I think fanfic killed literature as a lofty pursuit and brought it down to the level of mass culture. Fifty Shades of Gray killed the English major and damaged heterosexuality.
"It's hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they're doing,"
I'd say "try pursuing a Scottish captain instead" but I am taken, sorry ladies.
More seriously, I think that Amanda Claybaugh is lying. Making stuff up to further her argument. I simply cannot believe that students make it to Harvard without knowing what a verb is. Even if you don't learn it in English classes at school, you learn it when you're learning a foreign language. I haven't read "The Scarlet Letter" but I cannot believe that its syntax is so bizarre that a typical Harvard student can't pick a random sentence and tell you what the verb is and what its subject is.
The New Yorker, too, should never have let this pass:
"perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It's the small-bore university of campus comedy--of "Lucky Jim"
Of what? You think "Lucky Jim" is set in a "research colony" that thumps with the energy of dedicated scholarship? No, of course you don't. You googled "novels set in universities" and picked the first two that weren't set in Ivy League or Oxbridge.
There was a much better article to be written, and it's based around this paragraph:
I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about things being "reified.") Haimo told me that there was: the language of statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard now is introductory statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in 2005. "Even if I'm in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, 'Well, who was your sample? How are you gathering your data?' " he said. "I mean, statistics is everywhere. It's part of any good critical analysis of things."
This is critical thinking about sources and biases. It's exactly what people keep saying that studying the humanities is supposed to teach you. The article doesn't like it because it smells sciencey and mathsy but it's objectively good news. (Personal anecdote: the statistics course was the only non-optional part of my entire degree and it has without a doubt been the most useful since.)
I've never heard of Lucky Jim, but I know how much smart people can struggle with algebra, and so I can imagine that Harvard students - especially those from shitty high schools, and Heebie HS does send a student to Harvard about every year - would struggle with sentence structure.
A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
3 is funny.
I simply cannot believe that students make it to Harvard without knowing what a verb is. Even if you don't learn it in English classes at school, you learn it when you're learning a foreign language. I haven't read "The Scarlet Letter" but I cannot believe that its syntax is so bizarre that a typical Harvard student can't pick a random sentence and tell you what the verb is and what its subject is.
I don't know about The Scarlet Letter, but I definitely remember reading Paradise Lost in college and having a very difficult time at the sentence level (it wasn't until the end of the course that I felt like I could read more than a page or two at a time with any fluency). It would be an exaggeration to say that I couldn't identify verbs, but I couldn't necessarily follow the sentence structure without slowing down to a crawl.
I can't diagram a sentence to save my life.
The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade.
This seems to be drawn from this https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/humanities-degree-completions-international-comparison which says "Among bachelor's degree recipients, the humanities' share shrank 5% (from 5.7% to 5.4%), with just eight of the 35 [OECD] countries reporting an increase in share." And no doubt that is true (though it is worth noting that he doesn't say how many reported a decrease. He lets you assume it's 35-8=27, but it isn't because not all of them report data. This is deliberate misleading of the reader, because Heller is a bad person.)
But, anyway, that is a statement about the percentage of total degrees which are in the humanities, not about the absolute number of humanities graduates. Heller has taken the easy option because working out the change in the absolute number requires using Excel for three minutes and that's too much work, or because it made his argument look better. But if he'd paid attention in his computer class in school he'd be able to do it, if he was a more conscientious and ethical reporter he would have done it, and he would find, as we find, that the OECD report doesn't back him up at all.
The OECD reports absolute numbers of humanities graduates for 19 countries. In eleven of these countries, the number of humanities graduates grew from 2010 to 2020 (and of the remaining eight, three are very small - New Zealand, Norway and Latvia).
In the United States, the number of humanities graduates grew by 38%, from 120,259 to 314,898. The percentage shrank slightly because other subject areas grew slightly faster. The same is true across the OECD dataset - it's a 38% increase as well, in fact.
Different story, isn't it? Heller's an innumerate wastrel so he missed that, but if he'd put more effort in or studied some science he'd have done a better job. Or maybe he's not innumerate or lazy but dishonest, hiding the facts because they disagree with what he's already decided is the story.
Who can tell.
7 As we see from 6, Hawthorne's mid 19th century prose is accessible to us in a completely different way than Milton's mid-17th century Shakespearean epic poetry.
7 makes sense and I'm sure that a lot of Harvard students would have trouble with describing all the bits of a sentence, relative clauses and so on. I personally have never diagrammed a sentence in my life. Paradise Lost is particularly tough because Milton's deliberately writing in a Latinate style and because it's poetry so there for the rearranging of sentence order more latitude is.
And based on that excerpt "The Scarlet Letter" looks like a parody of the sort of terrible Victorian novel that has now deservedly sunk into oblivion. (You really should just decide that American literature began with Jack London and agree never to mention anything before that ever again. From him on it's world-quality stuff.)
But I still reckon that a Harvard student could find the verb in every one of those ghastly overburdened sentences.
I can easily believe Harvard undergraduates to be incapable of parsing sentences, based on the volume of execrable writing I encounter issuing daily from the most august publications and institutions of the Anglosphere.
That said, I share [the esteemed Captain's] pleasure at the reported ascendence of the statistical.
The first chapter of SL is called "The Prison Door." Here, from the next chapter, we meet the letter itself:
When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her towns-people and neighbors. On the breast of her gown,[59] in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of her female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?"
Maybe it's true that Kids These Days can't figure this out, I don't know. Maybe, though, ajay is right, and I'll go a step further: has the complaining prof ever read it either?
12 is a slight violation of the sanctity of off-blog communication.
I earned a literature degree that didn't have the convenience of being in English lo these many years ago, and I am still waiting for the verb.
16: true. I just meant that it reads like a deliberately over-the-top piece of writing.
14: It's your maiden name, no-one will figure it out.
Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
19 is better than 6 but it's no "White Fang".
Students don't know what verbs are because they're only being taught pronouns!
This is a moment when I regret the archival chaos here, because I do suddenly want to look at trends and themes in Unfogged decline-of-the-humanities threads over the past 20 years.
Maybe motivation to think about the past has changed in the last couple of decades? Those in power are visibly less interested in past attitudes and beliefs, even as misinterpreted sources of traditions to be venerated. IMO not surprising when kids take less interest in not-clearly-useful close reading when the people who run things are proudly illiterate (not just Trump, also W). Colleges are teaching more Chinese than they did decades ago, at least some kids enrolled are willing to work when they're motivated.
I read Gibson's Decline and Fall recreationally at some point in my twenties, and the degree of nested clauses popular in the late 18th century does sometimes make figuring out the gist of a sentence more work than felt necessary. I could imagine a student, not used to the style at the time, being misled into thinking the verb of one of the dependent clauses is actually the main verb, particularly in cases when the main verb ends up tucked in close to the end.
That being said, the quotes above are not nearly as bad. We're only talking two generations or so later but sentences are structurally much simpler, even if still more ornate than nowadays. (Supposedly I read the Scarlet Letter in high school, but I suspect it was one of the ones I slacked on and only read a bit before deciding it was more trouble than it was worth. Disappointed in myself over that.)
I do suddenly want to look at trends and themes in Unfogged decline-of-the-humanities threads over the past 20 years.
Perhaps the threads themselves have been declining in quality. One could quantify it, in statistically rigorous terms, by estimating the number of gophers whose concerted thumping would produce a similar level of intellectual verve and espieglerie.
I just can't get over a professional writer perpetrating "This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers".
And a thousand thousand energetic gophers
Thumped on - and so did I.
Over the hills with the thumps of a thousand gophers.
The gophers began this war under the rather childish impression that they would be allowed to thump everyone else and no one would be allowed to thump them. In Harvard, in Yale, in Princeton and a thousand other places they put this rather naive belief into effect. Well, they have sown the thump, and now they are going to reap the whirlthump.
I have been personally striving towards quality decline here, and I'm glad someone finally noticed.
I'm trying to create a pun so awful it can cause physical pain.
Why no "I feel your pain, Moby," Barry?
I assume that if the author was asked about "gophers", they'd say it was intended to have a double meaning: the rodent and also overeager junior employees, more often spelled "gofer". How erudite of them.
My English major was more fun than my Political Science major, and probably more useful too. I wouldn't advise a career in journalism but there's never a dull moment to it, and most of my career has actually been in technical writing, which is fine. I think my schedule is more relaxed than that of the engineers I'm always asking for more details from.
I kind of assume you can do whatever you want as an undergraduate and it doesn't matter too much, but you really need to have a plan for (or against) postgraduate education. If you're interested in teaching and learning for its own sake, as I know many people are, more power to you; if you want a job it's required for, you have to pay your dues and presumably it'll pay off in the long run; for everyone else, it seems like the worst way to get student loan debt.
"I have been personally striving towards quality decline here"
But with a complete lack of success
26 It's a Minnesota thing, you wouldn't understand.
I do actually buy that the Hawthorne excerpts in this thread would be difficult for a typical undergrad these days to parse.
I also agree with ajay that the apparent increase in interest in statistics is a very good thing for a lot of reasons, though.
Apropos of archives, workplaces of technical writers and engineers, and execrable writing, apparently I gave the following explanation of a co-worker's sudden departure in 2018:
I forgot that you're always somehow out of the loop on these things. It turned out [co-worker] was a werewolf. People had been talking about it for months but it didn't really come to a head until he got his decade-of-service award at the all-hands meeting this winter, and one of the partners who had apparently been a long-term acquaintance and even personal reference for him stood up and exclaimed, "That's, what, 120 attacks on urban chicken coops in the Bay Area, or is my math wrong?!" Everyone nervously laughed it off, and it was quickly redacted from the video feed (which was on a 15-second delay), but after that there was a lot of discussion of mysteriously cancelled early-morning office hours and the fact that, yeah, dude, he did always have a week of eating leftover chicken lunches, like clockwork. And then one Friday he was just gone.
37: Agreed, but I'm not sure how bad that is. Probably my least favorite part of my English education was a high school course my parents somehow arranged for me to have with a tutor instead of the standard high school English teacher. It seemed like a lot of fuss and struggle for little benefit. This class was probably where I learned about diagramming sentences, a skill I haven't used since. When I think about the Hawthorne passages with that in mind, it's easy to imagine florid sprouts with clauses branching off clauses like an exposition scene in a movie about navigating a multiverse.
I guess that sort of training helps me identify and focus in on the subject and verb a little more quickly than I could otherwise. I still wouldn't call it useful, though. Reading Hawthorne as an adult, after someone has already learned a level of patience and decided to specialize in literature, doesn't seem like too much of a cultural decline.
41: Yeah, I think deemphasizing that sort of literature and the skills necessary to read it was a more-or-less deliberate choice by high schools, and a reasonable one. It does mean colleges have to pick up the slack of teaching that stuff to the students who are interested in it, but that seems reasonable too.
I disagree with Ajay about Hawthorne, but he's definitely got a point about Nathan Heller.
think they've been worried about humanities enrollments for a decade or so. About 5 years ago, the economics department got worried about their enrollments in intro Econ. They thought it was because millenials were all leftists. I suggested it was that people took computer science instead. When education is as expensive as it is now, people want to be sure that they are employable afterwards.
I do think that in the 59's and 60's, it was possible to get an English degree from an elite school without being at the top of the class or doing a lot of specialized internships and get a pretty good job right out of college. Any college graduate could. Tim's father had a 3-year general degree from Manitoba. He was head of the aquatics department at the YMCA and then got into a training program in sales and marketing.
For Harvard folks, investment banking was an option or you could go to business school straight out of undergrad.
I think the problem with this, as UPETGI has noted, is that we are all supposed to get masters degrees now, and they are not all of equal quality or value. I do wish that people could learn how to think and explore as undergrads and then companies would invest in training people, but we've decided not to do that as a society.
I have done pretty good with the wrong master degree.
You say 'reverse time magically ' but that's what I am trying to see.
English majors I know went & got an MFA & then worked in tech. Or philosophy majors went into finance.
What's the needed magic time reversal? There never was a job in 'English' and 'Philosophy.' People went through college & got jobs in various things after studying those subjects.
The drop off is sudden. There aren't suddenly fewer jobs. You don't have to NOT study something to get a job in a field.
The article has some interesting facts but it's more like uncertainty churn, shifts in in cases where people do what seems safer because they don't know what will happen and they are anxious about that not so much 'we rationally analyzed our options.'
I encourage my arty kids to humanities just because if life is uncertain & sucks you might as well have some stuff you care about. I assume it's lasting because it lasted as a useful thing for humans for so long. If you get the jobs you don't age out of them the same way. Seems a better risk given how the child is.
I remember liking Claybaugh's book The Novel of Purpose when I read it when I still studied the humanities.
Anyway, I would guess that a Harvard student struggling to describe what's going on in a Hawthorne sentence is different than a Harvard student struggling to understand the same sentence. The former is probably bullshitting about something they haven't put much if any effort into reading, having calculated the probability of whether understanding Hawthorne is going to matter.
41: Yeah, I think deemphasizing that sort of literature and the skills necessary to read it was a more-or-less deliberate choice by high schools, and a reasonable one. It does mean colleges have to pick up the slack of teaching that stuff to the students who are interested in it, but that seems reasonable too.
FWIW, I would put my experience struggling with Paradise Lost as positive part of my undergraduate education, and one I remember fondly. I'm sure it helped that I was generally intellectually confident enough to be frustrated without feeling too threatened*.
* It's good that it wasn't a Freshman class, if I'd taken it in my first year I might have been scared away from any other literature.
I think the main factors in this trend are:
1) Increasing direct parental involvement in choosing majors. This is part of a general trend of increased parental involvement in their kids lives and decisions at every stage, but is also driven by the way that the cost of college often falls directly on the parents more than it did in previous generations. Parents are less likely to be idealist or interest-driven, and parents are more susceptible to takes in pop culture and politics that complain about useless degrees.
2) Increased emphasis on getting a *first* job. Humanities majors do fine financially at mid-career, but genuinely do make it harder to find your first job and likely result in you being paid less for your first job. This was exacerbated by the great recession when tons of people just didn't get jobs at all when they graduated (and many had to move back in with their parents, see point 1).
3) The rising power of HR departments which means that job ads and often the first cut are done by people who know nothing about anything and only known how to match words. So if the position is "assistant pea counter" the ad is going to say "undergraduate degree in pea counting required, masters in pea counting and three years of experience counting peas professionally preferred" and they're not going to hire an English major. This ties back into 2 because it makes it harder for academic majors to get first jobs. It also drives the general trend where no one cares whether you actually learned anything in college, all they care about is a piece of paper so that you can get by HR.
I do think that in the 59's and 60's, it was possible to get an English degree from an elite school without being at the top of the class or doing a lot of specialized internships and get a pretty good job right out of college.
Noah Smith had an uncharitable post on that topic.
51.3 is an important point that seems to be under-discussed in these sorts of conversations. Administrative gatekeeping is an increasing factor in determining career paths in both public and private sectors.
51: I'd add 4) really strong tracking of students from the get-go. A lot of universities now force incoming students to declare majors immediately, before they've had any classes or (unless they're already pretty academically-minded) even thought about what they want to major in. Many (most?) of them don't even have a clear idea of what a "major" means; they tend to read it as synonymous with "career." And once they've made a choice, it's psychologically if not also administratively hard for them to switch later. This isn't just an effect of 1); at my institution it's part of a whole "college to career" initiative.
With the caveat that whining about the decline of the humanities has been a thing for at least forty years, and the caveat that maybe, just maybe, these trend writers can look somewhere other than the goddamned Ivies for inspiration about what's going on in higher ed, well, it's a bit of a mess. Maybe we ought to talk about the corporatization of the university a little, as my employer released a strategic plan that is all about numbers of graduates and GPAs and hiring more administrators, and each department has to explain how they fit in with the strategic plan with the utmost strategery. The humanities and social sciences don't fit in at all. Neither does 'business', but if you major in business and get a job that counts as using your degree, and we have a good economy, so it's more time to shit on the humanities faculty. A consultant said the school should focus in what they're known for but of course all people know is the nursing program (fantastic) and that if you put 'tech' on it, the money will come. Of course, part of college is discovering that your world is bigger than your high school education, but that's not what the consultants said.
My mistake was actually trying to bother with anything, because the only thing I've heard back is that we don't have enough majors and they can't convince the board how we "add value to the institution." I got a whole meeting with the provost about how we were a troubled department, where the trouble was that we don't have enough majors.(Snarling back, "as you're nominal head of the faculty, have you tried explaining it to them, and if you don't want to do it, will you let me?" was met with "well, the Board won't read.") But unless someone creates a job that says "philosophy degree only" I can't win this game, and if my students get into Berkeley for law and have great careers, that doesn't matter to the metrics because they're not in a local job. My successes go out of state. If they land a good job but the payoff is in the promotion they can get five years later, well, that's outside the metric we care about.
The trouble is, if all we want to do is "stackable certificates" for local employers, we don't need the humanities. But without gen ed they can't keep the lights on nor justify charging more than a tech college; and we decided we'd be the primary sponsor of 'get your associates while in high school because we'll give you credit for a high school class' which of course cut our gen ed numbers. Every Monday I get an email about our enrollments and I swear I do not have any freshmen in my pocket but the regularity of the emails suggest it must somehow be my fault.
The university really doesn't know whether it wants to be the most flexibilist university of Phoenix clone or a solid regional university that attracts bright high school kids from the county, but it can't do both, and the leadership doesn't know what to do.
I keep hoping I'll hate my job less but it's been a mess since COVID.
But oh noes, Hawthorne.
Heebie: "especially those from shitty high schools, and Heebie HS does send a student to Harvard about every year"
Ha! You just told us Heebie HS isn't so shitty! My HS didn't send a kid to an Ivy League school for easily 20yr before, during, and after I graduated. [needless to say, I didn't go to an Ivy League school either]
Heebie: "especially those from shitty high schools, and Heebie HS does send a student to Harvard about every year"
Ha! You just told us Heebie HS isn't so shitty! My HS didn't send a kid to an Ivy League school for easily 20yr before, during, and after I graduated. [needless to say, I didn't go to an Ivy League school either]
Also, cost is some of it, but our cost is $5000 per year, which about matches the "work minimum wage and pay for school" Boomer metric, and everyone just knows that you can't make any money unless your major has 'science' on the end, which is why psychology changed its name to 'psychological science'.
With the caveat that whining about the decline of the humanities has been a thing for at least forty years
Yes, there were times when I was thinking of Doonesbury jokes from the 80s.
and the caveat that maybe, just maybe, these trend writers can look somewhere other than the goddamned Ivies for inspiration about what's going on in higher ed, well, it's a bit of a mess.
They do actually use ASU as one of the main case studies but I didn't excerpt that.
A.S.U., which is centered in Tempe and has more than eighty thousand students on campus, is today regarded as a beacon for the democratic promises of public higher education. Its undergraduate admission rate is eighty-eight per cent. Nearly half its undergraduates are from minority backgrounds, and a third are the first in their families to go to college. The in-state tuition averages just four thousand dollars, yet A.S.U. has a better faculty-to-student ratio on site than U.C. Berkeley and spends more on faculty research than Princeton. For students interested in English literature, it can seem a lucky place to land. The university's tenure-track English faculty is seventy-one strong--including eleven Shakespeare scholars, most of them of color. In 2021, A.S.U. English professors won two Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other English department in America did.
...
In a quantitative society for which optimization--getting the most output from your input--has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change. In 2019, two deans at Emory, Michael A. Elliott and Douglas A. Hicks, received a $1.25-million grant from the Mellon Foundation to create what they called the Humanities Pathways program, focussed on career preparedness. ("Faculty learn to integrate into their syllabi elements to make students conscious that what they're learning will help them with what potential employers are looking for," Peter Höyng, a German-studies professor who co-directs the program, told me.) It arranges Zoom seminars with alumni to help show the way. Almost immediately, the program's co-creators were plucked up into bigger roles: last year, Elliott became the president of Amherst College, and Hicks is now the president of Davidson.
...
At A.S.U., the English department has been wondering whether even to keep calling itself the English department. "More and more students come to the discipline not necessarily to take courses in literature," Devoney Looser, a professor and an Austen scholar, told me. They're curious about creative writing, or media studies, or they follow other beacons. A few hundred yards from the department's building, which has only two classrooms of its own, looms the business complex--two wings with terrazzo floors, sky bridges, fountains, and wall placards that say things such as "vision: we transform the world"--and comparisons are hard to avoid. " 'Branding' makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and English professors are not typically a group that embraces the marketplace," Looser said. "But this is a moment where we might be in a position to reimagine ourselves."
...
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that it's actually a counting problem: students haven't so much left the building as come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren't included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard's history-of-science department has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students are still getting their vitamins. There's a lot of ethics in bioethics, after all.
Echoing the work at A.S.U., Kelsey regards the drifting of humanities skills into other fields as the way of the future. (This mixing has a pecuniary benefit, too: humanities deans like Kelsey and Cohen rarely have first crack at big donations, so nesting their divisions' doings in the sciences and the social sciences can help with funding.) Instead of determining majors by how professors organize themselves, why not also match majors to topics that resonate in the current moment, like climate change and racial justice? I wondered aloud whether that was a moving target--the concerns in our headlines today are different from those fifteen years ago--but Kelsey insisted that some causes were here to stay. "I would like to see us come out with better platforms for studying the environmental humanities, migration and ethnicity, and the medical humanities," he said.
Basically, to be a successful department you have to have enough majors that you can statistically track their outcomes. We won't count second majors, however, because that fucks too much with the narrative.
Cala - that sucks. So sorry.
51.3 is maddening.
52: My father-in-law was first generation university graduate, so it definitely wasn't by an elite background.
58: Someone told me he knew someone with a small financial services firm outside of Harvard Square who looked for Classics degrees, Physics, and Philosophy.
Maybe if we hire a fourth associate provost we can fix it.
I do wonder if the recent shifts in the labor market toward greater bargaining power for employees might lead to changes in some of these systems. Part of the reason for the rise of HR gatekeeping is that for so long it's been a buyer's market for labor and employers got used to being able to be highly selective. That's not the case anymore.
I agree that 54 is an important trend, but I think it's mostly being driven by the same causes, rather than being a primary cause itself. At my school students are more than welcome to not choose a major immediately, but that's very clearly not what the students want to do! I genuinely see our initiatives in this direction as responding to student (and parent!) decisions and not leading them.
Make all the new university administrative jobs require philosophy degrees. Checkmate, neolibs.
Right? I mean, I get it. I think it's reasonable for students to expect that their education isn't just a vanity project and will help them get a good job. But I can't win with metrics designed for large programs.
which is why psychology changed its name to 'psychological science'.
Wissenshafting doesn't make it true.
As long as you use a replicatable method for measuring the bumps in the skull, why not?
About a decade ago, the prestigious "slac*-attached-to-a-prominent-graduate-school-of-business" where I used to work started offering 3 undergraduate business courses. The economics department had opposed this move, but it was supported by many of the humanities departments. The thinking was that a major contributing factor behind the decline of enrollments in the humanities was student anxiety about post-commencement careers (presumably in business). This was leading them away from what they were truly interested in and to econ as a way of demonstrating that they were serious about their futures. It was hoped that once students could point to the 3 courses on their transcripts from the B-school, they would be able to get their parents off their backs about majoring in philosophy or Italian or (heaven help us) English. I don't know if it had the desired/expected effect.
*Not really a slac, but that is one of the ways it markets itself.
Business+Foreign Language is a great combo which can really work for certain languages. The main issue tends to be that language classes are much more difficult than Business classes, which limits growth. But we have decent success with say growing Spanish minors aimed at the Business students. We also have a program for liberal arts majors to add a business certificate, which has tremendous success rates in terms of student getting jobs but for whatever reasons struggles to get students. I suspect a lot of that is that it's just more difficult than a business major.
I do think a lot of this is being driven by employers genuinely not caring whether you learned anything in college. You can just teach high-school level classes with no rigor and no one seems to notice or care. And Liberal Arts majors even if you make them include a job-getting component are still going to be substantially more rigorous (in terms of some subset of reading, writing, foreign language, or math) than trade majors.
The local teen population is currently planning on majoring in history as preparation for law school. I don't know how I feel about the second part.
And Liberal Arts majors even if you make them include a job-getting component are still going to be substantially more rigorous (in terms of some subset of reading, writing, foreign language, or math) than trade majors.
I suspect this is the key thing driving a lot of this. Ironically, it also explains why liberal arts majors tend to do better in the actual job market, thus providing a straightforward argument for teaching this stuff even in terms administrators can understand. But everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too.
How much is humanities + coding a thing these days? It's my literal job, so I don't mean is it a thing in general, but how much is it a thing in terms of course offerings and institutional priorities? I have some experience with "digital humanities" courses and academics who work in that field, but those are often quite surprisingly light on the practical side of the digital part.
Certainly when I'm hiring, I'd much rather hire someone with coding experience who has a degree in something other than CS, all things being equal, because I want them to understand what we are doing and why, and ideally, to be able to write those things down and share them with clients or other people. I don't want to traduce CS grads, but it's noticeable that the only people in my company who can write worth a shit, and who can understand the why part of what we do at a more global level, tend to be humanities people (and one guy who was a physicist).
74 is a great question. We have a major in that direction (called "informatics") which is supposed to be some kind of computers in context, and you pick some other specific topic to learn about, so this could easily be a computers+humanities major if you wanted it to be. But the computer side doesn't require you to take an actual intro to programming course and I think in practice the popular thing to do is to pair it with some kind of medical-related topic and go into medical IT of some sort.
Reading, writing, and coding is a really rigorous combination that's going to be very hard to find students for. You gotta keep in mind that the students do care about finding a good job, but they care even more about only taking easy classes.
The article was many pretty words with little thought behind them. An intellectual entree consisting entirely of parsley and other decorative garnishes.
We use to house econ in the humanities. The business department was embarrassed about how few phds the faculty had, and petitioned to get econ over there. 15 years later, they couldn't keep faculty in the position and so we just agreed to shutter it. Oh well.
72: I have a weird admiration for the people I know who are successful in business with a bachelors and no MBA.*. I know someone who is a real estate investor/developer for commercial properties w/ an undergraduate degree in history.
* 20 years ago, there were some colleges that had professors with masters only and no Ph.D, and percentage of faculty with Ph.Ds was a metric that was tracked. I have always loved that Zeph Stewart was a distinguished Harvard Professor in my lifetime without ever having gotten a Ph.D.
https://news.Harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/classicist-loeb-library-trustee-stewart-dies-at-86/
I also love that he had a career in military intelligence. Nowadays those people are all mathematicians.
78 MSU's Jack Horner fits that bill.
https://www.montana.edu/news/15866/msu-paleontologist-jack-horner-announces-retirement
I think he might have gotten a bachelors, but maybe not even that. He was a big deal, nonetheless, and if you've seen Jurassic Park, you've seen his fictionalized version.
79: I'm not a huge fan of investment bankers, venture capital, or private equity, but I love when they tell people: you're so good that's we donn't want you to waste your time on an MBA.
On the general topic of humanities in decline, I have not read the linked piece but my sense is that 20 years ago the decline of the humanities was discussed more on an abstract level, though enrollment numbers and the atrocious but somehow not as bad as it is now academic job market was always part of the picture. In the last decade or so, at least in what I've followed while working in not-academic but academic-adjacent fields, the decline in majors has been the focus of discussion.
I vaguely remember yet another Ivy-focused article a few years ago where Yale reported increases in History majors after actually making an effort to recruit them but I don't know how that worked out in the long run. It seems like if your university isn't making an effort to recruit students to certain majors, representatives of the university publicly state that those majors seem kind of useless, and hiring and retention of faculty who teach those majors is stagnating, then you probably don't need to look too far to explain declining enrollments. I'm sure many college leaders would say that I've got cause and effect mixed up but many of those same people are dishonest and went into their leadership positions with the goal of slashing the humanities.
52: Noah Smith doesn't know a goddamn thing about the humanities, but that has never stopped him from opining uncharitably. (I recall him once asking for an example of the humanities helping the science of economics, apparently having forgotten the entire discipline of history.)
Noah Smith has an even worse case of glib pundit-brain than Saiselgy, and that's really saying something.
83/84: Now I feel the need to defend him (with some ambivalence).
First, I'd say that the work of his that I think is most worth reading is the series on developing countries (and his interview with Arvind Subramanian about the Indian economy). If those aren't interesting then I think it's reasonable to skip the rest of his work (at least what I've read), but if those are interesting I think they do point to some strengths. (1) Ironically, a grounding in an academic field (economics). That series is very much based around, "what can standard economic measures tell us about [Country X]" but they are useful summaries. (2) Interest in countries outside the US. I doubt that many of those articles would add much information for someone who was already following the country in question, but most people aren't, and it is useful to have some starting point. (3) [also ironically], those articles demonstrate an interest in spreading information, not just scoring points in online arguments. Which is not to say that he doesn't spend (too much) time scoring points in online arguments.
Secondly, I think the linked article in 83 goes a little too far in making it's point. It's an eloquent and valuable defense of historical knowledge but also comes close to saying that a proper Historian should never attempt to generalize.
Instead historians are taught when making present-tense arguments to adopt a very limited kind of argument: Phenomenon A1 occurred before and it resulted in Result B, therefore as Phenomenon A2 occurs now, result B may happen.
I understand how he arrives at that as a response to Noah Smith's blitheness, but it reminds me of an argument that Saislegy has been making (which I also feel ambivalent about, but which seems worth engaging with), that for many questions of public debate it's important to be informed by subject matter experts, but that subject matter expertise is unlikely to settle the debate in any meaningful way (and, therefore, calls to trust the experts are a rhetorical dodge rather than a practical strategy). That linked article would support Saislegy's position -- in that it makes clear that what Historians do professionally is a different type of thinking about history than the arguments by analogy that are often used in public debate.
85: Yeah, that's fair, and 84 is probably overly glib of me (ironic!). He does seem like a smart guy who means well, and those economic development posts do look interesting. It's his penchant for grand theorizing based on limited knowledge outside of economics that grates, as well as his tendency to get into interminable online fights.
I just read his Ghana post (the most interesting to me right now since I've been reading a lot of African history as a sort of offshoot of my epidemic project). It's interesting, and I'm sure his policy conclusions are basically correct, but it's weirdly devoid of any sort of cultural or historical context. He talks about government policy and decision-making as if it's purely about abstract economic theory and how to maximize growth, and as a result seems baffled by decisions that don't fit that mold. Presumably there are political, maybe cultural, certainly historical reasons for those "wrong" decisions, but he seems oddly uninterested in exploring any of that even though it's obviously relevant to getting to the "right" decisions in practice. This is the sort of thing that I find annoying about him and similar econ-oriented pundits.
On a similar note, I recently read a kind of fascinatingly bizarre paper from 1962 about Sudanese economic development. It posits that the limited success of government-sponsored cash crop projects was due to lingering attitudes among northern Sudanese that consider agricultural labor to be "slaves' work," with the result that "tenants" on the government farms hire West Africans to do the actual work, and as they make more money they hire more workers rather than making more "rational" economic decisions. That's all pretty convincing, but the "solution" it (kinda-sorta) proposes for this "problem" is to somehow change those societal values, which, I mean, good luck.
86 & 87 are both fair, and I'm completely serious in saying that if the economic development posts aren't interesting you can probably stop there. They are not models of empathy (his post on Pakistan, for example, relies heavily on stereotype and gross generalizations) however . . . I still think there's something interesting about the "economic development by the numbers" information.
I once shared an office with a guy from Pakistan whose brother was a reasonably high customs official. The only thing I remember is that the brother wasn't happy that he had to bring back all kinds of pornography with him when he went home because his brother's colleagues and friends would expect to get a share of it since one of the benefits of working in customs was that your family members could smuggle pornography into the country.
I would guess that he also smuggled in alcohol, but that he didn't mind that.
86 is a fair reading. When he's off-base (all the fucking time if there's not nice decor and obseqious waitstaff) I get angry, and in general not interesting enough to me to compensate
I was amused that ASU was chosen as the contrast to Harvard.
71: I wish I could have studied language with a business certificate. I regret not taking 3-4 years of German, because they helped you get jobs in Germany.
OH WAIT. I knew I had taken note of the OP article for some reason... and now, after a whole day and almost 100 comments, I remember what it was: the bit where the author roasts Stephen Greenblatt.
As of this year, it is possible to receive a degree in English from Harvard without taking a course dedicated to poetry. There are plentiful offerings in creative writing--in the age of the "maker economy," the idea goes, students want to send material into the world--and forays into new media. Stephen Greenblatt, one of the highest-ranking humanities professors by the stripes and badges of the trade, told me that he'd come to think that literary students had a future somewhere other than the page.
"It happens that we do have a contemporary form of very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study," he said. We were sitting in his paper-piled office. "And that is long-form television. 'The Wire,' 'Breaking Bad,' 'Chernobyl'--there are dozens of these now!" He rocked back to rest his feet on the edge of his desk. "It's a fantastic invention."
Greenblatt popped open a green egg of Silly Putty and began to knead it vigorously. For a moment, he seemed lost in thought.
" 'Better Call Saul,' " he added.
He liked to think of Shakespeare reading "Don Quixote," in 1612, and marvelling at this new narrative form: the novel! So it was today, with "Better Call Saul." He wondered whether literature departments should do more with TV.
The Guardian warns me that this article about Alastair Fowler reviewing Greenblatt is "more than 18 years old," which fuck you too, but as an 18-year setup for this punchline, it's just delicious.
95.last: With a Trump cameo! Talk about foreshadowing.
Ok, I actually read the linked article. It was better than I thought it would be. Unless I missed it, Heller showed remarkable restraint for a New Yorker writer in not actually saying where he went to college. Maybe that just means he didn't go to an Ivy.
Anyway, I was happy to see it wasn't purely about Harvard, though it was basically drawn only from ASU and Harvard in terms of people profiled.
81: the causation is hard to figure out but that seems plausible.
Smith:
This was only part of Ghana's government borrowing, all of which together raised government debt to about 100% of GDP -- a number that's sometimes OK for a rich country, but very unwise for a developing country where things can go wrong so easily. It spent this money on trying to build out an oil industry that ended up producing underwhelming returns, and on some other ill-advised projects as well.FT (link readable by IIRC 50 people):
The government borrowed heavily to insulate the economy from the effects of the pandemic and may have avoided a recession as a result. But the country's debt as a percentage of GDP went from 62.7 per cent in 2020 to more than 100 per cent last yearDisappointing, Ghana! Why didn't you sit back and watch your people starve? And releasing a catastrophic pandemic in the first place, what were you thinking?! Smith:
Remember that if you borrowed a million U.S. dollars when the cedi was strong and now suddenly a cedi is worth far fewer U.S. dollars, well...you still owe a million U.S. dollars!Yes, you do! And why is that the cedi was worth less? Because the dollar was worth more! Reuters (Sept 2022):
Emerging market currencies will find it difficult to reclaim ground lost this year as relentless Federal Reserve rate hikes and safe-haven demand keep the dollar ascendant, a Reuters poll of currency strategists found. A stampede into the greenback pushed the wider index of emerging market currencies (.MIEM00000CUS) to its lowest in two years on Tuesday amid growing worries of global recession [...] Almost all beaten-down EM currencies were expected to weaken or at best cling to a range over the next three months.Silly Ghana! What were you thinking, making the Fed raise rates like that? And the ECB! What's wrong with you Ghana? Reuters:
FX analysts also warned that the Chinese yuan, which is down about 9% this year, is affecting emerging market counterparts more than ever before and may have a profound effect on their performance over the coming year. "The Fed is not going to be the only factor keeping the dollar strong. EMFX remains undermined by renminbi weakness," [...] "Unless China presents some sizable fiscal stimulus or abandons its zero COVID strategy, EMFX will continue to trade poorly."Not merely unleashing covid, but also making the PRC trash its own economy! WTF Ghana? Smith:
Ghana's top import is refined petroleumSo what was Ghana thinking, making Russia start an energy war and then an actual war? Disappointing doesn't begin to cover it! Smith:
and its third biggest import is riceFAO:
The FAO All Price Rice Index averaged 127.8 points in May 2023 [...] its highest level, in nominal terms, since October 2011.AND inflating the entire global rice market! Madness! Smith:
The huge debt burden, in turn, probably led to soaring inflation. Ghanaian businesspeople looked at the mountain of government debt and decided that eventually the government would reverse its pattern of rate hikes and resort to printing a ton of money to pay off its debt. So they got in ahead of the game and started raising pricesOR, maybe, just possibly, like everyone else in literally the entire world, they looked at all their input costs going up and started raising prices, in order to get in ahead of the game of not going fucking bankrupt.
Blaming the poorer for everything is a growth industry.
I lost a measure of respect for Smith with his India post. He has lots to say about problems with the PRC government but with India it's suddenly "Gee whillikers, there seem to be some controversies, but Modi sure is popular!"
Unless I missed it, Heller showed remarkable restraint for a New Yorker writer in not actually saying where he went to college.
Alas, it's right up in comment 4:
I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about things being "reified.")
Aw, I guess I didn't parse subject-object relationships properly. For some reason I thought someone quoted in the story said that.
When I was considering colleges, one school's* promotional brochure had a pull quote where a student used the word "reify". I thought "who talks like that and who puts it in the brochure" and didn't apply.
*Not Harvard.
We used "reify" in graduate school all the time, but only in class.
I hope you pronounced it correctly to rhyme with "wifie".
"I read Gibson's Decline and Fall recreationally at some point in my twenties"
The sky over the Alban Hills was the colour of a mosaic tuned to a dead channel.
I think I should spell it "reïfy."
It's just so easy with the keyboard on this phone.
So, someone took a goblet, coated the rim in frosting, dipped the covered rim in jimmies, put cotton candy in the glass, and filled it with domestic sparkling wine. I need to give up the internet for a couple of months again. Or at least the not-here internet.
the degree of nested clauses popular in the late 18th century does sometimes make figuring out the gist of a sentence more work than felt necessary
Digital Humanities project: reformat nested-clause sentences as nested threads tumblr-style.
(Is there anything already comparing threading representation in social media, etc to structural complexity in one-author writing? )
>be me
>have little or no money in my purse
>have nothing particular to interest me on shore
>involuntarily pause before coffin warehouses
>bring up the rear of every funeral I meet
>fml
>decide to sail about a little and see the watery part of the world
>drive off the spleen
>regulate the circulation
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