If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.
Economics has become a clown science to me personally, because you can even tell them that you have a method to accomplish everything they claim happens automatically through a handful of policies and they will laugh you out of the room, while they keep juggling (and sometimes dropping) chainsaws and telling you that you just need to hold them right.
If you have a crush on me I'd suggest sending a PM.
Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.
Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't necessarily say anything about overall trends.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
https://www.rand.org/education-employment-infrastructure/pro...
It has gotten worse statistically. It's not just optics. This is critical as much of the western world is still living in the illusion that, "liberal democracy (the great civilizer) is that last form of government." Tell that to a Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Chinese, or Turkish person.
There were plenty of wars in the middle ages and the nobles and peasants weren't exactly equal either.
There's a reason Jordan Peterson is so famous especially on the, "new right." There's a reason people take medical advice from the JRE program. There's a reason half of Americans believe in angels. It's because we don't have the institutions and incentives require to create something better than Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. That's the best you get with the current set.
Tangentially related; there's a better, "science" lying in waiting:
https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd...
JP is firmly coming from academia (got famous with his lecture videos taught at Harvard and U of Toronto), "the institutions created" him. You just disagree with him, but that's not the same. He's not some outsider to academia.
Academia became very dishonest and people noticed. Maybe the replacements are even worse, but the trust will be very hard to gain back. It's very easy to destroy prestige and consensus and takes long to build it up. Of course self-reflection cannot be expected at all. I don't expect it.
It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing, recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't responsible for the issues that the company is facing.
Back in those years, at I suppose a Tier-3 school, I went to some academic ceremony where the professors wore their robes. I was impressed at how spiffy the crimson Harvard robes looked. Somebody more sociologically aware would have thought, Hmmm, there sure are a lot of Harvard Ph.D.s on the faculty here, and considered why.
Yes, and the US population went from about 130 million in 1940 to 330 million in 2020, while the percent of adults with a college degree went from about 5% to about 40%. There were a few decades of particularly rapid growth.
When I first heard Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze blasted out as I walked in darkness down the hillside to the womens' dorms, I realized it was a new age and a good time to be alive!8-))
He’s one of the best people to talk to in the department. Kind, passionate and compassionate, interested first and foremost in ideas and people. No ego, doesn’t care about telling anyone he’s smarter than them (he is though), just wants to figure things out together.
The junior faculty can’t afford to be that way.
You have to give breathing room for creativity to unfold, but the breathing room can also be taken advantage of.
Also, it used to be more accepted to play elite inside baseball, hiring based on prestige, gut feel and recommendation. Today it's not too different in reality, but today we expect more egalitarianism and objectivity, and do literature metrics become emphasized. And therefore those must be chased.
Similar to test prep grind more broadly. More egalitarianism and accountability lead to tougher competition but more justice but less breathing room and more grind and less time for creative freedom.
What a stupid fucking idea that was!
It is a great idea.
We just don't live in a great society where your naive thinking would have been fitting.
Alternatively take up a day job like everyone else and join a philosophy / arts / book club as a hobby.
We have more access than ever to the materials.
That was not the request, nor claim.
Your last sentence:
> It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
> Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0...
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
There's not further justification needed than the fact that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-blowing.
Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By all means go write great novels that express the human condition. But better go live a real life with adventure and real non-academics around you and write about that. Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful paintings. But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Its also the case that you wouldn’t have a great understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the latter you actually read and analyze the text at the level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don’t actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty and the course obviously, I just wouldn’t trust most philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way, so history, art, science, politics, philosophy, technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal, cross-cutting way.
For example to understand the political relevance of some art movement, you need to know the history of the period, understand the art, the political climate, the philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical context, and I'd argue you should actually understand evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but quantitatively including our modern understanding and what he couldn't know then), also his religious background, you should understand what is Unitarianism and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted, and how their general situation was at that time, etc. etc.
But in my experience academics really dislike interacting with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any benefit in an exchange because their publications are aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course sometimes it works, but in my experience "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well known bubble and be left alone.
That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality.
> Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer".
> But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.
I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way.
It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines.
So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.
Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto.
Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge.
In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc.
Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.
The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation.
Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important.
Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
> For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
I'd say that concrete stuff like resolving authorship questions is not really the lion's share of digital humanities. And the key thing there is that there was an answer that was found. The mere fact that the field changes because of new techniques and "novel interpretations" doesn't get us very far. The question is whether such changes are an advance over previous research or simply a change. In scientific fields if a new theory is accepted it means the old theory is either enlarged or discarded; we either decide "we knew X was true, and now we know Y is also true" or we decide "we knew X was true but now we know it is false and actually Y is true". But "new interpretations" can just mean something like "some people think X and now some other people think Y", but without reference to any ground truth this doesn't represent forward progress.
I'll add that I agree that humanities courses are valuable and that society would benefit from more people taking them. I just don't think that focusing on the aspects of humanities that are slightly more scientific is a good way to justify that. Insofar as something like resolving authorships questions is concrete and measurable, it's because it's using scientific methodology. The humanities cannot beat science at its own game. I see the humanities as more valuable in how they provide a broader context and motivation for scientific and technical work. I don't think this is incompatible with what you said, it's just a matter of what gets the emphasis.
In physics the ground level is solving a new engineering problem in industry. You use the recipes and methods you learned in physics class to formulate your problem in the language of physics and solve it. Once removed is teaching the equations and methods themselves. Twice removed is discussing how the physics knowledge was produced historically and how research is done today.
I do belive though that learning about the history of science is immensely enlightening. In school it seems like these things just fell from the sky fully formed like Athene from Zeus' forehead. Kuhn's book on the Copernican revolution is super interesting. I found it better than the more famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The latter is more abstract and tries to build a big theory, while the former mostly just narrates how it happened in the concrete case of Copernicus, Kepler et al.
This isn't to say that opinions don't or can't have value, but just having someone say "I think X" or "Professor Blah thinks X" isn't in itself important by virtue of the content of X. This is especially true if the subject of the opinion (what it is about) is something that is rather far removed from the realm of fact. There is not really any meaningful sense in which a given text, for instance, "really does" instantiate a Jungian archetype or a Freudian urge or whatever. But I get the impression some humanities scholars think there is, that when they debate among themselves about such things, there is a "fact of the matter".
Not all humanities scholarship is like this, but I think the proportion has increased over time. To my mind what it misses is that the important thing about such humanistic opinions is not their content in and of itself but the ways such opinions are formed and what kinds of "evidence" can be found to support them. An alternative goal would be for students to read things, engage with them from their own perspective, and learn how to solidify and articulate their response, as well as (importantly) to elucidate its sources both in themselves and in the text (i.e., "my reaction to this story is X, and I think that because the story says Y but also I have had experiences A, B and C that led me to think about things in such-and-such way"). This is likely more valuable than simply being taught someone else's opinion.
I think this approach is sometimes shunned because it is perceived as navel-gazing or having students "just learn about themselves". But this perception may partly be due to a fear of acknowledging that what I said above is true, namely that opinions on such matters have little intrinsic value, and therefore the students' opinions are almost as valuable as those of more senior scholars.
All this is basically to say that I think the humanities could be perceived as much more "valuable" and positive if they shifted more towards the idea of "these are some ways to have a rich life, gain an awareness of other people's opinions and how to infer their sources, and learn how to extract a meaningful experience by careful attention to what you're confronted with in life".
https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acqui...
The significance to the University financial picture cannot be understated.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John Adams:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
-- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)
In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire to devote years of their lives to studying the arts.
Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of study.
That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend. John Adams studied political science because his business was the business of government. Studying political science today -- as an otherwise directionless middle-class student relying on loans and scholarships for tuition -- is not really hearing the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended.
Yes, but considering the contemporary assault on democracy and the rule of law, it seems apt.
> the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended
It depends on what you mean by pragmatism. I'd call it public pragmatism, not mere private pragmatism. Adams calls it his "duty" to study, and goes on to talk about the "liberty" and "right" to student other subjects. The obvious interpretation, I think, especially given who Adams is and his role in the founding of the US, is that he has the obligation to fight for democracy and liberty. Otherwise, he could probably just accumulate person wealth and allow his literal descendants, and those only, to study whatever they want.
Everything has an opportunity cost. Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
Humanities are critical to society and have been for many thousands of years.
Getting rid of the department because of "glum" people, is downright silly.
Curmudgeonly professors are part and parcel of universities. These are intellectuals, by default they don't fit into normal society. Universities are where they thrive.
Don't worry be happy, is that what you're saying?
What's hilarious about this is how short sighted and stupid universities are. Their cash cow programs are the ones DIRECTLY TARGETED by AI. What's going to distinguish some grade seeker that walks through Uni looking for 4.0 atop a pile of AI generated crud, and a real thinker?
It's going to be humanities. It's going to be the "liberal arts".
Not that I'm saying humanities won't need to adapt. The take home term paper will probably need to be replaced by verbal argument and defense, so they can prove they actually understand without an AI.
Humanities and actual intellectualism, as opposed to degree rubberstamping, is how universities will survive AI.
It's also amazing to me that as college costs have skyrocketed 10x higher than they used to be, humanities require almost none of that increase. Nor does it need the administration.
You can't afford humanities? I know "where is the money going" has reached comically Kafkaesque levels in modern "education", but this takes the cake.
Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with difficult texts—they were the living embodiment of institutional melancholia.
The faculty—and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring even Enigma would envy—presided over this misery with what can only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was not to be remarked upon.
Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely demoralize students—they actively corrode the very institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants too much awareness of cause and effect.
Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find themselves unable to justify continued investment in these programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having replaced them with something else entirely—a cargo cult version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to fund its own negation indefinitely.
(I really wish they would update the HN guidelines on this so that it is easier to point users to.)
It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.
U of C notably does not have an engineering program. When I attended (in the 90s), the rumor was that, over the years, several alumni had offered to make significant donations to start one, but it was always rejected for being "too applied."
We didn't even has a CS major for a long time, instead having "Mathmatics with a emphasis on computer science." When CS was introduced as a major, it was still very heavy in theory. I would estimate I didn't touch a computer for half of my classes?
There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them.
TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it.
P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.
The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for escapist fun, like a fandom).
You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because same disease, different patient.
You just described a lot of research in mathematics
You mean every research article in any subject that I have ever read.
But that’s the audience for research.
Read the survey articles if you’re looking for a more palatable exposition. Research is written for researchers.
Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?
A real question for you. How have you attempted to interact with modern humanities research? I'm married to a historian. A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership. Presses ask "how will this be of interest to the general public" when engaging with scholars to decide what books to publish.
I have a CS PhD. In comparison to my experience doing CS research, history research is vastly more likely to consider a non-expert audience. I cannot speak to other fields within the humanities, but this data point makes me rather skeptical of your claim.
There's a ton of interest in history. Always has been in pop culture (with WW2 producing a looooooot of material based off of it, ranging from truly authentic such as Schindler's List to loosely affiliated such as the MCU), to be honest. And it's not just pop culture. No matter what, history tends to be a staple subject in schools, every town worth its name has some sort of local museum telling the story of said town. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
In contrast, there isn't much money to be made discussing gender identities so no one cares about it outside of the humanities and non-cisgender people, so where's the incentive for researchers to write "in layman's terms"?
I am now going to speculate, though if this isn't your reason, I apologize. Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
You also say: "It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public." Is any research? In any field? Looking at the remaining unsolved Millennium Problems in mathematics, do you think that the general public has any interest in the "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture?" Whatever that is? I don't. I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's quite interesting if you do.
I do not believe that your point is correct.
I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer), but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.
It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because, if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions, statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.
I could compare this to my average experience attempting to approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's concept of différance. Here I find myself reading explanations that seem to recursively invoke other neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
Yes, I think humanities people are having STEM-envy and it's bad. They should not frame it in terms of rigor and complexity. The humanities are much closer to art, and that's fine. We need art and culture. As commonly said, politics is downstream of culture. Storytelling and myths and fables and parables form a bedrock and a platform for living together. In its ideal form it is more like holistic wisdom, not a narrow rigorous specialization like designing more efficient internal combustion engines or something.
And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it.
Also, essentially fake fields exist in abundance. A lot of business management stuff is like that. Basically someone makes up cute acronyms and bullet lists (what are the 5 characteristics of XY, what are the 7 criteria for Z), and definitions and the actual content behind it is super thin. I had classes like that in college and all STEM students learned the whole thing on the day before the exam. Also, the more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.
There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces. I like them, if they are written well. But it's not rigor.
It would be great to hear the opinion on this from someone who thinks the humanities research (eg. literary criticism journals) are rigorous AND have also passed a college-level serious STEM course like Electromagnetic Fields or Graph Theory or Linear Algebra with a good grade. I think most humanities people just don't really understand what rigor actually means. It's not just about using words that have special definitions for more efficient communication or something.
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> If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
Yes, it's on purpose. It's the statement itself. The content of the message is reflected in the form it is presented. It's in the same lineage as Dadaism, or the empty-canvas-as-painting etc. His philosophy is literally called "deconstruction". And if you ask "but what is the result?", well it's the influence on other academics and thinkers. Surely you heard a lot in recent years that X or Y thing is just a construct and should be deconstructed or dismantled etc. That's the result.
Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)
But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
This is a good point. Gödel was interested in theology for example. Or look at Warren McCulloch (of McCulloch & Pitts, 1943 fame, the paper that first modeled neurons mathematically and built logic networks with it), who had a theological early education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw These thinkers had a much broader view of humanity and science and knowledge than common today, where academics follow an extremely narrow specialty and PhD students often proudly admit they never read any paper older than 5 years, but mostly just from the last 2 (in AI), since the work is always anyways extremely incremental and will be anyway irrelevant in a few years. And vice versa, the humanities people closed up among themselves and cooked up an unrecognizable thing to an educated person from 100 years ago.
With some of the humanities I feel like the lightning never strikes the ground.
A huge chunk of the humanities have been neck deep in esoteric discourse about social justice for decades. Meanwhile down here on the ground things are going backward. More and more people are rediscovering things like “race science” and “traditional” ideas about the roles of women, etc. This is happening all over the world.
When is some dude in a toga going to descend from the ivory tower with a powerful rebuttal and a new way of framing these issues that renews the flame of liberalism and free society?
I’m not holding my breath.
If I were post-economic I’d consider taking a crack at it, but what do I know?
To me it seems like you're trying to paint the picture of misguided goodguy academics VS outsider grifter meddlers. But JP is just not a good example of that.
He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit. I mean it would bother me if I didn’t have two daughters, but that makes it more personal.
Peterson is one of those people who sounds reasonable and even compelling at first, but as you keep listening eventually you get to the part where he starts clucking like a chicken. Unfortunately that is his original stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZOkxuNbsXU
People who start reasonable then lead into nonsense always make me think of the Monty Python lumberjack song skit. They had several skits with that premise. The woman who does Philomena Cunk is a modern comedian who riffs on this.
His daughter has a husband and her own income stream, i.e., is no longer economically dependent on him.
I've also listened to the man himself for at least a hundred hours. I would be interested to read an explanation in support of your statement "he’s also a raving misogynist" because I've heard nothing that would lead me to conclude it or even to suspect it.
He probably believes that marriage and motherhood are best for most women. Is that contributing to your belief that he is a misogynist?
I don’t want to go on a quote hunt. I’ve seen some. But this is the crux of it.
My wife is a stay at home mom. It’s something she’s wanted to do since we were dating. I’m supportive of it, and she’s become kind of the pillar of the whole extended family.
That was her choice. It’s what she wanted. Get it?
It wasn’t my choice. I’d have supported her if she wanted a career. I supported her giving it a try but it wasn’t for her.
It’s definitely not some windbag public intellectual’s choice, or the government’s. The thing you quoted sounds innocuous until a politician gets ahold of it. Then we find out what it really means.
I guess the most damning thing to me is that so many incel and Tate types like him. By its fruit shall it be known. Marxism sounds liberating but if that’s true then why does every Marxist nation turn into a dictatorship or a mafia state?
A lot of things Marx said sound innocuous until politicians and men with guns get hold of them. Then you find out what they really mean.
Any time someone says they know what other people should do with their lives and they have some grand theory of history full of great meaning and purpose all ready to slot people into their appropriate roles, run away.
I never heard him or his wife say anything that might suggest that the opinion is anything other advice to women. (And when has Marx or Lenin ever said anything that can be interpreted as nothing more than advice to any individual -- other than the advice to join the collective effort to overthrow the capitalist class?)
Peterson is not shy about criticizing some of the pronouncement of feminists, e.g., "believe all women". He will point out that 1 or 2% of women are sociopaths just like 1 or 2% of men are sociopaths and that if you give sociopaths the opportunity to profit from lying, they will take the opportunity (and a depressingly large fraction of them will take the opportunity even if the only "profit" to be had is the pleasure of ruining someone's life or reputation).
Or are they just not saying the quiet part out loud?
Intellectuals say should, which politicians and activists turn into must when people don't listen. That's usually the progression. Marx didn't say to put people into gulags. People were put into gulags when Marxism didn't work as expected. The ideology can't be wrong, so if people aren't doing it well enough they need "encouragement." If the square peg doesn't fit in the round hole, you have to use a hammer.
I'm pretty equal opportunity here. I am deeply skeptical and suspicious of anyone, right left or otherwise, who claims to have a proscriptive Grand Theory of how human beings ought to live. Such ideas usually end up having body counts.
BTW the fact that Peterson has women echoing and support his ideas doesn't mean much. There's plenty of men who subscribe to authoritarian ideologies that involve forcing other men to do things. It's no different.
He complained that he is required (by his commitment to speak in front of audiences) to regularly go through airports because he gets icked out by the authoritarian vibe. He says he tries to stay at mom-and-pop hotels because hotels run by corporations give an authoritarian or at least bureaucratic vibe strong enough to ick him out sometimes.
I don't think he ever claimed that these ideas were original?
> He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit.
I feel like this is quite an extraordinary accusation. The tone of your comment reminds me of his interview with Kathy Newman. Everything he said that had even the smallest nuance was twisted into something else. What specifically did he say that makes you thing he is a misogynist?
A fair question! Put briefly, I would say that studying the humanities would make one more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations (which is... most of them), with the example I gave being one situation that I figured would be more familiar to the crowd here at Hackernews.
> It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
It seems like that because it is like that :) In other words, I DO consider it good to have a broader view of situations that otherwise might be considered narrowly "technical" because I believe that understanding the human element as part of the situation helps me understand the situation (whatever it may be) way better. I relate it to "the humanities" because it IS related to the humanities.
Yes, of course it is beneficial to be "more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations," but there isn't a class on that and I see no relation between social skills and education (at any level or field of study). I would take a HS dropout sales guy over a phd in humanities any day in terms of this particular skill.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.
The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
Chicago is a heavy hitter.
The U of C is affiliated 101 Nobel Laureates (amongst the highest in the world) -- not to mention 10 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award winners, 58 MacArthur Fellows, 30 Marshall Scholars, & 55 Rhodes Scholars.
Friedman explained numerous time how he went from a New Deal left (having grown up in the Great Depression) to an fervent free market capitalist because he believed capitalism was more effective in helping people.
Now you may disagree, perhaps vigorously, but you should still be honest over their motivations.
This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out:
that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.
In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.
How right you are! From now on I'm only hiring folks who created abiogenesis in a cereal bowl while fellating a hungry lion. Anyone else had it much too easy, amirite?
It's either that or just folks who discovered a new elementary particle while defending Afghani women from the Taliban.
Anything else would be way too easy.
My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.
I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...
It's ok - most companies that matter are led by people who have spent more time reading the Mahabharata rather than Plato. Enjoy your scraps.
Is that in both respective fields of study, though?
It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues more strictly pursue relevant titles.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-p...