Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Humanities

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The decline and fall:

The radical scholars recognized Western Civ had to be erased to achieve their goal of destroying the old order and ushering in the new “inclusive” inclusive manifesto. (Remember Jesse Jackson’s chant at Stanford? “Hi-ho, hi-ho, Western Civ has to go”). In the process, the General College was abandoned – and with it went the foundation of a proper college education.

And out went academic standards, which suited the radicals who adopted grade inflation as a gesture against the Vietnam War. College students found it much easier to remain full time students without contending with the onerous course load, and even easier to maintain a 2.0 academic average – the minimum to avoid losing the student draft deferment. Plus students could now choose courses across the spectrum without having to build a foundation of academic rigor.

By the late 1970s, many radical scholars were gaining tenure — the archaic privilege enjoyed by academics that guarantees a job for life — and the power to push their advantage to mold the curriculum to their purposes. New hires were screened for allegiance to the radical manifestos. Traditional liberal arts course work was re-defined to focus on women, race, sexual technique, gays and the environment. The result has been unsound subjects masquerading as worthy academic pursuits — and college graduates who are unaware of their inherited culture.

The public was mostly unaware of this revolutionary change.

Unfortunately, it probably still is. As noted in the piece,the current “humanities” aren’t worth saving, or worth the cost of the tuition for them. At least more people are starting to figure that out.

5 thoughts on “The Humanities”

  1. I was fortunate enough to attend one of those old South military schools, which at the time put a premium on a classical Liberal Arts education. No matter the major, you had to complete two solid years of math, science, economics, english, foreign language, and history (1 year of which was Western Civ). Despite graduating with an unimpressive GPA, I still felt better educated than most of my friends from “normal” colleges. And the math & science reqs left this English major with enough understanding of the fundamentals to succeed at an engineering management job 20 years later. I might be a writer, but damn do I love calculus. Too many artsy types can’t see that it’s as close to a universal languagen as we’ll ever see.
    Sadly, my alma mater has since let some of those requirements slip from 2 years to 1. Nowadays I caution teenagers from pursuing a BA in anything, particularly English. And if the major ends in “…Studies” then RUN.

  2. A couple of months ago there was an article in the New Yorker about MOOCs and their impact on the humanities:

    “Imagine you’re at South Dakota State,” [Peter Burgard, a professor of German at Harvard] said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes. It will probably hurt less prestigious graduate schools first, but eventually it will make it to the top graduate schools. . . . If you have a smaller graduate program, you can be assured the deans will say, ‘First of all, half of our undergraduates are taking MOOCs. Second, you don’t have as many graduate students. You don’t need as many professors in your department of English, or your department of history, or your department of anthropology, or whatever.’ And every time the faculty shrinks, of course, there are fewer fields and subfields taught. And, when fewer fields and subfields are taught, bodies of knowledge are neglected and die. You can see how everything devolves from there.”

    This got me thinking: What does it mean when humanities knowledge gets neglected? I assume that Burgard meant that original research in the humanities would be neglected. But is that a bad thing or a don’t-care kinda thing?

    AFAIK, “original research” in most branches of the humanities (I’ll exclude history and sociology) means a continual re-vamping of critical frameworks. Suddenly it became clear to me. Humanities professors get tenure by concocting some new interpretation of old cultural works. But, because ten or so generations of professors before them have done the same thing to get tenure, interpretations that aren’t full-blown-bat-guano crazy are getting a bit thin on the ground now.

    Enter gender and identity studies. Voila! Whole new vistas of reinterpretations of old cultural works, with accompanying endless papers and books to publish and thereby not perish. And of course once you’ve written a book, it’s only right that you force your students to read it as part of your course syllabus.

    I’m sure that there are plenty of professors truly motivated by liberal/radical politics, but the uniformity of viewpoints has always seemed a bit off to me. The desperate need to say Something New may have more to do with it. With a little luck, maybe the next paradigm to provide wholesale reinterpretation will be a little less corrosive than the last one. One can only hope…

  3. The era of the Enlightenment and Humanism has ended. The future belongs to tribal (formerly national) socialism.

  4. There is too much narrowness in contemporary education and life in general. We have engineers who can’t talk to each other — see the Columbia accident for example. We have people in the humanities who can’t communicate with people outside their narrow specialties. We have business schools (or should I write “busy ness” schools?) that fail to teach MBA students things about humans that affect their companies significantly. I can go on for hours, but I am keeping this brief.

    1. It’s been pointed out in several places that engineers tend to be more familiar with the classics than humanities graduates are with algebra. I wouldn’t be surprised if currently the average STEM graduate could write better than the average humanities graduate.

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