History for Dollars (Humanities)

New York Times ^ | June 7, 2010 | David Brooks

[C19fan]

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.

[C19fan]

Brooks misses the elephant in the room. You can major in one of the humanities and there is a good chance you will never read "Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon" because the profs think you should read some POS work by a lesbian black left handed blind woman.

[goat granny]

Amen.......my thoughts also.

[Tublecane]

“there is a good chance you will never read ‘Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon’”

I was a history major, and only one of those three ever made an appearance as required reading. That was in the form of a short excerpt: namely, Pericles’ funeral oration from Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War.” The only other classics I can recall them assigning were similarly short works like Plato’s “Apology,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and Rousseau’s “The Social Contract.” Nothing like Gibbon would ever, ever be suggested.

[KarlInOhio]

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose).

If you can't do that by the time you enter high school, much less by the time you graduate, then you have much bigger problems than a humanity degree can solve. None of the humanities classes I took did anything to teach me how to read or write because those skills were an expected prerequisite.

[Sawdring]

POS work by a lesbian black left handed blind woman.

Does it count if she has a cleft palate also?

[Pollster1]

I had exclusively technical majors, but I read Livy’s “History of Rome”, Gibbon’s “Rise and Fall”, and dozens of other classics. It was well worth the time, and as I watch Obama it’s easy to put him in historical context.

[AmishDude]

Kill the humanities.

It’s not that they’re useless, they’re easy.

And the subjective nature of the subject leads inevitably to lesbian black left-handed blind poetry. It’s a slide to the bottom in order to get more students. The only “standards” left are diversity.

Parenthetically, diversity is fully realized if all of the faculty are women, for example.

Suppose you were hiring for a generic office drone position. No specific skills required, just being organized, etc.

Would you rather hire (a) a sociology major from Princeton (b) a history major from the University of Chicago or (c) an engineering major from Mississippi State?

‘Cause I’d rather have the guy who took multivariable calculus than Michelle Obama or David Brooks.

[SunkenCiv]

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Thanks C19fan. Note: this topic is from 6/08/2010 Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.