Breaking News: Humanities in Decline! Film at 11.

Well, honestly, as I sit here contemplating the bitter dregs of my own curriculum vitae, I wish there had been an attempt to erase the stigma of trade schools ten or fifteen years ago. But such promotion of practical education need not, and should not, come at the expense of liberal arts programs and institutions, since it seems much more to be driven by the spurious requirement of a college degree for everything from soup to nuts.**

**I choose my analogies frivolously, you know.

Oh, I imagine that sales of Sgt Pepper are experiencing a very big spike today, and will stay that way til Christmas.

The decline in computer science majors in recent years is, actually, spectacular, and might be worth both headlines and some sort of action to reverse the trend (certain of former, not of latter).

The French, Beatles, and careful analogies, all rolled into one. Propitious? I think not. Today, UNESCO honored French cuisine as a world heritage food source, APPLE agrees to sell Beatles on iTunes, and all of those public school teachers that got humanities degrees in the 60s and early 70s are nearing retirement age. May the humanities spike again!

Is there a site online that shows the changes in degrees granted in various subjects over time, and if so, could you please post a link? Would be interesting information to see.

random passersby parents telling students their children they’ll be consigned to a life of selling apples and flipping burgers if they major in English;…

Fixed for you. As parents of a history major (with a job!) and an art history major (without a job!) we may have failed them but it was, is and will be a happy fail.
I accompanied the older to an accepted student session at the school she chose and in a room with the parents of about 30 other prospects, none talked about their desire for a liberal arts education. It was all pre-law and pre-med which to me seemed they were looking for a higher-class trade school.

@3 I know software engineers who absolutely don’t want their kids to study computers, and software engineers who do. I also know of kids who are studying computer science in spite of their dads’ (usually) telling them it’s a bad idea–it’s just too cool, you could write your own roleplaying game. I would say if you want to do technical stuff (not move very quickly into e.g. marketing), and you think you might be ambitious or easily bored, you should get a master’s at a minimum.

For what it’s worth about a month ago I said that if Larry Summers had bothered to develop the skills that art historians develop he wouldn’t have been such a total failure at his last two jobs.

“What is this “happier and more flourishing” you speak of? I tried to Babelfish-translate this into Neoliberalese and kept getting gibberish.”

That’s a tricky one. The best I could do was a “richer and more empowered consumer.”

I like the interviewer’s suggestion that if one lets it slip that one is a philosophy major the natural reaction to that news is that one is a “slacker”; to which Faust’s response is basically that undergraduate majors don’t mean anything, and that while some people need to sow a little intellectual wild oats in their misspent youth, they usually turn out okay in the end.

Speaking as a slacker myself, I have to agree that a philosophy BA is small potatoes: you don’t get to the serious slackage — the big potatoes, if you like — until you find yourself writing a 250-page dissertation on such bagatelles [that’s French] as the question of what it is for a word to mean something. Because that never comes up.

I’m not so much worried about the decline in humanities majors, since there doesn’t seem to be any. I’m a bit more worried about the increase in preprofessional majors: business, engineering, communications, and the like.

But what really frightens me is the decline is rigorous majors. Except for engineering, none of the preprofessional majors are particularly rigorous. The humanities are often rigorous: invariably philosophy, and often the others. So are math/physical science. Not so much social science, although economics I suppose is math lite. This is not to trash social science, which is worthy of study. It just doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a rigorous undergrad major.

Which explains why the hierarchy of law school admissions goes something like: philosophy, physics, etc.

What strikes me as particularly odd about the SUNY-Albany and LSU cases is that if we accept the ‘college as trade school’ logic, the foreign languages become one of the most useful skill disseminating part of the humanities there is. I mean, there are all these global corporations, and someday everyone worth talking to will speak English, but we’re not there yet. Being fluent in foreign languages is one of the clearest, most straightforward skills one can put on a resume.

That’s funny, because I would have thought that if anything’s going to be materialist (as in “dialectical materialism,” for instance?) rather than idealist (like Berkeley) it would be the “virulent strain of Marxist radicalism” which has driven students, &c. I wish the wingnuts would get their talking points straight. Oh wait, that’s supposed to show that we’re confused. Got it.

Btw you promised us a wingnut-off when you bailed from the other blog. Don’t forget!

Bloix got it right at (or about) #16.

“Remove yourself Sirrah, the wench belongs to me;” Blabbered
a drunken soldier, too far consumed by the influences of his
virile brew to take note of the superior size of his adversary.
Grignr lithly bounded from the startled female, his face lit
up to an ashen red ferocity, and eyes locked in a searing feral
blaze toward the swaying soldier.
“To hell with you, braggard!” Bellowed the angered Ecordian,
as he hefted his finely honed broad sword.

I see this in my own bailiwick. Upper administrators come around saying we must be hard-headed and practical and respond to data on student demand. Excellent, you reply: look at this data showing demand for arts degrees! And they gape at you and change the subject.

Michael — no problem, and thanks very much for the link.

Arts degrees presumably include commercial art, you would probably assume an increase in web design and film courses, and I’m not quite sure the rise in formal writing and art degree programs means there’s lots more room for slackers who are only getting degrees in what interests them with no thought of a career.

Also, perhaps Bell might have decided to canceled the program on the basis of that written report, evidence or no evidence? Nah. And hey, I’d love to pay higher rates so executives can have time to shoot the breeze with one another and further their humanities education.

I’m also pretty sure the number of professional performers who attend regular colleges and universities has been going up too. Conservatories are being reaccredited as colleges and universities, middle class kids who might have gone to work at 18 while taking private lessons and going to auditions are going to college instead, and rich kids who might have gotten a genteel degree in French while taking private lessons want a head start on their career instead of doing that.

Fun conversation. I should only add that the only reason you should learn anything is that it is beautiful, and this most definitely includes physics, biology, and economics, computer science, statistics, and engineering. Aesthetics and understanding are really the same thing.

Both “Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities” and “Multi/interdisciplinary studies” increase considerably in raw numbers over the date range in question, while numbers for “English language and literature/letters” and “Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics” are static or fall slightly. I wonder if that’s a sign of less rigor, more general curiosity (and tolerance of general curiosity by administrations), or both— or neither.

“Communications” encompasses a decent range of corporate jobs, doesn’t it? Marketing, PR, documentation/QA, that sort of thing. I could be wrong about this, but I think it is a real niche.

ToS watch on “a.y. mous” (#30).

“Neoclassical economics is important in the social sciences, which are hardly vocational degrees. It’s a approximately no importance in any vocational degree I can think of. (Whatever you think of IASB or GAAP rules, they are not theories.)”

Business education is (or was) pretty explicitly based upon neoclassical economics. Yes, even in accounting, beyond teaching the GAAP rules, textbooks were almost solely a discussion of how GAAP rules interacted with (various aspects of) neoclassical economics.

And neoclassical economics got very heavily imported into policy studies, health care management studies, human resources, law and economics, agricultural training, and many more. And many engineering programs require their students to take “engineering management” courses, which are also usually taught relying upon neoclassical economics.

.
ToS?

Troll on Site?
Thaumaturgy opposing Serendipity?

(My online dictionary is open. I will continue unless you enlighten me.)

My first degree was in the humanities. Then I got an engineering degree years later. That is the correct order. Irony + calculus = Big Win!

It would be swell if someone deleted all of my now-very-weird-looking comments on this thread since the ToS has been erased:

https://crookedtimber.org/2010/11/07/swift-versus-berlin-on-positive-liberty/

I look positively unhinged.

Re the Troll of Sorrow, he was most recently commenting here under the handle “Beauregard.” I’m glad he’s been cleared out; it may seem harsh but the fact that CT actively enforces its rules for commenters is a big reason you can have real (often very interesting!) conversations here, unlike lots of blogs.

I do wonder about the psychology of it, though. Why would would someone go to such persistent lengths to talk with people he insists he despises?

bianca steele 11.17.10 at 5:54 pm

“I’m also pretty sure the number of professional performers who attend regular colleges and universities has been going up too. Conservatories are being reaccredited as colleges and universities, middle class kids who might have gone to work at 18 while taking private lessons and going to auditions are going to college instead, and rich kids who might have gotten a genteel degree in French while taking private lessons want a head start on their career instead of doing that.”

A friend’s sister was able to make a living in NYC as an actress/singer/dancer/tech theater person (sort of a utility player). She got her BA first, doing summer work as well. In her opinion, that’s necessary; the way that she put it was that vast numbers of high school students starred in their school play, and therefore thought that they could move to NYC (or LA) and get a job. Once they got there, they found that people who had a few more years of education and experience beat them everytime.

“Where on earth did you get this idea? I take it you’ve never, for instance, spoke to a person who teaches at a business school, or read anything published by one?”

I actually spent two years in the confines of one – along with a bunch of people who primarily had undergraduate business degrees (so they had already gone through 4 or more years of business studies). I’m sort of astonished at the level of nonsense on this topic: at the undergrad level, most business students take a good heaping of economics classes no matter what their major – in business schools, this was primarily taught through the lens of neoclassical. If they’re management majors, they learn the theory of the firm by Coase , Williamson and Jensen (I was even assigned a paper by Alchian). If they’re finance majors, their curriculum would have almost entirely derived from neoclassical economics (the best places will actually have you read the original Fama, Markowitz, Sharpe, Modigliani/Miller, Fama/French and so on papers). They’ll also spend a fair bit of time on game theory, taught explicitly through the neoclassical take on game theory (noncooperative games exclusively). People pursuing graduate degrees get compressed versions of the above. There were some areas where neoclassical didn’t dominate: marketing, strategy (usually taught by sociologists), operations research but most of the fields were primarily composed of neoclassical economists.

Heck, I’ll send you my syllabi if you want me to.

“There were some areas where neoclassical didn’t dominate: marketing, strategy (usually taught by sociologists), operations research but most of the fields were primarily composed of neoclassical economists.”

Except the sharper B-school majors will notice that when you’re reading Porter on strategy and the five forces, that Porter’s sources of competitive advantage are market imperfections.

The funniest time I had was after a i-Banker explained the process of making book for an IPO (which was very fucking far from a frictionless market with perfect transparency of information), one of the students dismissed one of the i-Banker’s observations because it violated the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

“Despite all the attacks on our Piss Christ this and our queerying that and our deconstructing the Other … ”

Though this is a small bit of a much larger piece, I find an idea intimated here that is both common and objectionable when debating the fate of the humanities. What I have in mind is the tendency to equate literary studies – the place where concepts like “queer” (at least as used here) and “deconstruct” have a home – with the humanities as a whole. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to describe it as the tendency to equate post-structuralist thought with the humanities in general.

burritoboy @51-

OK, I believe you. My comment was overly confrontational, and I apologize.

I still have to say, tho, that from my perspective as a consumer of economics literature, I find that people in business schools are much less doctrinaire than people in economics departments — they’re far more likely to write empirical papers that simply describe the observed behavior of firms, without needing to spend half the paper rationalizing the findings in terms of some model of optimizing agents with rational expectations. It can be a real breath of fresh air.

I thought the turtles joke was OK, and even appropriate to certain situations where people keep using new terminology to express the same tired idea. Work for the Dole, you know.

Not sure what the joke was doing here.

Well, Professor, in mous’ defense, koala Singapore au jus invert.

“Except the sharper B-school majors will notice that when you’re reading Porter on strategy and the five forces, that Porter’s sources of competitive advantage are market imperfections.”

My precise point is that it’s extremely rare for even the very sharpest business majors to even have the capability to notice that – they are not trained to do that. As a graduate business students, those who had undergraduate business degrees were (generally) the least capable of critical thinking on that level (in my experience only, of course). The most capable of doing so were either people trained in traditional liberal arts programs or as engineers.

Michael, I hate to spoil a joke, but I respect you far too much to suffer your incomprehension. That was a copy-paste from the essay titled “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell which I was sure you would have known by heart. Mea culpa.

No, no, mea maxima culpa. As I used to say on my old blog, I are a total ignoramus. But no, I haven’t committed the sentences of “In Praise of Idleness” to memory and couldn’t make the connection. As for the terrapins, I thought it was either a turtles-all-the-way-down bit or something about the ACC or the Grateful Dead.

Thing is, since Russell’s time, the US has embarked on this wild, crazy, wacky madcap adventure called “mass higher education.” Then, well into the experiment, we decided that higher education was a private investment rather than a public good, so we offloaded its costs onto individuals and families (see “neoliberalese,” above). So it makes sense for some of the masses to wonder whether the time and money spent in college are going to help get a decent job. And maybe a happier and more flourishing life, as well.

Leave it to Bertrand Russell to clear the air. I love how in his autobiography he describes how the professors at Harvard would stop him in the halls to tell him an anecdote they had already told him before many times over, and when he tried to pre-empt them by telling it himself, to show that he knew it, they would hear him out politely and then, quite undeterred, go on and repeat the very same anecdote with all seriousness. My own late father in law, a distinguished professor and administrator, rest his soul, and otherwise sharp as a tack until the day he died, used to indulge in this very behavior. You could feel the air being sucked out of the room, sometimes, when he and his colleagues got together.

Taking up a bit of snark for a moment, i deem to think that without important humanities curricula in higher education, the future professional athletes in the system would have no place to turn to work towards graduation. You can’t ask an entire offensive line protecting Cam Newton to take comprehensive courses in engineering or microbiology.

As for the terrapins, I thought it was either a turtles-all-the-way-down bit or something about the ACC or the Grateful Dead.
Yes, there is a station for that, in the UCSC library, i think.

Well, a liberal education was intended for free and independent people, not slaves, I believe. “Plato is my friend, but I love the truth more” — as someone once said.

“Why does Sgt. Pepper get all the love from critics?”

I’m not a critic, but I suspect that Sgt. Pepper’s was so different from the other “rock and roll” then being made, and also so different from the Beatles previous work, that contemporary critics perceived it as “revolutionary”. It kinda was. Maybe you had to be there, in a mileau where one regularly heard crap by Herman’s Hermits and Gary Lewis and the Playboys, to understand how completely different from anything else it sounded.

As for why the declining enrollment in Com. Sci. and computer engineering, I’d say that the twenty-five-years-and-ongoing plateau in median salaries (i.e. lifestyle steadily losing ground to inflation) and the simultaneous decay in working conditions (offices gave way to cubicles; life/work balance gave way to the expectation that one’s entire life would be dedicated to corporate goals, and that one would be online and working seven days a week,; support staff has disappeared) have been accurately perceived by young Americans who are choosing a career, and they have for the most part chosen to abandon the field to the H1B holders who now populate so much of the tech workplace.

Sgt. Pepper — yes, you had to be there.

My brother bought the album when it came out. Eighteen months later we had to buy another copy — because repeated playing had worn through the dark outer vinyl layer and revealed the white plastic inside. Needless to say we had the entire thing memorized.

Of course it was also impossible to avoid lesser ilk like the “1910 Fruit Gum Company”: “Yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy” and that line will remain engraved on my brain until the day I die.

The crisis in the humanities is not occurring in the universities so much as in the elementary grades, where they are most needed and where the fetishization of capitalism has virtually taken over:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html?hpw

All I could take away from this thread is that somehow The Beatles and French are connected. Then it seemed to wander astray. I’m still puzzling the connection.

@77 I suspect you could also argue that there had been a bubble in new CS graduates, fed by Y2K fears (though not sure the chronology makes sense), dotcom hype (though they often enough hired people without formal training), and the constant drumbeat about not enough graduates (fed in part by impossible demands for “credentials” for skills with a cycle shorter than five years, which any experienced person who needed a university course to learn them was probably not very good in the first place). But that reflects badly on universities and makes me look like a prof-basher, doesn’t it? :(

“Wow. Just wow. I don’t think even Mylse SG could excrete such a load of self-important pomposity. I’d vote for Berlusconi too, if I thought this was the alternative.”

Yes, Lemuel, we’re already well aware that you’d eagerly vote for Berlusconi for aesthetic reasons (or for any other reason, if you’re being honest with yourself).

Real college degree*. Contrary to popular perception, film studies (at least at certain colleges) is a real college degree. Communications, however, is a diff. case altogether. Does any reputable liberal arts undergraduate institution offer that as a major? (Not the various semi-detached Schools of Communications/Journalism, etc. but communications as a major).

On another note, if you are going to take a vocational degree, you should be at trade school, not college. Babson, for example, is a perfectly appropriate destination.

“Insofar as instruction in “the humanities” makes people better able to communicate in speech, writing, and visual images (which includes both the ability to speak and write well and produce good visual images and the ability to decode the speeches, writings, and visual images produced by others) of course it has “practical” (i.e., vocational) as well as intrinsic value.”

There are some strange, very strange things going on here that are obvious to anyone who looks.
I listen to a LOT of university talk/lecture podcasts, from a variety of universities across a variety of disciplines, and there are very strong patterns to the talks that are given. Some are interesting and fairly well-known, but irrelevant to us right now — for example physicists, believing (correctly, hah! [I’m a physicist] ) that they are the smartest person in the room, are very aggressive at interrupting speakers and asking questions, whether the topic is within their domain of expertise or something completely different (eg when Murray Gell-Mann addresses a group of physicists on his current interest, the deep history of language); economists behave likewise though not quite as aggressively.

However the one thing I suspect few would have predicted is that scientists and engineers, in general, give extremely good talks. They speak fluently, their thought are organized, and they never read from notes. They understand the limitations of the medium — that a talk is for overview and explanation, while reading is for appreciation of the full details of the math and the argument.

At the other end of the scale, English lecturers give truly astonishingly bad talks; the convention in English appears to be that delivering a talk consists of reading in a monotonic drone from an article written in dense stereotypical prose, with little discussion of what is being presented and why it’s interesting. (And I say this not as someone with an axe to grind against English departments. Occasionally I find a speaker discussing a subject, like various types of literary criticism, or some common arc within a set of texts, in a way that suggests that truly find this interesting, and I find what they have to say truly fascinating. But these speakers are all too rare.

In between we have the vast area that covers the humanities and the social scientists. What we find is that
– historians are generally pretty damn good, unless they want to become amateur sociologists, in which case we get the droning reading of a dense jargon-laden article
– likewise for classicists
– sociologists, on the other hand, are often pretty good, even when in theory mode — they seem to actually have some interest in their theories and a desire to explain them to the world, rather than just going through the motions.

I’m sad to say that the departments you’d expect to be polemical within the humanities, eg women’s studies, african-american studies, jewish studies, generally are. I don’t know if it’s the laziness of preaching to the converted, but these talks pretty uniformly come across as having absolutely nothing to say that isn’t already known to any intelligent human being, unless they’re a long catalog of the methodological details of some study — the sort of thing that any scientist/engineer would omit, telling you at the end of the talk to read such and such an article if you want the details.

So what can we conclude?
Disappointingly, I’d have to say that for many in the humanities, what they appear to be taught is how to produce a very specific sort of paper that bears almost no relationship to the communication engaged in by most of the rest of the academy, along with zero skills in how to present the ideas in those papers vocally and in a limited amount of time.
On the plus side, they do also learn how to interpret and dissect words, images and artifacts in a way that is substantially more sophisticated than the skills possessed by the rest of us, and when these skills are put to good use and communicated well the results can be enlightening and enthralling. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether the skills are rarely being put to good use, or if the findings are just never communicated to the outside world, but it’s rare indeed to find these ideas communicated in a way that isn’t completely awful. Consider, to take one example of all of what I’m saying, Foucault. The ideas he has to convey, in a book like Discipline and Punish, are really really interesting — interesting historically, politically, sociologically, psychologically. But my god, you have to have some really strong motivation to actually make it all the way through a Foucault work without wanting to stab your eyes out.

I’d conclude by saying that this seems, to me, to be substantially self-inflicted by the humanities. I’m the last person to praise my fellow man, but I think there is a substantial fraction of the US (and world) population that really does appreciate learning and understanding, and supports money that is spent on this endeavor. All they ask in return is to be given some insight into what has been learned. Many disciplines understand this bargain and do their best to give back — we’ve long been awash in popular books, good, even very good, popular books on the hard sciences and engineering, on various aspects of history, on psychology and sociology. The political scientists are late to the party, but we’re slowly seeing cross-over social science popular books that discuss issues like median voter models, voting methods and game theory.
But most of the humanities seem utterly uninterested in this exercise, and, even worse, to portray an air of being above popularization — “what we say is so subtel and refined that a mere commoner could never understand it, no matter how we tried, so why make the effort”?
If the classics profession, for example, is unwilling to let the outside world know what the new ideas are in their field over the past 30 years, is it any wonder that the outside world considers that the subject had been mined out by 1900, and so who cares if their department folds?
If the public face of the Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, and English departments is some refugee from the 60s waving a protest sign, rather than people talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book on how critical theory helps us deconstruct advertising, textbooks, newspapers, and the entire social world around us, should we be surprised that no-one outside these departments cares much about saving them?

if you are going to take a vocational degree, you should be at trade school, not college

I went to vocational school myself, tho I think the official name was the University of Mississippi School of Law.

At the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia (then a BA program) A. J. Liebling was exempted from writing courses, possibly on the strength of several short stories he had written: “My queerest disillusion, he said, ‘came in a course in just straight writing. I was excused from it on the ground that I could already write ‘well enough.’ I have often thought back on that ‘well enough’ with wonderment; well enough for what? The aim of a serious professional school should have been to teach everybody to write as well as Tom Paine or William Cobbett.'” (Quoted in Raymond Sokolov, Wayward Reporter: the Life of A. J. Liebling, 1980, pp. 53-54)

Whatever the case, according to Sokolov, “he did somehow demonstrate his writing competence and that gave him space in his schedule to take Old French from Raymond Weeks [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Weeks ]. And to keep his hand in with modern French, he seems to have translated several pages of elegant erotica by Restif de La Bretonne.” [NOTE: this is what Bertrand Russell undoubtedly meant by “leisure.”]

“Otherwise,” Sokolov goes on, “the school was a washout for Liebling. In The Wayward Pressman, he complains about the exercises in ‘newswriting’ and that the model he and his classmates were meant to copy was Adolph Ochs’s ‘colorless, odorless, and especially tasteless [New York] Times of 1923, a political hermaphrodite capable of intercourse with conservatives of both parties at the same time.’ The Pulitzer School, he concluded, ‘had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P [grocery chain].’”

According to Sokolov, “Liebling’s chapter on Columbia in The Wayward Pressman is entitled ‘How to Learn Nothing.’ Still, his exposure to Romance Philology did really make an intellectual difference to him. Raymond Weeks was a fine scholar and a writer too. . . . That course must have been part of the impetus behind [Liebling’s] studies two years later in Paris and in Normandy. The subject also gave him a learned frame for his passion for Villon and Rabelais. But as a whole, Columbia struck him as a pointless exercise. He said, ‘The newspaper world is full of alumni of schools of journalism, but they seldom admit it until their interrogator thrusts hot needles under their fingernail.’”(Sokolov, 1980, p. 55)

[Lieblings’ view may have been colored by the fact that he, a Jew, had previously twice been thrown out of Dartmouth College for repeatedly missing compulsory Chapel, despite an exemplary academic record.]

I went to vocational school myself, tho I think the official name was the University of Mississippi School of Law.

That’s professional school, not trade school. Professional schools require previous undergraduate study, and thus presumes existing general academic aptitude.

That’s professional school, not trade school. Professional schools require previous undergraduate study, and thus presumes existing general academic aptitude.

So people who want vocational training shouldn’t go to college, because if the job training in question requires colleges, it’s not vocational but professional?

Maynard Handley writes,

I have been trying to let the “outside world” know about new ideas in Classics for the last five years via free podcasts. If you are interested, please Google “C. May Marston Lecture.”

Sincerely, Owen Ewald

I never understood why high-school calculus is everywhere the high point of maths encountered by the general population. It’s a pretty technical subject that is only useful to people who will get lots of maths later on anyway.

For people who will not take more maths lessons, I’d say that enough statistics to vaguely understand newspaper claims should be the practical priority, plus a decent practice in mathematical proofs as part of general education.

If the purpose of college education were really only to be a gate keeper for future employment, then allowing a student to educate him or herself and then take an exam — in statistics, calculus, or whatever — ought to serve the same purpose just as well or better. Indeed, U of Chicago tried to do just that, but high school administrators all over the country rebelled.

@89: Stanford has a communications major, which I only know because Michelle Wie is in it.
Also, St. Louis University has had a communications department for some time. This is a Jesuit institution.

(At SLU, the basketball players are generally clustered in the business school because the philosophy and theology requirements are more extensive in the College of Arts and Sciences)

Oops, almost forgot, Mark. Just for the record:

Reading Plutarch provides young Americans good and bad examples of leadership. Shakespearean tragedy shows them where love goes awry and loyalty holds fast. Emily Dickinson reveals how a few choice words in the right places — ‘And zero at the bone’ — strike home. Monet’s cathedrals unveil a whole new way to see the world. Lose them and the college produces a half-educated graduate. Humanists scoff at this old-fashioned defense, but they’re wrong to assume that others share the cynicism.

Some humanists scoff, sure. Most don’t — including this one. I’ve been using versions of this old-fashioned defense for quite some time now. And best of all, it has the advantage of being true.

Why wait for college. Core curriculum works especially well in high school, especially when literature is coordinated with history and languages. Thus, for example, epics and the Bible in freshman year, along with ancient and medieval history. Plays are good in sophomore year, with early modern 16th seventeenth and eighteenth century history. Plus Milton and Pope and perhaps Defoe. Nineteenth century: novels and American history. Twentieth century — more international novels and poetry. A Shakespeare play every year, as well. Teachers can pick individual works to study according to their informed judgement. That’s the way it was done when I went to school and we had a pretty good education. We followed the same plan in French, which was compulsory, at that time for most of us.

But I think if you want to save the humanities — then let us aim for a just, humane, and demilitarized society, with a lot of spending on the arts, libraries, and scholarship.

I concede some guilt for over-arguing the correlation of theory/identity and slipping status for English and foreign languages, Michael. But I’m not so sure that theory/identity matters aren’t as influential any more. In the advanced circles, yes, one sees some traditional (and non-traditional) humanistic arguments surfacing (Felski, Nussbaum, etc.), but if you pore over a wide swath of publishing in English as well as the “expertises” of professors in 2nd- and 3rd-tier departments, as I have for a current research project, the identitiarian focus looks awfully dominant.