for them to know history, literature, languages, the sciences, philosophy and other such studies to be considered suitably prepared to join others of the upper classes in their positions as rulers of society.
Every civilization needs a King, a Warrior, and a Wizard. Wizards are often considered superfluous, though, because how they contribute to an organized society isn't as obvious as the other two.
Part of the reason for the demise of humanities courses/majors is "hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go."
The other reason is that employers today don't want someone who is well-rounded with a general education, however great, because they don't do on-the-job training. They want pre-made specialists for the job they are hired to do.
And if per chance you lose your job, it is YOUR responsibility to pay for the expense of retraining for someone to maybe hire you, rather than someone hire you and train you for the job.
Formerly, English majors sifted into three rough piles:
1) Children of wealthy parents whose future comfort and social standing are assured, consequently, their hoped-for BAs in English are just part of the maturation ceremony.
2) Aspiring writers who trust the English department's curricula will somehow open the gate barring the literary highway to riches and glory while being quite oblivious to the numerous professorial chairs occupied by failed writers. "In May I'll graduate summa cum laud, by July I'll have that 7-figure Random House advance." Two years later the newly minted BA applies to grad school hoping to get work teaching English at some bottom-tier community college.
3) The unmotivated student with no consuming interest in anything but frat parties and getting laid.
So why the decline?
1) Wealthy parents aren't the safety net they once were. If the family net worth isn't reckoned in at least eight figures, one had better study something that pays well.
2) Declining functional literacy means a contracting job market for writers.
3) Black Studies, Queer Studies, Trans studies, and all the other bogus "studies" cirricula offer an even more relaxed lifestyle for the unmotivated student. How often has a Black Studies major flunked out of the program? Pretty rarely, I surmise.
As others have noted, the humanities have always been a luxury.
The humanities must be of marginal interest to a marginal human.
What's more depressing is the near-universal eclipse of the classics department. I dread the future Western civilization faced with relearning all those bitter lessons of an advanced society falling flat on its face because no one cared about anything but "transitioning" until the lights went out.
What is it, that they now teach in 'humanities courses'?
Chimpanzee politics.
Ook-ook, Dr. Zaius.
The Humanities in the USA have always been a joke. Occassionally the professors did good work, but mostly it was just people who wanted a soft job and to chase Co-eds.
The only real purpose of "The Humanitites" is transmit the values of western civilization. Once that got lost, it was all over. Besides, the vast majority of people don't go to College to learn anything, they're just punching their ticket so they can get a good job at a Big orgainzation, or move on to a professional degree.
And people who are smart and have connections get well paying jobs no matter what they study in college. Yoel Roth studied Gay sex in College, and got the 2nd most powerful powerful position at TWitter. Literally determining whether people could read the tweets of the POTUS.
"Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?"
It's pretty simple. Humanity faculty are not providing anything of use to their students. I actually find this outcome heartening.
It was also instilled in me by my parents that at the end of college I needed a job. We/I didn't have the money to do anything else. I am grateful for the guidance they provided me in this regard. My life would have been poorer, in both a figurative and financial sense, if I had done otherwise. And it isn't as if this path deprived me of intellectual stimulation. Quite the contrary.
The “Humanities” were primarily the creation of class of privileged people who didn’t have to concern themselves with such plebeian worries like making a living. Good for them. And that’s why I have degrees in engineering and law so I could make a living. I did enjoy those courses in the “humanities” and still read a lot of history and novels. But I didn’t go into debt getting a degree that didn’t enable me to make a living.
Why would you need a college to pursue an interest in the humanities in this day and age?
Call me marginal, but I think there is more wrong--and at much higher individual and societal costs--in athletic departments at our temples of learning, than in our humanities programs.
It would probably surprise a lot of commenters here just how normal most humanities folk are.
I see the common rush to declare English majors and other humanities degrees as right and proper. No one, seems to have gone to the point of declaring only the Liberal Arts major is educated....anymore.
But the question is, Is the majoring in English Lit or other humanities worth the lifelong debt it now costs? And if so, please tell your fellow, but younger grads, to stop whining about their student loans. They should think smart thoughts while they do whatever is necessary to make money and pay off their party costs.
From 1923, "A man does not come to college to learn to earn a living; he comes to college to learn live!". Which is a nice sentiment, again stop whining about your indebtedness and continue to live like you should have in college, poor.
But the current reality about college is that a degree is no longer a guaranteed job, and really hasn't been for 40+ years, but the colleges kept the "Cargo Cult" going and going.
But, I want to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is intellectual services. It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor's degree, you're going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you'd get a great job. And, in college, you'd basically learned artificial intelligence, meaning, you carried out the instructions that the faculty member gave you. You memorized the lectures, and you were tested on your memory in the exams. That's what a computer does. It basically memorizes what you tell it to do.
But now, with a computer doing all those mundane, repetitive intellectual tasks, if you're expecting to do well in the job market, you have to bring, you have to have real education. Real education means to solve problems that the faculty who teach don't really know how to solve.
And that takes talent as well as education.
So, my view is we've got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century. You've got to recognize that just because you had an experience with, say, issues in accounting, doesn't mean that you have the ability to innovate and take care of customers who have problems that cannot be coded.--Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
Oh, and the best way to assess an Humanities/Liberal Arts department is to see what they did in 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Not much? Well, there's your sign.
Hey, I never once went to a frat party!
I heard that the current college dropout rate is about %40. Sad if true.
I think it’s a combination of the high cost of college, the attention span of students, the flakiness of humanities professors, and the online access to troves of insightful analysis and guidance to help people self educate in subjects.
Understanding literature, history, philosophy, theology, sociology, and psychology is beneficial. I graduated from college in the 90s and am disheartened to see so many people my age or older who are susceptible to fads, lack basic self reflection, cover themselves in tattoes, and are partisan ideologues
The purpose of a liberal arts education should be to help someone become open minded, inquisitive, curious, benevolent, humble and grateful.
It’s up to individuals to do this for themselves.
there is an alien who communicates by farting and tap dancing. This is our future.
Seems that once again, I am ahead of my time.
The H/humanities have always been a minority interest.
As far as going into debt for education's sake, I never did, and I don't understand why anyone would. My own humanities interests don't generally pay enough to make taking on debt advisable, IMO, though many of my compeers chose differently.
If I had thought it impossible to make a living in the liberal arts in 1971, I wouldn't have bothered with college at all. I certainly never gave a shit about 90% of what passes for higher education. Real estate finance? Fashion merchandising? Sports and recreation management? Football and basketball?
GMABAGMWAS!
"The subject matter changed to something few students want."
I go with the above statement. You can graduate in English Literature without having read Shakespeare or Milton or Lincoln and, as that became the norm, interest in "literature" declined. A humanities graduate could, and still can, get a job teaching so I don't think it is the job issue per se that caused the decline. Rather it's the horror of studying comic books in college and then going on to teach CRT in the public schools. But here's a new wrinkle in our time. If you get a traditional-based education, you can home-school your children thus saving $20,000 a year or more for a private school so trad-ed is a good investment. People aren't really thinking that way, yet life is coming out that way for increasing numbers of families.
But the real reason for studying the humanities is the humanities: One can only point to examples. Here, for instance, is Milton describing the Seraph Abdiel, an angel in Hell who has spoken out against Satan and all his assembled hosts as Abdiel turns and walks away through the crowd out of Hell. Abdiel represents the Puritan mentality, New England as it was, a mentality now similarly driven forth from Harvard.
So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found:
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn,...
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.
"The subject matter changed to something few students want."
I go with the above statement. You can graduate in English Literature without having read Shakespeare or Milton or Lincoln and, as that became the norm, interest in "literature" declined. A humanities graduate could, and still can, get a job teaching so I don't think it is the job issue per se that caused the decline. Rather it's the horror of studying comic books in college and then going on to teach CRT in the public schools. But here's a new wrinkle in our time. If you get a traditional-based education, you can home-school your children thus saving $20,000 a year or more for a private school so trad-ed is a good investment. People aren't really thinking that way, yet life is coming out that way for increasing numbers of families.
But the real reason for studying the humanities is the humanities: One can only point to examples. Here, for instance, is Milton describing the Seraph Abdiel, an angel in Hell who has spoken out against Satan and all his assembled hosts as Abdiel turns and walks away through the crowd out of Hell. Abdiel represents the Puritan mentality, New England as it was, a mentality now similarly driven forth from Harvard.
So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found:
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn,...
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.
I served on the university faculty senate for many years. The experience often prompted me to wonder why people with real love of learning and humane studies had to waste time with the likes of accounting profs and tennis coaches (not to mention the Ed-schoolers).
"The purpose of a liberal arts education should be to help someone become open minded, inquisitive, curious, benevolent, humble and grateful."
And college students used to be, presumptively, "of good moral character."
Pretty words, but they haven't been the reality for decades.
above commebts recall scene in Atlas Shrugged ...
... When a professor of literature saw Francisco on top of a pile in a junk yard, happily "dismantling the carcass of an automobile," he said, "'A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.'"
Francisco replied, "'What do you think I'm doing?'"
speaking of slavery and the support slavery gave to persons like Thomas Jefferson to pursue the arts and sciences,...
did anything useful come out of his University of Virginia in early years?
I think the drop in humanities started long before the 2000's, and long before the spread of critical theory. My hypothesis is that it coincides with the expansion of college access after World War II, a trend which has only increased in recent years. Back before the GI Bill, when college was mostly limited to the wealthy and maybe a few scholarship boys, the people who went to college could all afford to study the humanities. The "humanities" was also still a fairly rigorously defined concept, with a traditional canon of classics and rhetoric and the like. This was around the same time as the growth of new pseudo-scientific approaches to traditional humanities subjects (e.g. sociology, Marxist history, linguistics, etc.), but before those approaches had become dominant in the academy. It was still sort of a finishing school for rich young men.
Once college access was expanded to the masses, however, the masses weren't looking for college education so they could rattle off Latin tags -- they wanted something that would help them get jobs. And that pushed them towards non-humanities subjects.
College was still limited to high academic performers through the 80's or 90's or so, so there was still a non-trivial wage premium that looked like it was connected with college education. But since 2001, the percentage of Americans with college degrees has skyrocketed, from an already high 31.5% in 2001 to 52.8% in 2021. And the incremental college degrees are probably concentrated in younger age cohorts, so their percentage college attainment is probably even higher. That is, the current set of college graduates includes people who in prior generations would have been mediocre high school graduates at best. As the signaling value of a college degree has correspondingly plummeted -- it's now basically just a crude filter that screens out people who are complete screwups (along with some other categories, e.g. people who for financial or personal reasons have not been able to go to college) -- I think students have been drawn even more strongly to degrees that they think will teach them practical workforce skills and distinguish them in a way that an otherwise meaningless bachelors degree will not. I suspect some students are mistaken about what will be useful (e.g. I don't know that an undergraduate degree in business or marketing or whatever has much practical use), but regardless, I think this concern pushes them away from subjects like English.
asking many lawyer commenters ... what about ripples effects from Griggs
Ha.
Have you looked up the English professors at the ASU?
“ Devoney Looser is an internationally recognized scholar of British women’s writings”
“ Adamson is President's Professor of environmental humanities and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative”
“ Ratcliffe's research focuses on intersections of rhetoric, feminist theory, and critical race studies.”
“ Brown is a public historian and a scholar of African American literature and culture.”
“ Lester's specialization is African American literary and cultural studies.”
“ Warriner is an educational anthropologist who examines the social, political, economic, and ideological dimensions of immigration and transnationalism.”
“ Adams research interests are in the study of language in its social and linguistic context.”
“ Bate is an international leader in green thinking and applied humanities, with scholarly expertise in sustainability as well as in Shakespeare, life-writing, Romanticism, contemporary poetry, theatre, and visual culture.”
“ Bebout has authored two books: "Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies" and "Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White."
“ Blasingame focuses on young adult literature, Indigenous education, secondary writing instruction, preparing pre-service teachers, and cowboy poetry.”
“ Broglio's research focuses on how philosophy and aesthetics can help us rethink the relationship between humans and the environment.”
“ Cohen is the dean of humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is widely published in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, and the environmental humanities.”
"Hey, I never once went to a frat party!"
tim in vermont, underprivileged undermotivated student.
It is only a recent historical phenomenon for so many people to attend colleges. Colleges were essentially finishing schools for young men from affluent families.
Yes, but it is also a recent historical phenomenon that high schools have failed to give all but the elite an adequate education. The rest now have to go to college to spend at least the first year or two learning what they should have learned (and a generation ago would have learned) in high school.
N.B. I read the census chart completely wrong. Those were raw numbers not percentages. The general point still stands, though, even if the 2021 total is only 85 million out of a total population > 25 of maybe 275 million (so about 30% with college or higher). There's been a significant increase in percentage terms and it's biased towards young people.
I needed a degree for OCS. Further planning seemed irrelevant. So, BA in psych. Made a living in sales.
And I know how to read "studies". Good training for a citizen.
I served on a Navy ship with the first English major Naval Academy graduate, a self-important asshole with short man complex. His career was shortened by punching an enlisted man who, in answer to the punch, hit him five times before he hit the deck, out cold.
@ Quaestor - Chimpanzee politics is actually fascinating and important. Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes was a pathbreaking work (de Waal is an animal behaviorist, not a humanities professor). Concerned that the first book was too Machiavellian, he followed it with Peacemaking Among Primates.
They're both very good. De Waal's first language is Dutch but he writes better than 99.999% of native English speakers.
Much good stuff in here, most of which I can't add to without being repetitive. I started out in computer science, did the math and some programming courses, then decided it was boring and switched to archaeology/anthropology. Eventually got a PhD in the latter (2001). By the early 1990s there was a complete glut of PhDs in anthropology in general. By that time, I'd been working in public health as an analyst/data manager, using the skills I'd learned in comp sci. But I was also able to write really well, and that helped in carrying out and doing research with others and on my own.
It may have been Charles Osgood who once told a story of meeting a carpenter/cabinet maker who'd gone to college and majored in something (like English Lit) and wasn't it odd that he then ended up "working with his hands"? The carpenter said it made his life richer and fuller because he could read and appreciate the written word.
I wouldn't tell anyone not to major in the humanities exactly. . . .or even get a PhD in one if you really love the subject matter. But you have to do so with your eyes open and realize the costs and benefits and that you still have to make a living with useful skills.
My older brother had a very high IQ and was majoring in humanities at a small mid-western college. I remember my dad asking him why he didn't learn a trade as well. So he enrolled in Lewis Colleges A and P program and became an aviation mechanic. (airframe and powerplant). A 2 year plus program of 44 hour days 50 weeks a year. He had his helicopter and avionics ticket as well as his radio license. He was a 747 specialist.
This is a rephrasing of a very old saying..."I am a soldier so my child can be a doctor. My child will be a doctor so her child can be an artist". Switch out "I am a soldier" with "I work three jobs (or spend my life at my small business)..." and you have this kid's family's story. Humanities majors are great for knowledge, but the paychecks lag behind STEM and legal careers.
My view of humanities as a hobby is the complete opposite. I look at the humanities as central to education (along with math) and computers as a hobby. A well-paying hobby that I enjoy.
One of my nephews majored in English. He wanted to become a teacher, and his parents counseled him to major in English rather than education. He now teaches English and mathematics.
I majored in history, but took math and computer science courses on the side for what in my mind was their hobby value. That worked out well career-wise. It’s surprising how many people in the IT field these days lack good math skills.
There are a lot of reasons, not least of which is the purity spiral that has led to people trying to make the have-it-both-ways argument that "Western culture is the most oppressive, destructive and soul-killing social machine ever created; You should pay a lot of money to study it." But a much bigger factor is the massive shift that has happened in American culture in the past 25 years. Middle-brow, literary culture was swept away by technology, and nothing has replaced it. Remember "Book of the Month Club," and newsweeklies that almost all middle-class people read that had Books, and Film, and Culture sections in the "back of the book"? In the 50s and 60s BoMC featured Hemingway, Faulkner, Kesey, Bellow, Malamud, but even up through the 90s "Literary fiction" could compete with scandal biographies or political books? It wasn't that long ago when when everybody would buy the summer's hot or controversial novel--Bonfire of the Vanities, The Secret History, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil--and people would actually read it and talk about it? That's all gone, so kids don't grow up in households and communities in which high-quality reading is central. At the same time, the high schools went spasmodically anti-West, anti-white, anti-male and nuked most of the books that had been touchstones for 2 or more generations because they were both easy and good--Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath--fell out of the curriculum and were replaced with....a whole variety of books that the students didn't necessarily enjoy and which parents didn't push them to enjoy because they were unfamiliar to parents (there are great books by non-Western, non-white, female writers, but nobody has found a "canonical" set of them that can work as the center of a high school curriculum that will give students a shared core of literary experiences when they start college. It also turns out that when you pass everything through the "no offense" filter and then the "politically correct" filter, and then the "identity politics representation filter," you end up with books so bland that reading them is like eating putty.
This semester I am teaching a Vikings and Old Norse class in which we are right now reading Jackson Crawford's translation of the Elder Edda poems. These are HARD poems--allusive, information-dense, confusing--and my students seem to be absolutely loving them, exactly BECAUSE they are not bland or inoffensive ("Shut up, Freya. Every person in this room thinks you are a bitch" is one of the tamer of the insults in Lokasenna). One first-year student--who very candidly told me he only signed up for the course because it didn't conflict with other classes and/or sports-team practices and games--said on Monday: "I've never had an English class where we talked about the individual words in poems," long pause, "but it isn't boring!" That's a common student experience.
Thanks to omnipresent digital media and smart phones, ubiquitous video, constant distraction, stupid politics, terrible curricula written by un-erudite people, and a crap publishing industry, our culture is producing massive numbers of young people who have never gotten pleasure out of slow, calm, deep-focus reading. Why would they major in English? But, if you think it's no big deal that this de-literarization of American culture is happening: if you don't do a LOT of that kind of reading, your internal language model isn't big and rich enough for you to ever be a good writer--no matter how many workshops you take--and we'll pay for that failure in the long run.
Advantage of US over UK. There one applies to "read" one subject, generally for degree in 3 years. Here one "majors" in a subject but can take many or most courses outside one's major, with degree generally in 4 years. Where I went, 36 credits to graduate, only 12 for my major in the humanities.
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