Free Republic

Students of English and history are going the way of the dodo bird. During just the last decade, their numbers at colleges and universities have dropped by a third – and humanities enrollment is down by 17%, Nathan Heller reports in his recent New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major.” Data collected by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project show that “from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University...

Is the humanities degree going the way of the dodo bird? An article in The New Yorker, “The End of the English Major,” posits as a eulogy for the bustling humanities programs of yesteryear, citing dwindling investment and a generational shift toward science and technology and degrees that can be monetized. Faculty members at the Graduate Center, however, say that while the article is a clarion call, the death of the humanities is exaggerated. The desire and need to study the human past remain strong. Scholars shared their views on the current state and future of the humanities: Tanya Agathocleous,...

What came to be known in the last century as “humanism” was, in reality, nothing new. It actually has an ancient lineage. Indeed, since the human race first appeared, there have basically been only two “religions”—two existential philosophies that have informed people’s beliefs and behaviors. Each has had multiple variations, to be sure, but still, in the end, there are just two: People can either believe in and worship the Creator, or they can reject that idea and worship themselves, individually and collectively. The latter belief is essentially the original sin, attributable to Adam and Eve as well as to...

U.S.—Scientists have discovered mounting evidence that critical race theory escaped from a lab in a college humanities department some decades ago. Originally thought to be a deranged conspiracy theory, the idea that CRT escaped from a liberal arts program is now accepted as mainstream consensus. "While many believed the deadly CRT virus arose naturally out of centuries of systemic oppression, it now appears to have been manmade," said Dr. Xander Willow of Hillsdale College. "It looks like some good-for-nothing liberal arts majors were messing around with some old law textbooks and experimenting with applying critical race theory to all of...

An Oregon middle school was exposed by furious parents after likening her colleagues to pedophiles and warning them they'd be fired if they refused to teach critical race theory. Katherine Watkins, an 8th grade humanities teacher at Cedar Park Middle School in Beaverton, Portland, told colleagues during a Zoom 'equity conference' that if they were 'going to keep up those old views of colonialism, it's going to lead to being fired'. Watkins also equated teachers who 'do racist things' with pedophiles, during an inflammatory statement that her colleagues were forced to listen to. She said: ''If you're not evolving into...

The turn language is taking in politics calls to mind that controlling language to control thought was a prime goal of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’Back in the 1990s, an adjunct English professor at Bakersfield College used to start first-day freshman composition by writing the F-word on the whiteboard in big capital letters. She’d then turn around and explain the word’s etymology, point out that its moral connotation was entirely a construct, and tell the students in no uncertain terms that any scandal they felt was due to their parochial ignorance. She would disabuse them of this...

Every time I read an op-ed piece from some English professor (and isn’t it always an English professor?) whining about the demise of the humanities, in The Chronicle of Higher Education or elsewhere, I’m reminded of that great scene from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. You know the one. As Anakin Skywalker and his erstwhile friend and mentor turned mortal enemy Obi-Wan Kenobi engage in an epic lightsaber duel, Anakin accuses Obi-Wan of being responsible for the recent disasters in his life, including the loss of his beloved Princess Padme. Obi-Wan regards Anakin stoically then delivers one...

People have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship in 1987; humanities degrees quickly rose. While coverage of individual academic disciplines like musicology, history, or comparative literature often deals with the substance of scholarship, talk of the humanities in general always seems to focus on their imminent extinction. In 2010, Wayne Bivens-Tatum provided a useful walk...

In May, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked four academics from across the country to weigh in on the “adjunct crisis.” The results were predictable, with most of the blame directed at the usual suspects: bean-counting administrators, complacent, tenured faculty members, tight-fisted state legislators, and, of course, those evil Republicans. Solutions generally involved pressuring colleges and universities to fork over more money for tenure-track positions—irrespective of enrollment and at the expense of students and taxpayers. Here’s an idea that wasn’t considered: What if we awarded fewer PhDs? A scarcity of humanities PhDs, rather than a glut, would create more demand,...

If you want to see one example of why a new populism has emerged in American universities in the last 10 years, take a look at a statement issued last week by the Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The incapacity of the experts and professionals who wrote the statement to understand why their own diminishment has happened is abundantly in evidence. The motivation for the statement stems from the deterioration of the liberal arts in higher education. The statement puts it this way: “the disciplines of the liberal arts, once universally regarded as...

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) is trying to prove that liberal arts majors are gainfully employed but they're not doing so all that clearly. For one thing, they call the report "The State of the Humanities 2018: Graduates in the Workforce and Beyond." What exactly is beyond the workforce other than unemployment and retirement? "While their unemployment rate has declined since the Great Recession, humanities graduates had a level of unemployment in 2015 that was modestly higher than the rate for the bachelor’s-holding population as a whole," the report proclaims. "The 4.3% unemployment rate among terminal bachelor’s...

Considering the Freedom Center’s aggressive political work, poetry may not be something one would expect to find as part of its intellectual arsenal. But as many conservative writers such as Andrew Klavan and myself have noted for years, reclaiming America means reclaiming the culture, and that means engaging in the arts. As Finch writes in his introduction, “[I]f as a people, and a nation, we can return to something lost, recovering something from our culture that has been torn, then it can only happen through art.” The art of Finding Home is Michael Finch’s deeply personal contribution to the culture...

April is the cruelest month, and August is the melancholy month. Even the crickets sing a different song at dusk as August begins summer's slow retreat. Children listen for the back-to-school bells as autumn closes in and the days begin to get noticeably shorter. Bicycle baskets morph into book bags. Sandals give way to tighter shoes, and the days of flip-flops are numbered. Sand from the beaches becomes the sand through the hourglass in the science lab. Free spirits are rounded up and structured into classes of whiteboards and textbooks overflowing with data. Teachers promise expeditions to new frontiers...

As commencement approaches, this year’s graduating seniors can look forward to pep talks about how employable humanities majors are. “Upon graduating from college, those who majored in the humanities and social science made, on average, $26,271 in 2010 and 2011, slightly more than those in science and mathematics but less than those in engineering and in professional and pre-professional fields,” Vartan Gregorian writes in the Carnegie Reporter. “However, by their peak earning age of 56 to 60, these individuals earned $66,185, putting them about $2,000 ahead of professional and pre-professional majors in the same age bracket.“ “Further, employers want to...

One of the fascinating dichotomies in academia is that its denizens, who more often than any other group, profess themselves obsessed with society, are more likely to show themselves absorbed with self. “The egological turn may be a reaction to the overtheorization of humanistic studies that dominated the late 20th century,” Theodore Ziolkowski, a professor emeritus at Princeton, writes in The Chronicle Review. “But it could easily have a similar negative effect if it simply replaces theory with the preening self of the author.” In the March 21, 2014 issue of The Chronicle Review, Ziolkowski surveys some of this literature....

Economic anxiety defines the Detroit bankruptcy, and not just in Michigan and the Midwest. Detroit is the urban nightmare, symbolic of America's downward cultural spiral since the 1960s, when optimism about what Americans could accomplish was the national elixir. The automobile was the national icon: powerful, beautiful and reliable. Detroit's advertising slogans reflected America's immeasurable self-confidence. Cadillac boasted that it was "the standard of the world." Buick promised that "when better cars are built, Buick will build them." Packard, then Detroit's ultimate expression of luxury, smugly advised, "Ask the man who owns one." The car was the example of infinite...

Duke University president Richard Brodhead, who abandoned his own students and took the word of a prostitute before knowing the facts in the infamous Duke Lacrosse case, has served as co- chairman of an allegedly bipartisan group convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to investigate the value of the humanities in the college curriculum. Members of the quango included filmmakers Ken Burns and George Lucas, musicians Yo-Yo Ma and Emmylou Harris, actor John Lithgow and retired Supreme Court justice David Souter -- an odd assortment to be called on to interpret academic trends. Said Brodhead in a...

On June 6, Harvard University released a long-awaited report on the state of the humanities. A central part of the report, "Mapping the Future," is a study of the "trends" in humanities education and "stakes" for faculty, students, and society in general. What with plummeting enrollments and declining interest in the humanities, those who do not reside within the halls of academe might suppose that the Harvard report would focus on the real problems: the increased radicalization of the humanities; the splintering of the humanities into discrete disciplines such as women's studies, men's studies, gay studies, Latino studies, and the...

"People say you should do what you love," but in the new normal reality, it appears - based on the flagging applications at Harvard's humanities division - that oft-used phrase has been appended with, "but, I don't want to be doing what I love and be homeless." As The WSJ reports, among recent college graduates who majored in English, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; for philosophy and religious-studies majors, it was 9.5%; and for history majors, it was also 9.5%. By comparison, recent chemistry graduates were unemployed at a rate of just 5.8%; and elementary-education graduates were at 5%....

One thing that journalism and the humanities have in common is that people don’t like either of them. Yet another thing they have in common is that journalists and English professors can’t figure out why. “Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” the Gallup organization reported on September 21, 2012. Meanwhile, at the last Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, which this correspondent attended, the thousands of English professors in attendance could attend panels on topics...