Posted on 08/26/2018 6:19:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 through the first 50 years of the humanities crisis, until about 1980. Because of this long history, I’ve always been skeptical of claims that the humanities are in retreat.
But something different has been happening with the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. Five years ago, I argued that the humanities were still near long-term norms in their number of majors. But since then, I’ve been watching the numbers from the Department of Education, and every year, things look worse.
Almost every humanities field has seen a rapid drop in majors: History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak, while the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s. Student majors have dropped, rapidly, at a variety of types of institutions. Declines have hit almost every field in the humanities (with one interesting exception) and related social sciences, they have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
“Teach them a few words like “intersectional” and “patriarchy” to put in every sentence and let them fill the rest of the sentences with their native language -—
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I’d add one more word,”sustainability”-——the new millennial buzzword.
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IUD’s, Instant Unemployment Degrees, have very little value in today’s job market.
Beside that obvious reality, the IUD programs attract the snowflakes, and those who hate America.
Hiring these people might be like hiring time bombs that could go off and harm or destroy your organization.
While history, English, and the rest have faded, only one set of humanities fields without a foot in the sciences has clearly held its own: the much newer (and smaller) disciplines the statistical agency joins together as ethnic, gender, and cultural studies.
So the only increase in humanities comes from the worst of the worst, the grievance studies majors. Unlike the old joke "how do you get a philosophy graduate off your front porch? Pay him for the pizza." you need a shotgun to get a xxxx studies major off your porch.
I was relatively impressed with the depth of the article. It touched upon the questions I thought of like "was the percentage drop per humanity major purely a statistical artifact from increasing the number of majors?" and "did the number of humanity graduates remain the same but just a lower percentage as total enrollment increased?" On thing it fell short on was its claim that humanities majors at the military academies remained flat. How many of those were in linguistics going into intelligence rather than general humanities?
I started my journey toward a degree in Business Administration this semester at my local community college. I hope to leverage it into a Logistics degree later on. I did notice that my US and Western Civilization classes were rather light on the attendance side. Folks, the PC crap is even in business curriculum. Diversity, climate change, globalism, it’s all there and I want to vomit. I will play the part of the clapping seal, take my grade, and walk away knowing what the real truth is.
Time out! Last week the a similar article was published stating that the STEM programs are not getting students. So which is it? Either no one is majoring in Humanities or Engineering, Math, etc.
Look, I’m a high school English teacher, and even I can tell you: we aren’t that valuable. You only need about 4 per 600 kids each year, and if we hang in there for 30 years, that’s 18,000 kids we can teach. So dividing 18,000 by 4 is... what, 4500? So you only need one English major per every 4500 people. A little goes a long way.
The cardiologist, a bit surprised walked over to where the mechanic was working. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked, "So Doc, look at this engine. I opened its heart took the valves out, repaired or replaced anything damaged, and then put everything back in, and when I finished, it worked just like new. So how is it that I make $48,000 a year and you make $1.7 million when you and I are doing basically the same work?
The cardiologist paused, leaned over, and then whispered to the mechanic, "Try doing it with the engine running."
Then the idiots who chanted "Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Civ has got to go", took over academia.
BA in History, was slowly heading toward a Masters in Library Science.
Worked at historical archives, then newspaper librarian (1980s database work), then research university library. That got me into the Library of Congress database system.
Databases were interesting, so I switched over to a Masters in Information Science.
That got me an IT job in the 1990s and I’ve been doing Systems Analysis ever since.
Reading, comprehending, and writing well have helped to make me stand out in an engineering field.
Also, history is simultaneously about understanding the Big Picture and also the Little Details.
In Systems Analysis you really need to know the Big Picture and also the Little Details — and I find a distressingly small percentage of engineers care about both (they just focus on one and that is not enough to be really good).
Not anymore.
‘Pod
There are some very informative statistics and charts in this article.
I’ve maintained for years that if Econ 101 was taught in high school it would be the death of the Democratic Party. By the same token, my pet peave is colleges who dump out degrees in performance without teaching credentials as the bulk of those kids will never work in the music field. If they do, it will be teaching private music lessons because they are not qualified to take over the local high school orchestra. That to me borders on fraud.
I agree. However, I think a significant reason is that there are so many words we're not allowed to use and concepts we're not allowed to consider. There are also whole new categories of deranged garble, such as "gender."
We were trying to sort out, yesterday, whether a "transgender woman" is the same thing as a " 'transgender' woman."
Degrees in plumbing and HVAC would pay of much better.
Home economics, and economics in general, should be an absolute requirement in high school. Or better yet, in middle school.
On your other comment, I recall that our band/music teachers were the second best paid school employees next to the superintendent. They were worth it. And they raked it in on the side with private lessons and gigs on weekends. One could even repair instruments at a good price.
I played the notes well but had no actual musical talent (second chair), so that field was shut down for me early.
I have multiple degrees in the humanities. I love those fields of study, but I received my degrees when (and with) professors who were serious scholars and who forced their students to do serious scholarship.
Even the one self-proclaimed Marxist professor who I occasionally had to work with was a very serious academic. He also was completely committed to his students and their success. He never would have dreamed of harming a student’s career because of political differences. I think that’s the real difference between the academics now and many of the academics decades ago. The ones decades ago had fought in WWII and Korea, many of the strongly believed in REAL academic freedom, reasoned discourse, logical analysis, and so on. Many academics today are nothing more than temperamental children (no matter what their age).
These are neologisms invented to obscure, not illuminate. They’re corruptions of the language, not refinements. As such, they should be ignored and they’ll eventually go away.
I agree with your first two statements. I would like to live to see the last come true.
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