… in the New York Times.
Not really enough meat in the article for UD to chew on, but maybe you’ll find something.
… in the New York Times.
Not really enough meat in the article for UD to chew on, but maybe you’ll find something.
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February 25th, 2009 at 3:02AM
Ok, how ’bout the title?
"In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth"
Why? Really…why do "the Humanities" have to justify themselves?
Cohen notes in the article that:
"During the second half of the 20th century, as more and more Americans went on to college, a smaller and smaller percentage of those students devoted themselves to the humanities. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the heyday in the mid- to late ’60s, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by a consortium headed by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Currently they account for about 8 percent (about 110,000 students), a figure that has remained pretty stable for more than a decade. The low point for humanities degrees occurred during the bitter recession of the early 1980s."
So, the number of degrees has been stable for at least 10 years; only the PERCENTAGE relative to the number of total degrees has changed. For many of us who taught [and still teach] students who do not really want to either be in college or become educated [all they want is the degree as a credential], this makes perfect sense to me. Many undergrads think they don’t need to read, write, study or attend class to earn a college degree. And depending on where they attend, they are getting away with it.
The humanities are not in their death throes. The Academy itself might be….with all those "new" students who have zero interest in a liberal arts education clogging up the system, dropping retention and graduation rates, and overflowing classrooms run by adjuncts and other contingents hired to teach them. But it seems like, perhaps, the Humanities are the same as they’ve always been, just lost in the crowd.
What puzzles me is this throwaway factoid:
"Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course."
Doesn’t U of Washington exploit humanities adjuncts like the rest of the nation?
February 25th, 2009 at 8:21AM
Students in professional areas (e.g., business, engineering, health sciences, applied sciences, and even education) often receive considerable incentives besides immediate employability. By my count, here we probably have close to one special scholarship or award for every two business majors; we have an office that spends 90%+ of its time on getting paid internships for these and other professional students; as far as I can tell, underenrolled classes in those areas always proceed, although they would be canceled in the humanities. The bennies go on and on. What surprises me is how well the humanities have held up in the face of the many incentives that students have to major elsewhere.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:39AM
[…] us, the students you graduate will be functionally illiterate. 25 02 2009 Via UD, I see that the same reporter who facilitated the slander of Stanley Kutler is wondering if the […]
February 26th, 2009 at 10:21AM
Let’s be clear as to what constitutes the "humanities". Let’s start with theology and philosophy and expand very carefully from there. Apparently, many universities have not. And "The Myth" is right. With hundreds of thousands of additional students attending college in the past thirty years, the number of humanities student, faculty and courses have not declined, just their share of the enrollments. And, yes, professional schools have general educational requirements, which are often restrictive and more respectful of the traditional humanities than are some of the new humanities programs and majors. Humanities programs seem to feel that they own the "meaning of life" portion of the intellectual life, but often they can’t even convey the "meaning of humanities."