Anything (whether science, the arts/entertainment/movies, education, medicine, statistics) plus politics is just politics.
Posted on 03/04/2023 4:38:34 AM PST by MtnClimber
The New Yorker is a magazine that I have barely noticed for decades. It is the epitome of the “New York groupthink” that I mention on my “About” page.
But the current issue has a long (10,000+ words) piece by a guy named Nathan Heller, titled “The End of the English Major,” that I thought might be worth a look. Perhaps here we might find some liberal introspection about how infesting everything you control with racialist and gender obsessions and Critical Race Theory might not be such a great idea.
Who was I trying to kid? What this article actually shows is that a fancy New Yorker writer can produce 10,000 words about the demise of the English major, and more generally about the demise of essentially all humanities departments at universities, without ever mentioning the takeover of those departments by the racialist radical left.
Heller begins reasonably by providing some data as to the declining numbers of students majoring in English at various schools. The piece focuses on two schools in particular, Arizona State University and Harvard. Here are some numbers for ASU:
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.
(If you’ve never read The New Yorker, you may be unfamiliar with its odd style of writing out in words all numbers except years.). And here are some numbers for Harvard:
From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses.
And here are some sample figures from other universities:
[T]he decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, 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 lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.
Clearly, the declines have been rapid and drastic. Heller now has about 9000+ words left to give us the explanation for what has gone wrong. The reason that is first up will not surprise you: stingy governments refuse to provide the needed funding. Heller interviews Columbia University English Professor James Shapiro, who has this to say:
“You get what you pay for!” [Shapiro] said. . . . [In 1958] the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, . . . the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education. . . . “That was the beginning of the glory days of the humanities,” he continued. . . . [But in more recent years:] “That funding goes down,” he explained. “The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level.”
All the money is moving to STEM:
“Harvard is spending a huge amount of money on the engineering school,” a sophomore mechanical-engineering major said at dinner in the dorms one evening. . . . “Mark Zuckerberg just gave another half billion dollars for an A.I. and natural-intelligence research institute, and they added new professorships. The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into STEM.”
But even Heller will admit that it’s not just the decline in government funding at work. Factor number two in the Heller analysis is what he calls “pre-professionalism” among the students. They’re looking for majors that translate immediately into high paying careers. Example:
According to the Harvard Crimson, which conducts an annual survey, more than sixty per cent of the members of the class of 2020 planning to enter the workforce were going into tech, finance, or consulting. “I think that the presence of big tech and consulting firms on campus is a big part of people’s perception that you can’t get a job in the humanities,” [said] Hana, a senior in integrative biology. . . .
OK, I’ll be the first to admit that events can have many causes, and the causes discussed by Heller may well have something to do with the decline of the humanities at major universities. But it’s also obvious that the humanities departments are the center of the obsessions with Critical Race Theory, diversity/equity/inclusion, and the like. Can anybody blame the students for staying away?
I wonder if the woke humanities and english departments realize that it is themselves who are to blame for the loss of interest?
The Left’s job is to package Satan’s lies into attractive little packages.
...don’t worry, the Dems will subsidize them.
Best way to get a job in the humanities is to learn about Captain Ahab’s first mate in Moby Dick.
Victor David Hanson wrote “Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom” in 1998. It does largely focus on the value of certain students learning the Greek and Latin languages and the cultural wisdom handed down to us from those civilizations. But, more broadly, he explains the decline of the academic world and how education in general had become too politicized. The “cultural wisdom handed down to us from those civilizations” was a bit of a problem for many institutions and so they stopped talking about it and just focused on Lesbian Dance Theory instead.
“I wonder if the woke humanities and english departments realize that it is themselves who are to blame for the loss of interest?”
I hope so, as Russia, with half our population, graduates TWICE as many engineers each year (and they use Russian math, so they can actually estimate things in their heads too). Also China graduates 6 engineers for every 1 that the US graduates (same for India) - still a higher rate than the US when adjusted for population.
One could argue that the best barometer of a dying empire is the above, where the offspring of the intellect that created the empire winds up wasting away on Drag Queen Studies and the like.
Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.
Now that the Leftist crazies have taken over the Humanities, the death of those departments is almost assured. Only ever more hardcore radicals will want to spend fortunes to learn anti-knowledge. However, there ARE still jobs for these people at NGOs and non-profits, which seems to be as well funded as ever (thanks to laundering of Government money).
Anything (whether science, the arts/entertainment/movies, education, medicine, statistics) plus politics is just politics.
“All the money is moving to STEM:“
Welp then kiss STEM goodbye.
The traditional job of a humanities education was to teach the students to read complex material with understanding, to speak and write clearly and persuasively, to analyze arguments with logic, and to come to an understanding of human nature.
None of which seems to be happening in the current campus indoctrination centers.
When government money dominates STEM, then STEM professors will parrot the government narrative without deviation.
Combination of factors I think.
First, is the humanities’ slide into modernism. Despite wanting to be a writer in the early 90s when I was in school, I refused to major in English because most of what was read was modernist dreck and I was interested in epic poety and Hawthorne.
Second, is that perennial American practicality which makes even conservatives regard the arts with some suspicion. A tendency that factor #1 has only exacerbated. I have been involved in trying to promote new literature in the traditional style since the 1990s and there’s really not a huge amount of interest in it.
The most open crowd I’ve found are homeschool kids. My wife homeschools our kids and we make sure they read good literature. My eldest daughter got on a huge Jules Verne kick and has been reading everything she can get her hands on.
BUT I understand that the USA produces more Parks Management majors than any other country. Hope they all have to learn spanish so they can communicate with the workers in that field.
Yep! And they will demand minority representation in STEM and dumb down the entrance and pass standards until they get it
I am an engineer. I was born an engineer. I graduated top of my class in Mechanical Engineering from Cal Berkeley. I spent 35 years doing high tech in Silicon Valley and have 27 patents. I only say all this to establish credibility for what is next.
A few good engineers are more valuable than large numbers of mediocre engineers. The cost of mistakes and errors is very high. Lowering standards is a bad bargin. Geek power. ;o)
Comrade, communism did not see a value to history and literature either... 🧐
When you mix politics with medicine you get theft.
Who in business hires a newly graduated student as a 'consultant'?
If I hire a consultant I hire experience. Let someone else pay for this newbies errors while he learns his trade.
Perhaps I would hire a newly graduated student as a temp worker with proportionate low pay.
I don't care that this guy is a grad of Harvard, he is still wet behind the ears with no experience.
A high priced education does not replace experience.
Maybe if the Harvard grad shows up with a Professional Engineers Licance I might hire him as a consultant but a diploma does not impress me.
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