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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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The decimation of the last vestiges of humanistic culture at the hands of our technocratic society continues: The End of the English Major

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. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

Reasons given by students for choosing STEM majors over humanities majors are in line with what you would expect: STEM majors teach you economically useful skills that translate directly into gainful employment, and humanities majors don't. Especially because ChatGPT just put a lot of copywriters out of business over night.

Although the crisis of university humanities departments has frequently been blamed on recent events like the 2008 Great Recession and the covid pandemic, these trends are not exactly new. In a collection of lectures delivered at Princeton and published in 1938 entitled The Meaning of the Humanities, the sense of crisis was already palpable:

Granting that the humanities are so interwoven with the fabric of society that the world cannot be entirely "dehumanized," a modern humanist can hardly help feeling that his position is far from being secure. In fact, the humanities are attacked on every side; they are losing ground every day; the host of their enemies is legion and their defenders a mere handful. When they are not in danger of being starved and annihilated, they risk being absorbed or annexed by peaceful penetration through the inroads made into their rightful domain by specialists on "human relations," psychologists, educators, and humanitarians.

There was also an acknowledgement that, unfortunately, most people do have to work for a living:

The easiest way to solve the problem is to ignore it, namely, to follow the line of least resistance and to continue along the old traditional lines. It is easy to declare that some studies, called disinterested studies, a polite euphemism for useless studies, will remain accessible to a chosen few, while useful studies, studies preparing for life, meaning by that equivocal term, for a profession, trade or business, shall become the lot of the masses.

It turns out there was never a time where the majority of people could decide on a whim to spend their formative years of education studying fictional events that never happened. Who would have guessed?

There is certainly something to mourn in the gradual erosion of the traditional support structures for western elite culture. I don't take it lightly. But I also believe that there is a fundamental resilience to what one might call the "humanistic mode of thought" that will ensure its survival, even if there were no universities at all. Humans will continue to do philosophy, and make art, and reflect on art, for as long as there are entities that are still recognizably human. There has never been any other time in history when narrative fiction played such a large role in the lives of so many people - it just comes in the form of TV shows and video games now, rather than novels. Although some Rationalists are prone to triumphalism about science and self-perfection through technology, a significant percentage of the output of LessWrong is dedicated to the analysis of philosophical questions, and the single most famous work to come out of the Rationalist movement is a work of imaginative literature. The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.

I suppose what ultimately saddens me the most about the fall of the English major is that it seems to be yet another indicator that the world I once knew - the world that extended roughly from the end of World War II to the 2008 financial crisis, the heyday of middle class consumer capitalism - is dying, if not already dead. As the linked article alludes to, the internet itself may be partially blamed for the decline of traditional university studies:

Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.

It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.

It sucks that it's antiquated. I am a hopeless nostalgic. But it is antiquated nonetheless.

Frankly, this has been a long time coming and I think very little has been actually lost.

The stark reality of the liberals arts courses in most Western universities/colleges is that they have been in decline in quality for a long time, and very little is actually being taught in them. I say this from both personal experience and from data. Unless you're lucky enough to have gotten a really engaging and intelligent teacher in the arts (needle in the haystack), most students come away from a liberal arts degree with very little (or in the case of ideological brainwashing, have actually been made worse).

The quality of liberal arts graduates and how little they know is frankly quite shocking. They know little to nothing of the classics, they know nothing of the works of important figures from Socrates all they way up until modern thinkers like Dewey. For many students, they think, or are taught there is nothing of intellectual value prior to the 1970s or so. Rawls is as about as far back and sophisticated they go (well, other than Marx of course, though even this is often through an attenuated way).

I'm not completely sure why this is the case, but I think it's some combination of the postmodern intellectual brainrot that continues to infect the academy and credentialism driving everyone to get degrees (which lowers standards).

If anything, I see the drop-off in student numbers for the liberal arts as a positive development, because hopefully that means the students who do remain actually care about things like philosophy, politics and the humanities generally aren't being held back by being in a larger, stupider cohort, and in time actually will remake the liberal arts degree into something respectable again (unlikely, but a man can dream).

History and philosophy are humanities and “liberal arts” as well you know….

Yes?

Can’t paste on mobile for some reason, but your initial post was complaining about them not knowing Socrates or history etc. So it seemed like you found history and philosophy valuable.

Yes, that is correct.

My complaint is not directed at liberal arts/humanities themselves. They have incalcuable value.

My complaint is directed at the universities/colleges who have been doing a piss-poor job at educating students in the humanities.

Ahh I see. I think most History + Philosophy courses are solid (at least I hope) but I agree there are a whole host of pointless majors and courses out there.

related links - tanner greer on humanities declining and bret devereaux on why humanities are important

It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.

I think the non-antiquated skill is teaching people how to think seriously (a skill that is sometimes given the awful label "critical thinking") which is otherwise only taught at the more advanced levels of STEM. In a ChatGPT world, it will become increasingly easy for people's cognitive skills to atrophy, and that is an underrated AI risk. A species of low-attention span hedonistic phone-zombies who think that they can always get an acceptable answer to any question from an AI is not in a very good position to resist its extinction, or even notice it before it's too late.

However, a lot of the humanities today is actively against thinking seriously. So, while I see a place for the humanities in the modern world, it's something closer to the heyday of American academia, which I think was from about 1935 onwards as it was flooded by European academics fleeing fascism, until the 1960s when the academic left started openly abandoning the principles of free speech and inquiry that they had exploited in the 1950s against McCarthy.

Reviving that style of academia is hard, because it involves so many assumptions that are unpopular today, e.g. that there is an elite of bright young people whose education and seduction into serious thinking is especially important, because they are going to have an outsized influence in society. This was what Allan Bloom was mostly talking about in The Closing of the American Mind - not that the American masses are unsophisticated, which is hardly a specifically American trait, but the loss of any places where future elites might be cajoled and trained into having a taste for truth as well as power. Elites who don't seriously study The Republic (or something similarly stimulating like a Rawls/Nozick combination or a Mill/Fitzjames Stephen combination) will default to Thrasymachus.

It is conceivable that STEM and the like become the overwhelming majority of undergrad degrees as these become prerequisites for a job, while the humanities becomes (like law in the US) a postgrad thing and expected for elite positions in society. That would not necessarily be a bad thing in my view: most people aren't going to think seriously about major issues ever, even when given the opportunity in a humanities programme; that doesn't worry me if they're just going to go and do an ordinary job, rather than have a significant influence in society.

It is conceivable that STEM and the like become the overwhelming majority of undergrad degrees as these become prerequisites for a job, while the humanities becomes (like law in the US) a postgrad thing and expected for elite positions in society. T

If more people go into STEM and STEM departments don't vastly lower standards, there will be a lot more dropouts and an overall reduction in college degrees awarded. Both of those would be good things. However, there will be overwhelming pressure on STEM departments to lower standards to what we see in current psychology/English/etc classes. This then will reduce the value proposition of STEM degrees.

Yes, I am glad that I am not going to be teaching STEM (except maybe a little bit of M) in the next few decades.

I can't say I'm all that bothered by a decline in the number of humanities major. As you said, humans will continue to do art, philosophize, and reflect. We were doing it long before there was such a thing as a university or even a college.

That said, I have taken some online courses and I think there's something lost doing a class via Zoom or whatever vs doing one in person. I found the discussions in my in-person classes much more productive than in my zoom courses. (This may also be a function of investment, I'm willing to be persuaded here.) I took an ethics course and the online video sessions were dull and boring, hardly any debates. The professor had to start calling on people to get responses. I even tried taking on the role of shit-stirrer, giving answer I knew flew against the conventional ethical wisdom of the group, just to see if I could things moving but to no avail. By contrast, the in-person courses I took at this same facility with some of the same cohort were much more lively and animated.

The interesting part of this to me more so than the loss f humanities a the surge of STEM majors. I guess students got the memo. I highly doubt this will work out like they planned. We will just turn STEM into what a college degree became. A bunch of middling graduates that are for the most part, not particularly useful to business and certainly not future members of the PMC.

I agree this is likely, but you are missing a step. A major reason STEM is now valuable is simply that it hasn't fallen into the same trap as the humanities departments of just lowering standards so everyone with a loan from the feds can get a degree (as the university hoovers up that cash). But most humanities majors can't pass a rigorous STEM curriculum. Whence "physics/chemisty/statistics for non-majors" being a thing, while engineers are never afforded the luxury of "English 101 for non-majors." So the shift to STEM will be impeded unless there is a rapid decline in STEM standards. Which there already is a hard push for (typically wearing DEI clothing), but the pressure will double and triple under the weight of a university actually losing federal loan $$$.

I've never really understood the place humanities actually held in universities. The required courses that my CS degree touched seemed as pointless of busywork as they always seemed in highschool. Spirited debate over canon literature I can get behind as fulfillment. But, as college became first and foremost about the economics and the modal student in the classes, at least the ones CS students needed to take, became more and more inclined to just do whatever it takes to get a decent grade with the least time spent possible I don't really see much of a point left. I have no idea what the people who majored in the subjects got up to in the higher level classes but in my entire academic career I never had one class that demonstrated any value for the humanities. Perhaps some academy can divorce itself from the university system now pretty much exactly aligned with jobs training and have value for people who opt into it, maybe I'd even consider taking some night courses at such a place. But college is not what it once was and I feel bad for people who mistook it for something else.

The place is that universities aren’t purely vocational, they’re at least theoretically for producing well rounded intellectuals as members of the leisure class.

Of course the reality is that a very large majority of the population needs to at least pretend to be productive with their time, so if everyone goes to college it inevitably becomes about jobs training. But the kinds of people who spend their careers in academia think that’s boring and low status, so they make engineers take English classes because it makes them feel like they’re still producing well rounded intellectuals out of the leisure class.

they’re at least theoretically for producing well rounded intellectuals

In the US.

In much of the rest of the world, the place for that is high school. I keep being surprised by how extremely myopic many people are about this topic here. There's a whole vast world outside the US (much of it even western) where the entire university system doesn't revolve around "liberal arts" or even have the concept of a "liberal arts" college / program at all.

In theory, the US teaches a lot of this stuff in high school as well. Reading and discussing classic books and plays, learning about art and art history, etc. But usually it's done fairly poorly and the students care even less than in college.

If a college degree is required for most well-paying jobs, then of course that's what people are going to focus on: Graduating easily and hopefully picking up some useful skills along the way. And most of the population is going to want to go to college. If a university has no need to teach practically useful information, because it's mostly educating either future academics, priests, and scribes to continue its own existence or a small group of future elites so they have the correct status markers, then the more esoteric and useless the information, the better. And let's face it, even most of the information that STEM and social science students are taught is useless outside of continuing to study that exact subject. Earning a degree in pure math, physics, etc. just tells employers you're probably good at the more relevant aspects of math and basic problem solving. Almost nothing I learned getting a math degree is useful to anyone who isn't studying math (or a particularly math-heavy subfield of physics or CS or something along those lines) in academia.

I enjoyed most of my core requirements (art, humanities, language, etc.) but that's just because I personally liked discussing those subjects and reading those great texts.

I think it must depend a lot what you are doing now. I dropped out of a PhD in a science discipline to take an industry job and actually regularly use a lot of the knowledge I obtained in grad school (of course I’m also very good at teaching myself stuff and would have been forced to learn this material on my own)

I'm sure it depends on the exact field you're in. I use some of what I learned in college (although most it was from a handful of stats classes or the programming classes I took unrelated to my major). But if Bryan Caplan's data are correct, you're definitely in a small minority.

I was a math major, and I am very glad my university required a liberal arts education. I had a couple philosophy courses that really stretched my intellect, an anthropology class, a sociology class (we read Fussel's "Class" and it's stuck with me since) and a Brit Lit class that left me with a sincere appreciation of boring dead peoples' writing. I also enjoyed poetry for the first time in my life.

All that said, I have no problem with the decline of the humanities, as long as there is still some significant chunk people who get to dedicate their lives to it. English major became, IMO, a standard choice for middle-intelligence people who wouldn't have been in college a generation before. The development of the humanities doesn't depend on them.

Isn't a world in which only a small minority posseses a PhD from a faculty of letters, a return to historical average? The 1945-2008 era being an aberration, of thoughtless proliferation of education in the abstract, yet not-scientific, fields of inquiry.

Now the sciences continue to suffer from the same mass malaise, now worsened by the inflow of what would have previously been English majors.

The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.

If I understand correctly, you would agree with the point I made above, so without evidrnce that the decline in enrollment is due to people who fit your description, and not due people padding their resumes to maximize their income, I do not see a problem.

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