Notebook: (2) Who Killed the Humanities?
Read Part One of this post here!
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. The profession of teaching is starting to look as self-sacrificing as, say, being a paratrooper. Other possible careers for humanities majors (leaving aside law, which Heller oddly omits)—publishing, bookselling, writing, journalism—are in existential crisis. The very businesses that are underwriting the giant STEM facilities on campus ogled in Heller’s essay have indifferently plundered the “content generating” professions to fuel their rise, to the point where they now are threatening to eliminate the need for content generation itself with machines programmed to reprocess everything that content generators have ever produced as our future reading diet.
One can hardly expect the bright, ambitious young aspirants at Arizona and Harvard to ignore the appalling career prospects before them, so different from those that faced even Nathan Heller not so many years ago. But beyond this quite sufficient explanation for the decline in humanities majors, how can students not also be getting the message sent about the value to society of stewardship of its intellectual heritage? Heller notes that students are aware that cultural subjects are no longer valued on the public stage. “They like being part of vibrant debate and discussion—it’s one reason we continue to see strong enrollments around Black studies,” one observer told him. The adults in Nathan Heller’s essay (including Nathan Heller) waver over whether or not to accept the new terms of reference. Some argue that the humanities should lean into their salience for the social issues that are of interest to students—racial representation, identity, climate change, media, the ethics and social history of science. Professors mold curricula around students’ interests. Did the humanities err in becoming too theoretical, too politicized, too remote from the experience of reading? Or is adopting the language of science, addressing contemporary social issues, creating a distinct professional vocabulary the way forward? (It has certainly been a point of frustration—and worry—for me that the politics of literary study seem so inhospitable to actual politics; they seem, in their dialectical purity, actively to discourage students from doing things like working for a candidate or lobbying a legislator.)
There is a whisper of anxiety that by giving away too much the study of the humanities loses its essence: it is part of the point to learn to see oneself in the language of the past, to train oneself to step outside contemporary preoccupations. Study of material that is too familiar is like looking in the mirror. I was often troubled seeing middle- and high-school syllabi festooned with contemporary fiction, novels written for the twenty-first century adult. Were children being asked to do anything here more deliberate than to think like their parents (and teachers)? Today’s pre-senior readers also reputedly linger over the young-adult fiction that boomed during their childhoods. I was startled to read in an interview with a retiring publishing executive (looking for this!) that young people seeking publishing jobs today all aspire to work in YA; in my time, the unrealistic expectation would have been literary fiction. Professors note meanwhile that attacks on the “canon” have undermined the whole notion that there is a valuable intellectual inheritance to be contemplated; students have drawn the lesson that critiquing work from the past as “problematic” is the only reputable form of analysis. Yet no one seems quite sure what they want from the study of the humanities except to keep their jobs.
Ben Schmidt and others (one more) have pointed out that even now humanities study is actually more professionally advantageous than students think it is: professions in “the humanities” may be contracting, but employers still look for candidates who can articulate themselves and evaluate an argument, and these skills obsolesce more slowly than technical knowledge and are valued higher up the leadership ladder. One tech observer tweeted in response to Nathan Heller’s piece, “as a tech reporter, it's clear to me that STEM majors need more humanities courses so as to not destroy the world.” Nathan Heller quoted a somewhat disturbing disclosure by one student that only chumps have, you know, jobs: “A lot of it has to do with us seeing—they call them ‘influencers’ online. I’m twenty-one. People my age have crypto. People have agents working on their banking and trading. Instead of working nine to five for your fifteen-dollar minimum wage, you can value your time.” She attributes this transcendence of working life to “progressiveness” in her thinking: “She and her peers had grown up in an age that saw the lie in working for the Man.” The humanities might yet have something to offer a person oriented around such a worldview.
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The students in Heller’s piece who are first-generation college goers and need for their education to make a financial difference for them speak eloquently for their situation, but we have perhaps allowed the corporate sponsors too great a hand in defining advantageous outcomes of higher education. Beyond creating a greater voice in career advisory for those looking for more broadly educated employees I’d ask a bigger question. Prognosticators now speak of Universal Basic Income and the post-work generation. We do not need to accept that the environment handed to us by economic exigency, defined by a technology industry to which we voluntarily gave too much power, is the only one we are allowed to have. We have the ability to channel our resources differently. If we chose, in our vast wealth, to find the means to pay people to teach literature and art and philosophy and religion, and to work in bookstores and libraries and publishing houses, and to translate and edit literature—as to some degree we once did—then not only do those things become viable professions, but we are living in a society that is rich in literature and art and philosophy and religious understanding. Likewise music and art and dance (not to mention history, which seems somewhat to fall between the chairs here, though it has an even more pragmatically compelling case to make for itself). A society in which people have the tools to consider existential questions, to evaluate difference, to find energy and purpose in adversity. To fill solitude and empty hours with reflection and expansiveness, to envision greatness, to imagine alternative destinies. Perhaps some of our towns from which industry has fled would find themselves less demoralized, less susceptible to nihilistic appeals. For much of human history, culture and study have been the preserve of the rich. History’s aristocrats did not hire private tutors for their children for vocational training. We have the opportunity to create a truly democratic culture, but we don’t seem very interested in taking it.
In the preface to The Education of Henry Adams, in 1903, Henry Adams wrote, “the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort.” In The Mis-Education of the Negro, in 1933, Carter W. Woodson wrote, “Every element of our population should be taught to develop from within … in its present predicament the race is especially in need of vision and invention to give humanity something new. The world does not want and will never have the heroes and heroines of the past. What this age needs is an enlightened youth not to undertake the tasks like theirs but to imbibe the spirit of these great men and answer the present call of duty with equal nobleness of soul.” And Black education reformer Anna Julia Cooper wrote in 1930,
‘Higher education’ has fallen under the disrepute of being ‘mere culture’ or professional or ‘gentlemanly’ training. In any exact thinking, culture is the term for those studies which disclose the child to himself and put him into possession of his dormant faculties … The industries and ideals of a nation cannot but be enriched by the sound of intelligence of all the people derived from thorough general education in its schools … The Report of the Committee at the Nashville meeting of the National Council of Education set forth in the following words the truth which should always be borne in mind in the matter of educational programs: ‘Society should see to it that the child who cannot choose the family into which he shall be born, shall have given him the best possible heritage fortune could bring him, namely, an education that awakens him to the consciousness of the higher self that exists dormant in him.’
If we have failed to communicate to our kids that study and stewardship of the intellectual legacy that is theirs is of use to them, this is a failure that goes back further than freshman year, and will haunt us all well beyond their graduation.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.
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As the parent of a 2021 Humanities grad, I have mixed feelings about all of this and I’m glad you wrote a part 2 because it brought up some things I contemplated commenting on in part 1. My daughter had an intellectually rich education that was upended by the pandemic - study abroad cut short, campus closed senior year, resulting in remote study and no access to the NYC internships we were counting on to help her land a job. So we have no objective way of knowing if what she studied impacted her prospects. She eventually landed a job in an adjacent field, earning low pay in an expensive city, working for a very worthwhile nonprofit where she uses her skills and is enriched by her organization’s mission and the people involved with it. For now, she is happy and fulfilled, which makes me happy. But the stark income inequality in this country (which was less stark when I was eating rice and beans, trying to break into a career), the burden of student debt, the ailing publishing industry, the rise of AI, our broken healthcare system - all of these things are worrisome. They make me fear for her future economic security
and would have made me think twice if she were starting college today. My other daughter just graduated with a marketing degree. It will be interesting to see how she fares.
“We have the opportunity to create a truly democratic culture, but we don’t seem very interested in taking it.”
On what empirical evidence does this assertion rest? We have “democratic culture,” and it’s Marvel movies. What do we make of the fact that it was *simultaneous with* the opening up of university education to a much wider swath of the population that the traditional humanities began an inexorable slide toward irrelevance in those *same students’* minds? Consider the possibility that forcing almost 40% of young people through the university system (to justify anything approaching middle class wages) was a mass social experiment demonstrating a *revealed preference* in the vast majority of these students for practical, even pseudo-vocational courses of study. Why do we assume that humanities departments just haven’t “sold it” hard enough? If we’re positing the actual ability of most of these students to grapple with abstract cultural questions & texts, wouldn’t we then also have to grant them our belief in the validity of their overwhelming choice not to?
If we’re merely debating the ratio of, say, English majors to STEM majors at a handful of elite schools, that feels a bit irrelevant to me. They’ll end up reading whatever pablum NPR recommends (perhaps too minor a tragedy to really spill much ink on, but still). If we’re talking about larger shifts away from the humanities in the next couple tiers down, it’s because you can be taken somewhat seriously at the water cooler now talking about Game of Thrones and Malcolm Gladwell, rather than Updike or Sontag or whomever. It was largely a class marker the whole time.