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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34482 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.

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.

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.

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