On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors with direct vocational utility. The article could have been written 25 or 50 years ago—the phenomenon it talks about is well known. For example, English majors made up 7.59% of those graduating with bachelor’s degrees in 1968, but as the stock market bottomed in the early 1980’s following the Carter economic debacle, that number had sunk to 3.7%. But Cohen’s article is not just a tedious rehash of well-known ideas from the past: it has a more serious flaw. For while this argument could have been and in fact was made at many times in the past, it can not be made today. And that is because the humanities have undergone a profound change that makes Cohen’s entire argument meaningless.
Let’s look first at the statistics. As the economy improved dramatically during the 1980’s, the figure for English majors rose with the economy, reaching 4.7% by the end of the decade. But now the familiar pattern broke down: as the economy continued to get stronger, the figures for English majors began to go in the opposite direction, the first time this had happened. By 1995, English majors had declined to 4.3% of all bachelor’s degrees, and by 2005 they had gone down to 3.7%, the same figure that was seen at the economy’s bottom in the early 80’s—except that the economy had now been booming almost continuously for 20 years.
Something had happened beginning in the early 1990’s to reverse the familiar pattern, and by 2005 it had halved what would have been the expected figure for English majors at this stage in the economy. (That other great field of studies in the humanities—History—showed the same pattern: in the early 1970’s it accounted for 5.3% of bachelor’s degrees, but by 2006 that had dropped sharply to 2.2%, again with the economy booming.) What had caused this amazing result? There can be little doubt as to what it was. The English major had changed profoundly, as had the Professors who taught it. The time when the numbers for English majors abruptly diverge from the economic cycle is exactly the time at which public unrest surfaced over the political correctness and obsession with race, gender and class in college humanities teaching. Richard Bernstein’s famous NYT article which first brought the issue to the attention of the public appeared on October 28, 1990, and Dinesh de Souza’s Illiberal Education, the first full-length treatment of the subject, appeared in 1991. The sharp drop in enrollments in certain humanities fields was not a response to economic conditions, but instead to the way they were now being taught.
While Ms. Cohen talks about the cyclical enrollment slump of the past she ignores the far more serious semi-permanent one that has been going on for two decades, but she is also living in the past when she describes the content of the humanities. She takes the essence of a humanities education to be reading the great literary and philosophical works in order to come to grips with the question of what living is for, a conception which, she tells us, some of the “staunchest humanities advocates” admit that they have failed to make the case for as effectively as they should have done. But here she displays an astonishing blindness. Doesn’t she know that for some time professors of English and History themselves (her “staunch advocates”?) have been making the case against this conception of the humanities? For the race, gender, and class obsessed orthodoxy that now dominates English departments, those great literary works are suspect: they reflect and promote the sexism and racism of the past, and so might stand in the way of the social change that is now the goal of the professoriate. That’s why students at major American universities can now get a degree in English literature without having read William Shakespeare: when Shakespeare is seen as an apologist for and ideologist of imperialism, this should not be a surprise. For Ms. Cohen, the great writers impart the wisdom of the past, but she seems not to know that the powers that be in college English departments worry instead about those writers exemplifying and perpetuating its bigotry. In History, the inspiring story of the development of the American Constitution–one of history’s greatest wonders–is also neglected and/or treated with similar condescension and disparagement. If the professors teaching these subjects no longer believe in them, why should it be surprising that students abandon them too?
Ms Cohen says that the “critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop… are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy,” and of course I’d be happy to join her in that view of the humanities. But in saying so she seems completely out of touch with what is really happening in college humanities courses, for it is not this. Doesn’t she know that civic and historical knowledge of American history and institutions is at a low ebb precisely because that knowledge does not mesh with the dominant politically correct ethos of the professoriate? Or that ethical reasoning in the humanities is now often reduced to a compulsory buying into the obsession with group grievance that has been central to humanities teaching for some time? Or that in the experience of far too many students, genuinely independent, critical thinking is scarcely inspired by teachers themselves in the grip of a shallow, one-sided critique of their own society–a dogma that may not be questioned?
I need not further belabor this question of the health of a field that in recent years has been far more concerned that its students read the incoherent Derrida and the paranoid Foucault that William Shakespeare. The most fundamental problem in Ms Cohen’s piece is that she writes as if what threatens the health of the humanities is the philistinism of the general public and the pecuniary crassness of its children, a viewpoint doubtless shared in her view by an enlightened NYT readership. But, alas, here she has things exactly backwards. The students are not the problem: they will be back when they are offered the kind of humanities program that Ms Cohen seems to want. The philistinism of the great unwashed non-NYT reading American public is also not the problem—it is very much opposed to the nonsense that has ruined college education in the humanities. If Ms Cohen is serious about getting us back to the conception of the humanities that she espouses, she’ll have to take on those elite humanities professors who have betrayed it. She’ll find it easy to reach them: I’m sure they all read the New York Times.
In the event anyone reads this (I just came across this entry today), I think this argument lacks empirical evidence. The content of required English courses, which all students take, is far different from some arcane upper level or graduate level courses only a small fraction take. In David Denby’s book _Great Books_, the author returned to his alma mater (Columbia )30 years after graduation and audited many humanities courses. He noted there was no evidence of ideological ‘propaganda’ or the mindless teaching of so-called post-modern doctrines and the rest of these so-called travesties. Have you spent time auditing representative humanities courses?
The argument is also rather lame in that it assumes student’s cannot decide for themselves what is bunk and what is not. If you teach ‘creationist science’ in the school as a view, it will give students the opportunity to see how preposterous it is; far better than getting it from the mass media.
BTW, here’s a quote from the CEO of Barclay’s Bank, circa 2007
Matthew W. Barrett , CEO of Barclay?s Bank had to say:
If you can get me a young person who can divine the patterns of imagery in Chaucer?s Canterbury Tales, it would take me just a half hour to teach that person how to break down a balance sheet.
Teach kids the humanities, and give them a broad liberal education, and I?ll teach them business skills. I hate schools that have been co-opted by business. I?d rather you taught people to think, because the limiting factor in executive development these days is people who can?t do lateral thinking. Instead, they have a vocational skill or a technical skill, and it runs out of gas very, very early. The ones who will end up in the top 20 jobs in the organization worldwide are people who can stand back and examine the context in which business operates and can connect the dots in creative ways and transform the business congruent with some of those directions.
I have an ungrad in humanities. Then masters. No job. No job. No job. I was an excellent student. Tons of debt.
I did a masters of accountancy. Good job. Debt all gone.
The humanities industry is a scam. A make-work project for otherwise unemployable PhD’s. It is very sad. I barely escaped.
Completely left out of the discussion is any notion that students might read Shakespeare, Joyce, etc, for their own sake–might even enjoy them.
Has Shakespeare’s work lasted because people like them, or because some jumped-up professor “taught” them? Are the humanities bitter medicine which we take because they are good for us, but which we otherwise wouldn’t touch with a barge pole?
I loved spending four years reading this stuff. It was the real life that came after that was the bad stuff.
Forty years ago, the place to park, if one thought of oneself as a professional radical, was Sociology. Students who wanted to play at being an intellectual warrior were attracted to English and History; if they worked at it, they could avoid the traditions of those fields. For a full generation now, those humanities have had competition. There are new places to park–the usual joke is, any study that ends in “Studies.” They won’t weigh you down with the exasperating past, don’t harsh the mellow much, and are grade-friendly to the already-correct. Enthusiasm counts.
Add current students to the well-meaning ne’er-do-wells and malcontents of the New Scholarship who used to major in traditional humanities, and you’ll find a number similar to the old English (excuse me, not Old English) curriculum. Maybe bigger. English is suffering the Sears dilemma: race K-Mart to the bottom, and they’ll take you over.
That said, I’m always reminding engineers that the only committed nihilist I knew as an undergrad was a math major. I blame Wittgenstein.
For a different point-of-view, I invite your readers to consider Sanford Pinsker’s recent article “Why we need the humanities now more than ever.”
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-06-09.htm
and my own comments on Sanford’s article:
Oh if those “geniuses” who brought us derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps had taken a few more liberal arts courses! If perhaps they had taken a philosophy course that discussed ethics, and perhaps had read a bit more of the history of the first half of the twentieth century, they might have had a better understanding of the risks involved in opaque financial instruments. They might have remembered that markets go down as well as up, and that downside risks have to be considered as well as upside potential.
For those of us old enough to remember, the standard was set in the 1950s at Columbia in courses with Trilling, Van Doren, and others like them who followed Matthew Arnold’s ideal of a liberal education as acquaintance with the best that has been thought and written. Lost since the 1960s, a liberal education has given way to training in the propaganda of identity politics. Yet parents pay as much as &40,000 a year for this indoctrination in the expectation that the named degree and the contacts made will secure a desirable future for their children. Somewhere along the way the meaning of education has been lost. You’ve put it admirably, Professor Ellis!
English accounted for 4 percent of all B.A. degrees in 1950, then over 7 percent in 1970, then back to 4 percent in 2000. I blame Foucault. Also, it’s clear that the Sixties ruined Western Civilization by producing all those English majors who went on to read that theory gunk.
Your point is well taken. Although postmodernism is apparently passe, academia has never really recovered from its effects. Why anyone would spend 5 minutes on this putrid, vacuous, and destructive philosphy has always puzzled me. And I suspect that many students came to share this viewpoint.
As a note, I consider Alan Bloom’s well-known 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind” to be the first real warning on the deterioration of the humanities in America, although perhaps his message didn’t reach the public at large then.