The Humanities Are in Crisis | Hacker News Reader

The Humanities Are in Crisis

theatlantic.com

13 pointsozdave20 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17840090.

I received what is essentially a humanities degree -- a math degree from UW in the College of Arts and Sciences -- in 1990. I loved reading Shakespeare, studying Philosophy, etc... and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Later I got a PhD in Computer Science, but I always cherished and recommended getting a liberal arts degree. Most afternoons in UW's Red Square you would encounter a myriad of street preachers, protestors, activists of all colors and stripes -- it was the kind of environment where your views would eventually be challenged. Debates were often out in the open and you better leave your straw men and ad hominem rants at home. It toughened me up and even altered some of my views. That is the way it should be.

Things have changed a great deal since then. Much of the liberal arts and related fields have been hijacked by the "social justice warrior" types. Free Speech is almost dead on campuses. Classic liberal and thoughtful progressive views have been overrun by those seeking to silence anyone who has an opinion that deviates from PC culture. Students are now indoctrinated into becoming "professional victims" and endorsing "identity politics" and its ilk. Ironically, in the push for diversity (an important goal) there ends up being very little intellectual diversity at all -- humanity professors think in complete lockstep with one another. Outrage and offense is the new badge of honor. Being "triggered" from "micro-aggression" is the new currency. Students are sheltered and protected from anything that they may offend them -- in the end the become intellectually weak.

I haven't visited Red Square in a long while -- but I doubt you see the same crazy speakers that once frequented there. Why would would any thoughtful young folks who thought "outside the lines" even bother anymore -- students just keep their heads down and focus on getting a degree that has future earning potential. If you fight it, you risk your degree. It is a sad conclusion, the humanities are indeed in crisis.

The core problem is humanities have accepted materialism. This leaves two options:

1. Subjectivity to preserve the values of goodness, truth and beauty

2. Deny such values exist

However, the humanities are predicated on the objective existence of these values, which is denied by either option. Thus, the acceptance of materialism necessarily kills the humanities.

Is there really nothing about, say, a novel that is worth applying your mind to? If "accepting materialism" means quitting whatever it is that English professors do then maybe they should just switch to doing something that doesn't require belief in an invisible metaphysical ideal. There's obviously a difference between a good book and a bad one so perhaps they should just study that if the metaphysical ideals aren't holding up.

Good and bad are metaphysical ideals.

If you don't believe in anything metaphysical then good and bad are still statements about the human brain. If you really committed to materialism, you could keep going as an English professor but you would have to start explaining things in different terms.

If anyone was willing to do it, "this painting is beautiful," could be put on exactly the same footing as "this drug cures clinical depression."

I think you mean redefining "this painting is beautiful" as "this painting makes me feel good." Not the same thing.

That depends on your definition of "beautiful".

Sounds like you agree.

The core problem is that during the last century universities changed from places where the privileged would spend some years getting "an education" to basically vocational training schools that everybody who wants a job has to attend. Since humanities don't give you much competitive advantage on the job market, funding dwindles.

>Since humanities don't give you much competitive advantage on the job market, funding dwindles.

Aren't there still as many, if not more, elites than there were last century? I think a much more realistic picture is that both the sciences and the humanities benefited from the GI bill and grew massively, but the sciences "left the house and earned their paycheck" while the humanities remained reliant on teaching. Now that the demand for education is not growing so fast in and of itself, the sciences have kept up the pace by recruiting support from industry while the humanities have had to face the music.

The humanities are the supply line for society's leadership class. That is why WEB DuBois promoted classical education for the freed slaves, instead of just the job training that Washington Carver endorsed. Of course, the powers that be favored Carver's vision, since it meant the white elite would remain on top, so DuBois' chain of African American run classical education schools has all but disappeared and the NAACP he helped found has only become a special interest lobbying group.

College-based humanities accepted materialism centuries ago, when they got comfortable with the idea of training future clergy that could make a living in nearby towns. Travel the back roads of the U.S., and you'll see that New England, the Midwest and the South are rich with small liberal-arts colleges that began as faith-funded schools backed by specific denominations.

Humanities departments continue to operate with a vocational tilt that made sense in the 1950s (heyday of the GI Bill!) training students to earn Ph.D.s and become professors of the humanities at other, rapidly expanding institutions of higher learning themselves. In this model, which persists today, students learn the current cadences of academic writing. That is its own art form, which is fascinatingly different from all other types of writing -- and generally pretty unsuited to everyday use.

This hasn't worked out so well lately, because faculty job openings in the humanities are far scarcer than the supply of new graduates. So students hoping to make it all the way to a professorship end up stuck. As Prof. Schmidt notes in his piece, it's possible for humanities graduates to find good careers in the mainstream economy, but there are a lot of jitters about how to do so.

What's probably fueling this student anxiety (and a desire to avoid pursuing humanities majors) is an apprehension that the faculty is unfamiliar with career paths other than chasing a Ph.D. and trying to earn a faculty position somewhere.

It's actually quite striking how many anthro majors find their way to UX; English majors succeed in sales, etc. But there's no support from faculty to get there. And while understaffed career-services departments do the best they can, learning how to get here from there is much harder than it should be.

By materialism I don't mean earning a living. What I mean is the belief the material world is all that exists. We are seeing the belief work itself out in the destruction of the humanities. However, the science and engineering fields are not immune, since they all depend on the humanities for their credibility. I.e. what sense does science make if there is no objective truth? Or, why worry about engineering good quality products if goodness doesn't exist? Then it's just a matter of what everyone can get away with to get the diploma and the high paying job. Hence the high rates of cheating, plagiarism, faking results, etc.

Humanities education made a lot more sense when the subject of the humanities was believed to exist. Then there'd be reason to have many openings for humanities professors, spin off education jobs in public education, private education, etc.

Thanks for the clarification - and sorry to go full tilt at rebutting an argument you weren't making! (Though it was fun to cover the territory.)

You're right that without any aesthetic sense, everything gets bleak. Are things that dire, though? With the business media getting obsessed about unicorns, $1T market caps, etc., it's easy to believe that money fever has infected everyone. It hasn't. Friends who teach, make movies, deliver social services, write, etc. are still keeping some sense of goodness alive.

>Or, why worry about engineering good quality products if goodness doesn't exist?

Why bother reasoning from our intuitions about what we want when we could just pursue our subconscious goals directly? Who needs to be convinced that they want a product to be good-quality?

> Who needs to be convinced that they want a product to be good-quality?

Many people, apparently.

I got my CS degree from a small liberal arts school, while also pursuing a creative writing major. I also had the chance to perform music, act in plays, study abroad, and do research with my favorite professors. I was never given the tiniest guidance towards employable skills. I would say it was wholly an education in the humanities, as long as you count math (and why wouldn't you?)

I won't try to argue that this education was superior other methods, but I will say I think it's worked incredibly well for me.

“A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits“ this basically sums it up. I think non STEM degrees are what gave upper edge to the first world countries. If you observe developing countries like india where everyone just wants to become engineer or doctor, you will see very one minded direction of life. Everyone is pursuing money.

I think the issues go deeper than the degree program per se. Often the humanities are part of a liberal arts degree, which differs from other degrees not just in the major subject, but also in that it is broad in focus. Where I went to school, for example, you could get a math major from a college of science and engineering, or from the college of liberal arts and sciences. The difference was largely in terms of how much of the coursework was in major versus out of major.

I bring this up because often liberal arts degrees are predicated on an assumption that a person will be seen as more than their degree, even in the labor market. That is, someone who can complete a liberal arts degree in philosophy with good grades and the right extracurricular experiences, who has taken a lot of the right coursework, can go on to get a master's in computer science, or biochemistry, or a law degree, or MD, or learn the right skills from their employer.

What we have now is a problem where too much focus is put on certification. Employers (or their HR departments?) see a degree as a certification to do a particular skill. They don't want to try to surmise these skills from other experiences, or to train new employees in those skills, they want a box checked that says "this person can do A."

This I think is the source of this trend more than anything. It's an equating of degree major with skillset, or ability, or whatnot.

When you live in a society where having X degree is required, either by employer hiring practices or by law, as a certification of being able to do A, B, or C task--even if you do not actually need that particular degree to do those tasks--you are inevitably going to see everyone want to have X degree. When you create an economic environment driven by rent seeking and regulatory capture of one sort or another, you're going to see people try to position themselves accordingly.

I think the rise in interests in MOOCs, etc., and criticism of traditional educational structures in part is a response to this overcredentialing. The irony is that the liberal arts degree, which is supposed to be a kind of happy medium, kind of has been squeezed out from both sides of that argument.

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