I remember when they wanted to close all smaller departments in the university of my hometown (Hamburg, Germany) with the reason you named: Geting rid of costlier departments, streamlining the university. But they didnt call it that, they said it was because they want more students finding work in those field.
When someone pointed out that no1 on the shopping block was finnugristic which had the previous year a HUNDRED PERCENT employmenmt rate by graduates in finnish businesses, they basically said "Well, still" (I left shortly afterwards so I dont know what happend in the end)
That was in the 90s.
Universities are expansive, and they allow for critical thinking. Thats not high on the priority list on conservative politicians.
Thanks for continuing to hold out fact over myth when it comes to the humanities. In that spirit, the Clemente Course in the Humanities has for more than two decades offered free, college level, dialogue-driven humanities courses to those who lack the financial or social capital needed to access formal education. The winner of the national humanities medal and numerous other awards, it continues to bring citizens at all levels into the circle of humanistic inquiry in a time of intellectual retraction. https://www.clementecourse.org/
It's doesn't feel like a mystery that students flock to STEM. The fields have been exciting, successful, and lucrative. Historically speaking, going to University to pursue some kind of study for it's own sake has been an option for the highly privileged. In the UK when they expanded access to higher education people were perplexed that many new students were choosing their courses like they were apprenticeships and expecting that if they studied forensic science, they'd become forensic scientists. But that makes absolute sense if you are the first in your generation to go to uni.
I suppose arguably having opposition to the humanities be bipartisan could work in its favor, if it meant that support for the humanities was also bipartisan. I realize that may be an overly rosy picture, but take what you can get from my usually pessimistic nature.
"In essence, a niche field (computer science) exploded" - yes, IT exploded starting in the 1980s and is now a serious strand of the labor market. But the rest of STEM also took off, immensely, especially allied health. CS is only one part of that.
Yes it's interesting because a lot of the humanities education that these right wingers idealize really happened in high school. Like in medieval times a BA was basically a high school diploma, and was often awarded to kids of eighteen or nineteen. That's where I got my humanities education, in my catholic high school. College, as currently constituted, is more like a medieval masters, which was always more specialized!
Great insights, John. Universities have pursued a neoliberal agenda for some time now. For some unknown reason, my dean invited me to lunch in 1990s with Ford Motor executives and he started waxing poetic re students as 'customers.' That led me to (a) point out how the student-professor relationship was so much more than that and (b) never being invited to lunch again by the dean.
Ian McGilchrist explains the invisible force under these deep cultural trends- yes capitalism but neuroscience too. Check the master and his emissary. Brilliant. Profound.
Aside from everything else, Flanagan strikes me as one of those creepy people who keeps hanging out with high schoolers when they're 28, not for prurient reasons but because they just can't shake off that time when they were taken seriously by the teachers and were smarter than most of the other kids--this constant revisitation of what college should be without any investment in college as such, without any ability to build a bigger framework or context.
As an economist, I get tired of capitalism being blamed for everything. First, we live in a mixed economy. This means some things are provided by the market and some things are publicly provided. This mix is determined by society’s choices. If the market underprovides a good or service, we could choose to provide more publicly. If this is the case, it is society’s failure not capitalism’s. Second, it seems like people that complain about capitalism seldom provide an alternative market structure or successful example. Are the humanities thriving in Russia or China? Is there a place where the humanities are thriving and is it because they don’t have capitalism? What alternative structure do you prefer?
You make really valid points! I may have said this as a comment on one of your other newsletters-- or quite possibly one of the many other newsletters I read, but most people view college as a way to get a job. And find no value in degrees that don’t directly lead to a job, i.e. the social sciences and humanities. Neither of my parents have college degrees, but my going to college was never a question, but an expectation. Because an education would lead to a good job. So I didn’t have the pressure to major in something that would lead to a job, and I didn’t treat college that way. I ended up with a BA in Anthropology, because it was the one discipline that was interdisciplinary! I could do all the science/bio stuff I liked without the math and chemistry, and also all the history I enjoyed with archaeology. I subsequently went on to earn an MA in anthropology as well! I always viewed college as teaching me and everyone else, though my peers vehemently disagreed-- most of whom were science/engineering/math majors-- that we were all learning the same thing, how to read, how to write and how to think critically. Vastly important skills no matter what career you choose. Skills, I realize, that my parents don’t quite have, with their high school educations. I never had a directly related anthropology job-- which did pose a problem in job interviews, and still does, as people assume that I should be a professor, or locked away in a lab doing research-- things I never wanted to do! But any real job skills, I learned on the job. In this day and age, where you can google anything, watch a you tube video showing you how to do something, college shouldn’t be about finding a job, but learning how to be in the world. Grad school is for practical job skills. You don’t need to have a BA in biology to go to med school-- you go to med school to be a doctor. That’s where you learn the skills for that, and frankly that’s what you do at the hospital! You learn to be a doctor not in college, but on the job. Like most jobs. So really, we all need to get over our hangups with using college as the means to finding a job, or the means to learning how to do a job. That’s not what it is and was designed for. And furthermore, college isn’t for everyone, not because everyone can’t go to college, by all means it should be accessible to everyone who wants to go, but it shouldn’t be the status symbol that it at times, still maintains. Skilled labor is important and necessary. We need plumbers and electricians and builders, etc. etc. who can be creative in solving those things, skills they learn in a trade school or through an apprenticeship. Anyway, now that I’ve run on, just wanted to say that I like all your points!
Sigh. Just what I've been saying all along, the whole problem (with everything in the world) is capitalism, comrades. Or to get all classical on you, as my liberal arts studies taught me, the love of money is the root of all evil.
My wife and I used to read each other newspaper articles about cricket because the descriptions seemed, at best, invented satire a la 43-man Squamish, at worst a series of random terms made to resemble a sports-like substance (or to be hip with the times, generated by faulty AI).
Apologies to the half of the world that understands cricket. We try to be good people in other ways.
Agree with everything you said! I also can't help but wonder if we're simply teaching humanities incorrectly. I read and wrote a lot as a young boy, but by the time I was in high school, I wanted nothing to do with the English curriculum. Now having, in a sense, returned to my roots (I'm an English major), I've constructed a vague hypothesis about the degredation of the humanities: we've simply forgotten our "why" (shoutout to Simon Sinek). Many English professors do a good job of enjoying what we read and sharing that passion with their students, but some--and many more high school teachers--put students off of reading by assigning ends to the material. In other words, instead of reading to enjoy and reap reading's benefits, we're reading so we can pass a reading test (which is literally a test that teachers assign that asks questions about the book's content to check if the student actually read the book). I mean, what a waste! Everything is for a grade. Curriculums are literally designed so students will pass standardized tests because the schools (at least where I'm from) with the highest standarized test scores get the most funding. It's no wonder students would rather play video games than read a book. Reading has become more of a burden than an opportunity! How can a young student reap the benefits of a book if their only goal is to finish it so they can get a good grade???
I remember when they wanted to close all smaller departments in the university of my hometown (Hamburg, Germany) with the reason you named: Geting rid of costlier departments, streamlining the university. But they didnt call it that, they said it was because they want more students finding work in those field.
When someone pointed out that no1 on the shopping block was finnugristic which had the previous year a HUNDRED PERCENT employmenmt rate by graduates in finnish businesses, they basically said "Well, still" (I left shortly afterwards so I dont know what happend in the end)
That was in the 90s.
Universities are expansive, and they allow for critical thinking. Thats not high on the priority list on conservative politicians.
Thanks for continuing to hold out fact over myth when it comes to the humanities. In that spirit, the Clemente Course in the Humanities has for more than two decades offered free, college level, dialogue-driven humanities courses to those who lack the financial or social capital needed to access formal education. The winner of the national humanities medal and numerous other awards, it continues to bring citizens at all levels into the circle of humanistic inquiry in a time of intellectual retraction. https://www.clementecourse.org/
It's doesn't feel like a mystery that students flock to STEM. The fields have been exciting, successful, and lucrative. Historically speaking, going to University to pursue some kind of study for it's own sake has been an option for the highly privileged. In the UK when they expanded access to higher education people were perplexed that many new students were choosing their courses like they were apprenticeships and expecting that if they studied forensic science, they'd become forensic scientists. But that makes absolute sense if you are the first in your generation to go to uni.
I suppose arguably having opposition to the humanities be bipartisan could work in its favor, if it meant that support for the humanities was also bipartisan. I realize that may be an overly rosy picture, but take what you can get from my usually pessimistic nature.
"In essence, a niche field (computer science) exploded" - yes, IT exploded starting in the 1980s and is now a serious strand of the labor market. But the rest of STEM also took off, immensely, especially allied health. CS is only one part of that.
Yes it's interesting because a lot of the humanities education that these right wingers idealize really happened in high school. Like in medieval times a BA was basically a high school diploma, and was often awarded to kids of eighteen or nineteen. That's where I got my humanities education, in my catholic high school. College, as currently constituted, is more like a medieval masters, which was always more specialized!
Great insights, John. Universities have pursued a neoliberal agenda for some time now. For some unknown reason, my dean invited me to lunch in 1990s with Ford Motor executives and he started waxing poetic re students as 'customers.' That led me to (a) point out how the student-professor relationship was so much more than that and (b) never being invited to lunch again by the dean.
Ian McGilchrist explains the invisible force under these deep cultural trends- yes capitalism but neuroscience too. Check the master and his emissary. Brilliant. Profound.
Aside from everything else, Flanagan strikes me as one of those creepy people who keeps hanging out with high schoolers when they're 28, not for prurient reasons but because they just can't shake off that time when they were taken seriously by the teachers and were smarter than most of the other kids--this constant revisitation of what college should be without any investment in college as such, without any ability to build a bigger framework or context.
As an economist, I get tired of capitalism being blamed for everything. First, we live in a mixed economy. This means some things are provided by the market and some things are publicly provided. This mix is determined by society’s choices. If the market underprovides a good or service, we could choose to provide more publicly. If this is the case, it is society’s failure not capitalism’s. Second, it seems like people that complain about capitalism seldom provide an alternative market structure or successful example. Are the humanities thriving in Russia or China? Is there a place where the humanities are thriving and is it because they don’t have capitalism? What alternative structure do you prefer?
You make really valid points! I may have said this as a comment on one of your other newsletters-- or quite possibly one of the many other newsletters I read, but most people view college as a way to get a job. And find no value in degrees that don’t directly lead to a job, i.e. the social sciences and humanities. Neither of my parents have college degrees, but my going to college was never a question, but an expectation. Because an education would lead to a good job. So I didn’t have the pressure to major in something that would lead to a job, and I didn’t treat college that way. I ended up with a BA in Anthropology, because it was the one discipline that was interdisciplinary! I could do all the science/bio stuff I liked without the math and chemistry, and also all the history I enjoyed with archaeology. I subsequently went on to earn an MA in anthropology as well! I always viewed college as teaching me and everyone else, though my peers vehemently disagreed-- most of whom were science/engineering/math majors-- that we were all learning the same thing, how to read, how to write and how to think critically. Vastly important skills no matter what career you choose. Skills, I realize, that my parents don’t quite have, with their high school educations. I never had a directly related anthropology job-- which did pose a problem in job interviews, and still does, as people assume that I should be a professor, or locked away in a lab doing research-- things I never wanted to do! But any real job skills, I learned on the job. In this day and age, where you can google anything, watch a you tube video showing you how to do something, college shouldn’t be about finding a job, but learning how to be in the world. Grad school is for practical job skills. You don’t need to have a BA in biology to go to med school-- you go to med school to be a doctor. That’s where you learn the skills for that, and frankly that’s what you do at the hospital! You learn to be a doctor not in college, but on the job. Like most jobs. So really, we all need to get over our hangups with using college as the means to finding a job, or the means to learning how to do a job. That’s not what it is and was designed for. And furthermore, college isn’t for everyone, not because everyone can’t go to college, by all means it should be accessible to everyone who wants to go, but it shouldn’t be the status symbol that it at times, still maintains. Skilled labor is important and necessary. We need plumbers and electricians and builders, etc. etc. who can be creative in solving those things, skills they learn in a trade school or through an apprenticeship. Anyway, now that I’ve run on, just wanted to say that I like all your points!
Sigh. Just what I've been saying all along, the whole problem (with everything in the world) is capitalism, comrades. Or to get all classical on you, as my liberal arts studies taught me, the love of money is the root of all evil.
My wife and I used to read each other newspaper articles about cricket because the descriptions seemed, at best, invented satire a la 43-man Squamish, at worst a series of random terms made to resemble a sports-like substance (or to be hip with the times, generated by faulty AI).
Apologies to the half of the world that understands cricket. We try to be good people in other ways.
Agree with everything you said! I also can't help but wonder if we're simply teaching humanities incorrectly. I read and wrote a lot as a young boy, but by the time I was in high school, I wanted nothing to do with the English curriculum. Now having, in a sense, returned to my roots (I'm an English major), I've constructed a vague hypothesis about the degredation of the humanities: we've simply forgotten our "why" (shoutout to Simon Sinek). Many English professors do a good job of enjoying what we read and sharing that passion with their students, but some--and many more high school teachers--put students off of reading by assigning ends to the material. In other words, instead of reading to enjoy and reap reading's benefits, we're reading so we can pass a reading test (which is literally a test that teachers assign that asks questions about the book's content to check if the student actually read the book). I mean, what a waste! Everything is for a grade. Curriculums are literally designed so students will pass standardized tests because the schools (at least where I'm from) with the highest standarized test scores get the most funding. It's no wonder students would rather play video games than read a book. Reading has become more of a burden than an opportunity! How can a young student reap the benefits of a book if their only goal is to finish it so they can get a good grade???