Notebook: (1) Who Killed the Humanities?
Notebook: (1) Who Killed the Humanities?
by Ann Kjellberg, editor
A few weeks ago there was a much-referred to essay by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker about “the end of the humanities” that I avoided, out of a distaste for the “end of” genre. But this week I was on a long flight and started to run down the saved article list until I found myself, depressingly, there, at the end. I girded myself for posthumousness and proceeded. Much of it was to be expected—the distractions of the internet; the croesian payoffs from tech. Yet the statistics were stark. Since the economic collapse (or arrival of the iPhone?) in 2008, the numbers of humanities majors in American higher education had, by various measures, very roughly halved. (Former historian and data scientist Ben Schmidt challenged Nathan Heller’s statistics on Twitter, and made reference to his own much more precise and convincing 2018 article on the subject in The Atlantic. Ben Schmidt, however, also found study of the humanities to have shown precipitous and unprecedented decline in the last fifteen years.)
Nathan Heller met this development by walking about on two campuses, Arizona State University and Harvard, managing to draw from both current students and professors strikingly candid reflections on the waxing irrelevance of the study of civilization. A surprising number of Heller’s young interviewees confessed to really liking literature (and philosophy, religion, and so on), but lacking a rationale for devoting time to it: “I kind of thought that those majors were a joke”; “I view the humanities as very hobby-based”; “People involved in the humanities may not even need to go to school for what they’re wanting to do.” The essay itself was strangely meandering, as though the twilight of the humanities had deprived the author of the means of contemplating its demise. “The great god Pan is dead!,” the sailor hears across the water, and continues on his way.
Nathan Heller seemed to me, as they say, to bury the lede on the most salient factor, and to miss completely a couple more. Toward the end of the essay he writes:
During the postwar swell of public funding for education, conveyances picked up humanities students right where their B.A. diplomas left them: they could go to graduate school, and on to a stable, rewarding career in teaching and writing; or they could leave the academy for arts-and-letters careers plainly valued by society and at least remunerative enough to sustain a modest middle-class life. Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline. (In 2020, the Survey of Earned Doctorates found that less than half of new arts and humanities Ph.D.s graduated with a job—any job—and the odds are vanishing even with élite credentials: of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track.)
He then moves on to talk about trends in AP placements, as though the fact that a person can no longer expect to make an honest living in the humanities is a side note in a consideration of their fate.
The effort to educate a broad swathe of Americans begun in earnest in the 1950s (I wrote about this last month covering the College Board) included a deliberate investment in the humanities in an attempt to delineate a shared culture for a newly diverse educated population. Nathan Heller’s coverage of the overall arc of education funding is sparse; at one point he describes a professor drawing a parabola on the back of a department memo, without himself pursuing any of the relevant stats. I missed a discussion of the consequences of the shift toward fiscal austerity that began in the Reagan era. Public institutions now fight for adequate state funding and must vamp the very businesses that will compete with them for personnel to keep the lights on. California’s 1978 Prop 13 notoriously skewered the public school system and began a decades-long decline in funding for its vaunted public universities. (Ben Schmidt calls the Cal State system “massively underresourced.”) The giant 2011 demonstrations that met Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposed state budget cuts and withdrawal of collective bargaining protections for public employees, precursor to Occupy Wall Street, began in the state universities. In 2012 Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law sweeping tax-cut legislation, the “Kansas experiment,” disproportionately starving education, which accounted for half of the state budget. Today’s student debt crisis, on the level of the consumer, springs from generations of privatizing education funding. (I read this essay flying back from Germany, where my friends’ kids are going to college for free.) Furthermore, 75 percent of faculty today hold contingent adjunct positions with part-time or short-term contracts and 47 percent of all college faculty are part-time adjuncts, low-salary positions without benefits or job security, according to Katie Scofield, writing in 2020; in 1980, by contrast, “70 percent of college faculty across two- and four-year institutions were tenured or on the tenure-track.”
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Prop 13, Wisconsin, Kansas were just headlines of a pervasive de-funding movement affecting other civilization-preserving institutions like libraries, museums, theaters, and the performing arts, also increasingly obliged to lean into business- and tycoon-friendly programming to secure revenue. Somehow the siren call of austerity remains seductive even after the pandemic and multiple natural disasters brought on by climate change have educated us, at the threat of our lives, in the need for publicly funded goods—right up to our current debt-limit crisis. Is it any wonder that higher education is being reduced to a jobs-training program for those industries stepping in to foot the bill—notably, in Nathan Heller’s telling, tech?
Meanwhile K-12 teaching, once a reliable middle-class profession, has also been under generational attack, drawn by the “reform” movement personified by Michael Bloomberg’s New York mayoralty of 2002-2013 into a decades-long corporate PR project of de-legitimizing unions, while educational budgets were (not coincidentally) being disemboweled at the state and local level. First the Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation, then President Obama’s Race to the Top continuation, and finally the 2010 adoption of the national Common Core curriculum, were all premised on the backbone of standardized testing and the automation of educational quality. Bloomberg and other mayoral reformers like Washington, DC’s Michelle Rhee were open in confronting teachers’ unions and arguing that fewer, less experienced teachers were an effective alternative to individualized instruction. The Common Core notoriously mandated teaching more nonfiction “informational” texts: 50/50 nonfiction/fiction in K-12 and 70/30 by high school. “College readiness” was invoked, but one could not help thinking of the usefulness of such vocationally focused trainees for Common Core’s sponsors like Exxon and the Chamber of Commerce and Bill Gates. The regime of standardized testing prioritized quantifiable learning and pushed study of civics, history, and the arts to the margin. Jonathan Kozol called its consequence “cognitive decapitation.”
Nathan Heller’s college students were eight years old by the time the Common Core was adopted by all but four states. One student told Nathan Heller: “I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary. You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” It does not surprise me that students who were drilled in achieving quantifiable results struggle with other kinds. The same student reported that “effective altruism,” the recent philosophical school favored by Silicon Valley that attempts to quantify goods and calibrate moral conduct according to the amount of money spent on it, is “a huge trend on campus, seeping into everything,” in spite of its most famous recent proponent being under indictment. It also does not surprise me that students trained to value only measurable results, and not nurtured in other ways of spending their time and mental energy, suffer from unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression.
On top of becoming vassals to standardized tests, tied to salaries, promotions, even school closures, teachers have more recently, with librarians, become moving targets in culture-war attacks drawing venom from the impossible position they found themselves in during lockdown … (Read Part Two of this post here)
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.
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I often argue that we need the arts and humanities MORE than we need STEM. After all, we already create enough food, clothing, shelter and other things to serve every person on Earth. We know how to create all the things we need; we just don't know how to care enough about humans to distribute those things fairly.
I’m interested in exploring more of public education’s influence even on private education. I teach English at a Catholic middle school and have previous curriculum that mainly focused on contemporary, non-fiction texts as opposed to classic fiction literature. I’ve started my own novel-based curriculum and it’s been a big shift to get kids to read and interpret fiction, like they have totally had critical and symbolic thinking removed over years of emphasis on nonfiction “informational” texts. Hard to pinpoint a single cause...