APT on Nussbaum

I won’t say much, because at this moment I’m busy incorporating a critique of Nussbaum’s argument in a paper for a forthcoming seminar. However, the central idea of the book, that receipt of a certain type of humanities education is necessary for people to acquire the capacities for empathic imagination that (according to MN) are necessary virtues of democratic (and indeed global) citizenship strikes me as (a) obviously false and (b) insulting to those of her fellow citizens who haven’t been the beneficiaries of such courses. Those given a more technical education are described as “useful machines” as early as p.2. There is very little empirical support adduced for any of the causal claims in the essay which tend to rely on more or less _a priori_ arguments from various educational and psychoanalytical thinkers that Nussbaum likes. The parts of the book that touch on things that I know quite a bit about, such as the research funding regime in the UK and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are hopelessly inaccurate.

Wow, that Jarrell quote is perfect, absolutely perfect. Never read Pictures. Must read it now.

“Explain the purpose of this intrusion upon my chateau!”
“Your sirenity, resplendent in noble grandeur, we have
brought this yokel before you (the soldier gestured toward
Grignr) for the redress or your all knowing wisdon in judgement
regarding his fate.”
“Down on your knees, lout, and pay proper homage to your
sovereign!” commanded the pudgy noble of Grignr.
“By the surly beard of Mrifk, Grignr kneels to no man!”
scowled the massive barbarian.

It is too bad she didn’t write this as a book for Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series. I find that the format has produced some creative and provocative summaries of things we already know. Consider, for example, Terry Eagleton’s Meaning of Life VSI. Say what you will about Eagelton, but the book somehow manages to feel fresh on a topic that is as old as they come.

Clearly what Nussbaum needs is not another book, but a techno soundtrack and some glossy facts.

Plus a really great powerpoint deck.

Personally, speaking as a liberal arts graduate who likes to read many kinds of things, but not a literature major, I found her criticism of novels, especially of Dickens, difficult to reconcile with her theories about empathy–though describing them as also “preachy” might explain it. She says a lot about emotions also in Upheavals of Thought, but what was most memorable in that book has turned out to be the detailed description of stoicism, so though her actual argument is that stoicism needs to be supplemented with a recognition of emotions’ value, I found it very useful to find out that people take it seriously at all these days.

Henry @ #13, but Keynes and T S Eliot were apparently good friends and Eliot, unlike the self-centered Virginia Woolf, apparently maintained an easy friendship with his wife. (Keynes’ wife, his own being a different story.)

The link in #2 is just another reminder of what an embarrassing and egregious hack Mark Ames is. Matt, I think, gets it half-right. She writes too much, and she tries too hard to be a public intellectual. Her most interesting and readable work is her most straightforwardly academic. I’m far from sold on the central argument, but Frontiers of Justice is a challenging and worthwhile read, as was Women and Human Development. While it’s not terribly groundbreaking, I find the framing of her work on shame and disgust a valuable aid to clear thinking on the subject. But other stuff, mostly the stuff geared toward a general and less academic audience, is boring and banal (or, in the case of her absurd hatchet job on Judith Butler in TNR, much worse). I’m pretty skeptical of any grand unified theory of Nussbaum.

As an aside, the APT blog-reading group is a fantastic idea; I really wished they’d selected a serious work of political theory.

My initial reaction, to be frank, is to call bullsh*t.

Certain norms of discussion and respect are important to a well-functioning democracy. But these norms do not require extensive seminars in the humanities or the liberal arts to be taught or learned. They can be taught and learned in any collaborative endeavor.

It is remarkable to me how so many humanities professors, having themselves most saliently experienced the thrill of open discussion and respectful engagement of opposing arguments in their humanities classes, suppose that humanities classes are the only places in which these things may be found. I have found them in the sciences and in business as well, and to no lesser degree.

I struggle to understand how tomes written in such a spirit can continue to be published, in a time when overwhelming technical complexity and long work hours – not lack of imaginative compassion – are the chief obstacles to informed public opinion.

I am astonished at the grossly grandiose pleas for the humanities, in a time when the health of the economy depends on workers of greater technical skill.

And I am entertained by the author who, having invoked philosophy, writes in the stentorian tones of those who are better able to proclaim the virtues of truly critical discussion than to sustain it.

[This was written at the end of the workday; comment may be harsher than intended.]

The humanities are important but the people who defend them are an embarrassment.

they sound like academic blah blah blah (with citations), and my eyes gloss over.

Snort.

Harold @21 is right, and I would add that the people defending the humanities are professors. If professors in the humanities can’t mount a persuasive defense, let alone act to defend the humanities against university administrators and politicians, then the humanities deserve to die.

djw, I’ll give you Women and Human Development and the disgust bits of Hiding from Humanity (and a bunch of other stuff, including her 1987 refutation of Allan Bloom); but I couldn’t deal with Frontiers of Justice just ’cause the prose is so bad. And, as has been noted upthread, it wasn’t always thus. Love’s Knowledge is nicely written, although I don’t think many scholars of the fiction she addresses would support her idiosyncratic take on it (was it Hitchens who, writing about Poetic Justice, asked, “Does this author know about irony?”?).

The people defending the Humanities are not professors. They are parents that don’t want their kids in a testing culture all day every day. Professors are least equipped to defend the humanities because they are it’s closest practitioners. What the humanities needs are a bunch of people who write catchy “How Shakespeare taught me to run a business” type of arguments. As an ex-professor I realize nobody in the academy wants anybody to make these arguments because they kind of cheapen what you all do. But these are the arguments that work. Second best, the humanities are essential for learning how to resist advertising and become an educated consumer by teaching you how to read text and subtext and making you sensitive to how people try to persuade you of stuff. Trust me, stuff like this works at the K-12 level. My history department has actually expanded it’s reach and program making them (even as the school loudly proclaimed itself a STEM school, now STEAM, soon, SHTEAM – or is it shtick?). I really wish we could just say “classic liberal arts education, except with technology” and be done with it.

And a very good friend of Leontiev – one doesn’t think of great economists and great poets as likely to have much in common, but they evidently did.

Fascinating. Sort of like Sraffa and Wittgenstein?

(they would mock: what’s the difference between a world citizen and an intergalactic one?).

Citizen of the intergalactic federation of sentient species get to catch a ride off-world with the dolphins when the throughway-apocalypse comes.

…Folks with a solid humanities education under their belt have probably learned to write pretty well. A humanities education isn’t necessary for that, but then, a technical college education isn’t necessary in order to succeed as an engineer or computer programmer.

An exception to the “have learned to write pretty well” might be the technical craft majors, e.g. art or music performance, whose in-major requirements are low on writing, but these majors are probably best seen as the modern-day apprenticeships.

And Ben Hlpers you could at least tell them who your mother is.

Seems to be Ben has explained his parentage clearly @26. It’s kind of cool, I guess, to be the grandson of Leontief. But, um, who cares?

Josh, good call on the Bloom take-down. One of my favorites. And yes, Poetic Justice clearly belongs on the “ugh, what the hell” pile. I haven’t seen Hitchens’ review of it, but that seems promising.

I’ll grant the prose in Frontiers of Justice isn’t great, but I was pleasantly surprised by freshness with which she applies the capabilities approach theory of justice to the three substantive areas. I was afraid she’d be somewhat mechanically applying a theory that doesn’t really fit (in the animals case) and fits rather too easily (in the disabilities case) but in both cases along with global justice her application of the theory was refreshingly creative, clever, and unpredictable. This gets me over the clunky prose issues. If you have any familiarity with the theory at all, the first hundred pages are a dreary, useless retread.

when they talk about cutting the English or Social Studies curriculum so they can spend even more time on Math because of, you know, China

As I mentioned on my own blog a while ago, university administrators demonstrates here a curious understanding of the nature of international trade. China produces 600,000 engineers a year. On the other hand, China has never produced a single decent television game show. Any sensible assessment of comparative advantage would suggest that we should react to the emergence of China as a scientific and technical power by producing fewer engineering graduates, not more, and more humanities and media studies graduates, not fewer.

(not to disagree with dsquared here — that would be foolish! — but simply to suggest that before we think too much about the social significance of the terrible decline in the humanities, we might want to explore whether the humanities have in fact declined.)

In the United States, at least, there has been no reduction in the share of “English and Social Studies” majors over the past 20 years.

Yes, thankfully the collective wisdom of crowds and the catallaxy of undergraduate students have resisted this insane dash to engineering. The UK is in a bad place though because the government is cutting humanities teaching funding as a result of Lord Browne’s report. Lord Browne was an engineer (and former chief exec of BP), and I found myself uncharitably wondering whether having had more of a background in the humanities might have helped him to an understanding that “it’s a bad idea to be in the closet for thirty years and then to lose your job and destroy your reputation over a really silly blackmail scandal”.

dsquared @ 43

“The UK is in a bad place though because the government is cutting humanities teaching funding as a result of Lord Browne’s report.”

It’s also cutting non-humanities teaching funding, and to roughly the same extent in absolute terms. Some humanities subjects (e.g., performing arts, European modern languages) will fare worse than the hard sciences as the result of the new funding arrangements. But most of the rest of the humanities will fare a bit better.

@Mike 45

I was going to say the same thing. Ld Browne has actually arranged a large funding boost for the humanities (albeit the students will have to pay much of it back later).

Tony Lynch @28: You can call this “prejudice”, but in my view – and you have done nothing to shake it – this is a Properly Basic Belief. Given this I would like you to be mature enough (or not so tired) that you might live with me in the world, rather than trying to eject me from it.

Sure Tony, but in that case the proponent should show me what she likes or values about the humanities rather than making a series of weak instrumental arguments in their defense. I agree with your basic belief, but to persuade others Nussbaum needs more Harold Bloom’s popular work and less Richard Rorty op-ed essays. Show me why it’s great to spend an evening with Milton. Persuade me. But if instead of demonstration and persuasion, I’m given dire warnings about the future of global democracy, I will roll my eyes, politely direct the author to the political science department where there is actual research on that kind of thing, and thank God that I wasted little time on the author’s book.

dsquared @39: China produces 600,000 engineers a year. On the other hand, China has never produced a single decent television game show. Any sensible assessment of comparative advantage would suggest that we should react to the emergence of China as a scientific and technical power by producing fewer engineering graduates, not more, and more humanities and media studies graduates, not fewer.

Comparative advantage is not static, China does produce game shows (they simply aren’t watched much in the UK or the US), and game shows are unlikely to be a viable source of large national employment (you have the same “problems” of scaling – from an employment perspective – that you might with hedge funds). Moreover there’s plenty of demand for engineers here; the educational system just isn’t producing them. Nussbaum’s book, for all the praises it may sing of the public square, seems curiously insulated from reality beyond academia.

Besides, technical education isn’t limited to engineering. Doctors, for example, in the US are some of the best trained in the world. Perhaps we should do a better job producing more of them at cheaper cost by streamlining the educational system. But that will require a more rigorous scientific and mathematical curriculum – and, yes, that may cut into the funding and time for seminars on “Post-Structuralist Gendered Identity in Neoliberalized Post-Industrial Culture(s): What Games of Thrones Can Tell Us.” But there’s a reason why there is demand for engineers and doctors, and precious little demand (from the vaunted public square) for seminars like that.

Given a choice, students have deserted the traditional disciplines in droves.

I wonder if this is entirely true as asserted. The other thing that has happened is the massive growth in undergraduate education, associated with – let’s not go into chicken and egg here – the growth of credentialism in trades which would historically not required a degree. How many of that 60% would have been in college a generation ago, rather than pursuing apprenticeships or other forms of on the job training? Or to put it another way, perhaps the same proportion of the population is interested in following a liberal arts education as ever, but they have been joined in their institutions by an equal or greater number of people who would historically have preferred to follow their vocations by other means.

and precious little demand (from the vaunted public square) for seminars like that.

You mean, for the seminar that you dreamed up as a cheap strawman? No shit, Sherlock.

I have remorse about my post (now) number 45 which added nothing to the debate.
The pre-Browne figures for a price group D (i.e. Humanities) student of high social class and good A-levels (to avoid complication with WP and retention premia) in England are: HEFCE Base price £3,670, of which £1,345 is assumed fee; however the actual fee will be £3,375 so revenue per FT student is notionally £5,700. In reality, from 10-30% of students will fail HEFCE’s non-completion rule and will not be eligible to draw down HEFCE funding, so the actual revenue is in the range £5,000-£5,500 per student.

Post-Browne the revenue per student will be £9,000 in many cases.

In both cases, this revenue has to cover OFFA compliance activity as well as the teaching and learning.

At the margin, though, the difference is much greater than this makes it seem. Assume that the marginal humanities lecturer retires, and the Dean decides not to reappoint. In the pre-Browne system only the £3,375 of actual fee per student is likely to be lost revenue to the institution, because HEFCE pay the rest as a block grant subject only to quite broad student number tests rather than actually paying out on a £-per-student basis. Post-Browne, however all the revenue stands to be lost.

If the Dean was thinking pre-Browne the cost of replacement was £60k so (allowing for central contributions) I need £120k of revenue to cover the post, but actually the HEFCE money is coming anyway, so break even is an SSR of about 35:1. Post-Browne exactly the same calculation gives us an SSR of about 14:1. The example is stylised, but I hope it adds a it more information than my previous attempt.

I can’t see how the humanities could be anything other than a major profit centre on the Browne model, especially as they remain a high-status option for UK Undergraduates, and therefore in fairly strong demand.

Similarly, the world’s leading TV producer in terms of ratings is almost certainly a Chinese civil servant.

This is actually almost certainly true; a friend of mine once appeared on “Foreigners Singing In Chinese” on state TV and thus has been seen on TV by more people than the winner of “Britain’s Got Talent”.

The media industry is a genuine industry and it is both a large employer and a large source of export earnings for the UK. Sheffield Forgemasters, to take an example from my blog, is roughly the size of Cash in the Attic when considered as an economic entity.

Aye, Sheffield Forgemasters is an irrelevance. Rolls-Royce and EADS aren’t (especially now that EADS is in the UK solely because people in Flintshire are better at designing and building aeroplane wings than anyone else, rather than because of back-scratching political deals).

The things the UK is good at, and will continue to be better at than China for the lifetimes of most people commenting here, are things that are *really bloody hard to get if you’ve not grown up with it* rather than *fairly easy to copy if you’ve got a half-decent education*. This includes the MAXTREME end of engineering, the non-commodity aspects of media and financial services, and education.

The last of these, obviously, is why any politician who suggests cutting back on student visas (or on education more generally) is not only a bigot, but also a lackwit.

@john b, wing design is in Bristol. But isn’t your point really agreeing with D^2? Game shows are a prime example of something where the people involved have a lifetime of cultural influences aiding them. Engineering on the other hand is taught in schools, including the MAXTREME end I presume.

Nussbaum’s relatively recent takedown of Harvey Mansfield’s book on manliness is almost as good as the Bloom one. Soft target, natch, but a thorough squishing thereof.

Sample passage:

He repeatedly tells us that “all previous societies have been ruled by males,” producing Margaret Thatcher as a sole recent exception. Well, one has to forgive Mansfield for not adducing Angela Merkel or Han Myung-Sook or Michelle Bachelet, since these female leaders won their posts, presumably, after his book went to press. One might even forgive Mansfield for not knowing about female heads of state in Mongolia, Argentina, Iceland, Latvia, Rwanda, Finland, Burundi, Bermuda, Mozambique, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Dominica, Malta, Liberia, and Bangladesh. Those are relatively small countries, and one would have to be curious about what is going on in them. But one can hardly overlook Mansfield’s neglect of the very newsworthy recent or current female leaders of New Zealand (Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark), Turkey (Tansu Ciller), Poland (Hanna Suchocka), Norway (Gro Harlem Brundtland), France (Edith Cresson), Canada (Kim Campbell), Sri Lanka (Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and now her daughter), the Philippines (Corazon Aquino, Gloria Arroyo), and Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto, a government major at Harvard who might have taken Mansfield’s class). And what might one say about Mansfield’s utter neglect of Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, two of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century? Don’t we have to think, in the face of these cases, that his assertions are some sort of elaborate charade…

The whole thing can be read online if one googles “nussbaum mansfield” and goes to the first link. Mansfield’s letter responding to the review, which can also be found online, is amusing in a tragicomic way.

Its form of presentation is didactic, not Socratic

well, thats part of the problem—many bureaucratic Nussbaums, and few authentically philosophic Socrates

(That was stupid, I googled with quotes… Still, it’s really true that google does not give everybody the same first result.)

Nussbaum is not pithy.

dsquared @50: The media industry is a genuine industry and it is both a large employer and a large source of export earnings for the UK. Sheffield Forgemasters, to take an example from my blog, is roughly the size of Cash in the Attic when considered as an economic entity.

Yes, I agree that the media industry is a genuine industry – and it includes quite a few people with very technical skills which require education other than a humanities or media studies degree.

More to the point, though, the media industry will never be able to provide the scale of long-term, well-compensated employment for “humanities and media studies” (your terms) degree holders that various industries will for holders of scientific, engineering, and business degrees. In fact I think a humanities degree, or a media studies degree, is unnecessary and of little help in entering most career tracks even in the media industry. The exceptions – a theater degree for acting, a dance degree for dancing, etc. – are such long shots that I wonder whether advising someone to major in them is any more responsible than advising someone to forget his studies and focus on basketball.

This assertion not remotely supported by data on college enrollments. I note that while “Small Liberal Arts Colleges” exist all the way across the USA, there are basically no economically viable “Small Engineering And Technology Colleges” which exist without significant state support.

Liberal arts colleges offer degrees in the sciences and engineering and they all receive enormous state support. But in any case, this isn’t the right metric to use. If you want to measure demand for a particular degree, look at the average and median earnings, and percentage employed, of various degree holders in the years following graduation from college.

nick s. @53: You mean, for the seminar that you dreamed up as a cheap strawman? No shit, Sherlock.

Well done Watson. I confess that the seminar I named, a semester-long deconstruction of a series of fantasy novels recently made into an HBO series, is in fact fictitious. However, given the reasonably good track record for other HBO series making themselves the subjects of undergraduate courses, the fall semester of 2011 may make liars of us both.

More to the point, though, the media industry will never be able to provide the scale of long-term, well-compensated employment for “humanities and media studies” (your terms) degree holders that various industries will for holders of scientific, engineering, and business degrees.

And yet it does!

Andrew Fisher, having managed departments in those areas myself, I have to say that your figures strike me as being on the low side. A department of drama, film and tv, for example can have really substantial equipment costs once you get into theatres, cameras, editing suites etc. Are you taking some average which encompasses departments with very different ranges of of activity?

Chris@75

The HEFCE figures are the same for all institutions everywhere pretty much, except for London weighting. As a matter of policy they do not reflect the different costs of different institutions. The two main sources of HEFCE revenue I have ignored are (a) research – if your units did well in the RAE this would obviously have a large positive impact on funding and (b) widening participation where the HEFCE funding is not so generous but could still be material, especially if you recruited mainly older students from high-risk groups.

It is true that some particularly high-end media programmes are permitted to claim a proportion of their FTE at Price Group B, whilst some small and specialist arts institutions have institution-specific funding to reflect their higher costs.

Finally non-HEFCE income (such as Overseas or PG fees) could be relevant.

You also use the past tense. My figures are for 2011/12 so if you are thinking back pre-cuts that might have an impact.

The example was stylised and simplified I admit, but the only point I was originally trying to make is that absent a catastrophic fall in applications, the humanities will be better funded in 2012/13 than they were in 2011/12. For performing arts even a catastrophic fall in applications would leave most courses oversubscribed, so I think their position is very secure. If any discipline is under threat, to my mind it is Business.

Leederick @ 78:

the government always describes fees as a ‘contribution’ toward the cost of a degree, when in reality most students will be paying not only all the current cost, but a substantial markup on top. That seems misleading.

That’s a very valid point. At Oxford, where the cost of the labour-intensive tutorial-based teaching of a (HEFCE Band D) humanities student is £15,000, and much of this is cost covered by endowment income, higher fees will actually contribute towards the cost of the teaching they now receive. But outside of Oxbridge, where endowments don’t subsidize (much) teaching, higher fees will more than cover current costs.

Your £5.2K figure, however, is out of date. This reflects the cost of humanities teaching averaged over 2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09, rather than current costs. At the very least, you should have chosen the most up-to-date 2008-09 figure on the pdf to which you link, which is £5,680. Even that figures is out of date, but it’s pretty close to the £5,931 that universities now receive per Band D student. And I suspect that 2010-11 costs are even closer to £5,931.

As Andrew Fisher notes @ 74, “The price-bands are reviewed from time to time by looking at average data on costs … but of course all institutions (except the tiny number with substantial endowments) tend to see their costs settle towards what HEFCE have in fact allocated as revenue over time. You can see this happen when subjects such as Psychology are re-banded.”

If there’s a case (outside of Oxbridge) for raising fees so that universities end up receiving more than £5,931 per Band D humanities student, you’re right that it isn’t that this is what is required to cover actual costs. Rather, it will have to be that this is what is needed to provide a decent humanities education at higher cost that covers the pay of enough permanent faculty to teach lectures and seminars at a decent student/faculty ratio.

If humanities departments receive more money in order to teach their students, they will spend this money, e.g., by hiring temporary lecturers on 9 month contracts rather than paying part time teachers by the hour, or by hiring a permanent entry-level lecturer rather than a temporary lecturer on a 9 month contract. They won’t pocket this money in the form of dividends, as your ‘profit centres’ language suggests.

(LSE’s fees, by the way, will rise to £8,500, not £8,000.)

… and a brief addendum to my last.

You seem to be assuming that the increased fee income will and should be going on tuition costs. Yet we know that US institutions, charging much greater fees than we do, spend such income not on tuition but on “enhancing” other aspects of “the student experience”. I would expect the same thing to happen here, especially if universities have to compete for students.

Chris @81 you are right about capital universities will have to generate more cash from their operations for this purpose. On the other issues – how much reaches frontline departments, and how any additional money is spent – I would expect wide institutional variation. It will be interesting to see.
My experience of institutional decision-making is that the political or ethical commitments of the senior management make rather little difference. Over time, the decisions that preserve the organisation as close as possible to it’s current state tend to be the ones that get taken. Universities are bureaucracies after all.

Sorry, the entire first paragraph of the above, from “Andrew Fisher 74:” to “response to these data.” should be italicized.