This article in the new Atlantic was given two titles; the original is the second one below, while the latest—and the one on the site—is the first. Presumably the older title looked too provocative. You can go to the Atlantic‘s online piece by clicking on the first title, but in all likelihood it’s paywalled. But you can find it archived here (or click on second title).
The article is a good one, explaining why, to author Tyler Austin Harper, the humanities are being erased in American universities. Many departments have been cut back in the face of declining enrollment (see below), while others have been eliminated entirely. (Neither I nor Harper are talking about “studies” departments, like Chicago’s new Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; rather, we’re talking about the “classical” humanities like departments of English, classics, and art history.
The author is identified as “an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College”, and he’s black, which adds information (and credibility to his critique. In this piece, Harper not only gives his take on why the humanities are moribund in America, why they’re valuable, and how one can combat their disappearance. I happen to be a huge fan of the classical humanities (not so much of “studies” departments, which I see as vehicles not of learning but of propaganda), for I got a ton out my humanities studies at the liberal arts College of William and Mary, and their effects remain with me. So I, like Harper, defend the retention of classical humanities. Sadly, I don’t think the decline of the humanities can be stopped—not until wokeness abates in American universities.
The older one (identical in content); click to go to archived link. As usual, I’ve indented excerpts from the article.
First, Harper notes that the reason humanities are dying has to do with them becoming more political and ideological—even English departments. Our own English Department, for example, announced in 2021 that it would admit only those graduate students who planned to work in black studies. At Princeton, the well known classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta called for the elimination or radical restructing of his own field on the grounds that it promoted white supremacy. Princeton later eliminated its requirement that students know either Latin or Greek. In this way humanities is morphing into studies. Indeed, that’s what college administrators want:
The idea that radical faculty members are destroying majors like English by teaching classes on the “queer subtexts” of Taylor Swift, rather than the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, makes for a provocative talking point. But narratives like this unwittingly turn the problem inside out. If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are “useful.” In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.
And this, says Harper, comes back to the miscreant we see so often in the downfall of universities: DEI, which sticks its nose into every aspect of university life, rarely improving it.
Administrators, not professors, usually approve hiring decisions, and these administrators are under intense external and internal pressure to diversify the faculty and curricula. Diversifying the faculty is a noble goal—I’m a beneficiary of these initiatives—but universities have looked for clumsy shortcuts. The reigning assumption is that scholars of color are disproportionately represented in activism-oriented fields such as “decolonial theory,” which means that deans—always seeking more brown faces to put on university websites—are more likely to approve new tenure lines in ideologically supercharged, diversity-rich disciplines. It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.
And this has led to the erosion of humanities departments because they no longer attract scholars who really want to study humanities. rather. prospective students, from pecuniary motives, want to study humanities involved in “studies”:
At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice. I went on the job market in 2019—the last year before hiring and Ph.D.-admission trends toward activism dramatically accelerated as a response to George Floyd’s murder. The pressure, as a scholar of color, to bend my work to the study of race was already intense. Were I on the job market now, it would no doubt feel insurmountable. Open literature jobs this year are overwhelmingly skewed toward subfields related to identity, politics, and power. The message this sends to scholars of color, who are the intended audience for these job ads, is clear: The only expertise we want from you is the expertise that flows from your identity.
. . . As the historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a vocal champion of the history profession, told me: “We’re no different from the sciences and math. Just as there wouldn’t be any computer chips without quantum mechanics, there wouldn’t be any 1619 Project without scholarship on early-modern accounting practices. But it’s the curiosity-driven research in the humanities that’s being seriously undermined right now—this is what needs defending and advocacy.”
. . . A cynic could easily argue that the core purpose of the humanities has become to provide the illusion of progressivism to deeply unprogressive institutions, helping them appeal to wealthy liberal students.
It hasn’t worked. After a boom in the number of humanities students in the 1960s, the area is now experiencing a big bust. and enrollment has dropped further: 30% between 2005 and 2020.
Unfortunately, the response of humanities faculty has not been to emphasize the real value of humanities in enhancing one’s life (who cares about that now, anyway?), but to mistakenly point out that studying humanities is politically and socially useful. That notion is a recipe for disaster:
Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, some would have you believe that it is humanities departments that do the bending.
This, too, turns humanities into “studies. But, as Harper points out, using an excellent quote from Kurt Vonnegut (read the piece to see it), there’s not the slightest evidence that studying the humanities transforms society in a positive way (by “positive”, I mean, “in the direction of Enlightenment values”).
Although all these trends are mostly promoted by the Left, Harper doesn’t let the Right off the hook, either. They not only have defunded or eliminated humanities because of declining enrollment, but use the very politicization of humanities as an excuse to do so. Who wants those Lefty-taught propaganda courses? And, of course, everyone knows the difficulty of getting a job, much less a six-figure income, with a degree in, say, English or art history. So another reason for the decline of humanities relative to STEM studies is the increasing commodification of universities: even liberal-arts students demand to know how studying Caravaggio will help them get a job. (Some of my own evolution students, primarily pre-meds, used to beef that studying evolution was useless for their goal of becoming doctors.)
So how do we defend the humanities? Clearly, it’s because they enrich your life independently of your income—at least that’s my view. My personal example is studying philosophy and art history. Had I not taken those classes in college (fortunately with charismatic professors, numerous at a teaching school like William and Mary), I don’t think I’d be reading philosophy now, or going to art galleries and reading books on art. Humanities education, at least for some, ignites a fire to engage in lifelong learning, and surely that makes your life better. I wouldn’t give a hoot for a scientist who dismisses the value of literature or art (sadly, I am mostly tone-deaf to the allure of classical music, but I don’t dismiss it!) And this seems to be Harper’s view as well:
If Newfield is right that we must reestablish the humanities as a serious research discipline, then we must begin by defending the idea that the humanities have value that is independent of their political or economic use-value. We can make the case that we are not the stewards of some rigid and exclusionary Western cultural heritage or literary canon but of a millennia-old tradition of human inquiry that is still capable of producing knowledge vital to understanding our present. And above all, we can start by being honest—publicly honest—about the forces that form, and deform, the humanities today.
. . . When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me—and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med—because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect—or require—from the humanities.
Sadly, mounting a defense like this seems doomed. Too many students want palpable usefulness from their studies. And that is the fault of whoever made liberal-arts education into a commodity. My own limp defense would be to ask students to read Joyce’s story “The Dead”—in my view, the greatest thing written in English. If they’re not moved by the story and its ending, then there’s no hope for the humanities.
Despite no longer being subscribed to WEIT, the email notifications continue to be sent. Dr. Coyne says he can’t fix this. Any WP gurus out there who can lend a hand?
If your email reader has filters, you can make a filter to send unwanted email to trash/spam/wherever and not have to deal with emails yourself. That has to be better than waiting for WP.
I can think of nothing better to say on behalf of the Humanities than what William Cory said in the nineteenth century about education generally:
I don’t see how anyone who has had such an education could be considered unprepared for the world, and it hardly matters if you got there by reading Greek poetry, Shakespeare, or medieval History. Of course, it’s not clear that you can get that education nowadays at most schools. It seems like you are lucky if you get graduates that can write. With the Progressive worldview that History is moved by the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, education is just choosing a color and style that you like, but the outcome is always the same.
Thank you for providing that brilliant, inspiring quotation.
I like reading Harper but think he misses something important. Many students no longer need to study philosophy, art history, or literature in order to enrich their own lives. For them social media via their phones now fill that need. The volume and accessibility of content from around the world gives a simulacrum of knowledge about culture and popular art that fills the humanities-shaped hole in many of our students.
The vocabulary here is tricky. Departments with “studies” as part of their title are usually something to be wary of, but fields within a department may be intellectually respectable despite having “studies” as part of the label for the field. Someone doing “modernism studies” may just be doing comp lit but specializing in early to mid twentieth century. Modernism studies can include (for example) Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Wittgenstein looked at in the light of their relation to developments in culture and the arts of the 1920s. Someone might want to argue for or against Kipling being a modernist. This sort of work is respectable humanities stuff.
+1
The church used to bind and orient the departments of the university toward The Good.
As the church influence receded, the more virulent of the humanities tended to fill that role.
See John Henry Newman’s writings for that first claim about the church.
I’m a subscriber and I read the piece when it came out—under the “Seeds of its Own Destruction” banner. It’s a good piece with—as you say—a weak ending. Humanities proponents need to fashion a better defense. Not only are the humanities assailed from the political right—and the proliferation of grievance studies departments have only made the humanities a bigger target—America’s belief that a college education is all about getting a job has tilted the balance of interest away from the humanities and toward STEM. These are potent headwinds!
I enjoyed the humanities and strongly believe that my two careers in STEM were greatly enhanced by the humanities courses I took in college and by my continuing interest. I’m not saying that one should defend the humanities as a money-making enterprise—although I surely did benefit monetarily thanks to skills I learned in the humanities—but there is an argument to be made.
All that said, we do need to have some humanists stand up and defend the humanities in ways that resonate. Maybe they already have. If so, they need to do better to get the word out. They cannot expect politicians, the general public, or prospective students to go searching for why the humanities matter. In his Atlantic article, Tyler Austin Harper has made a decent start.
I dropped out of medical school for two years in order to study comparative literature, political philosophy, and a couple of introductory fine art courses. And after I belatedly graduated, I went to London and somehow persuaded a London University Chinese archaeology professor to write me a letter of introduction to the British Museum, where for a few months I was an informal [ non-degree taking ] student attached to the Department of Oriental Antiquities!
What I didn’t see in Harper’s article is any treatment of how tertiary humanities degrees are marketed. In Australia and Keyaurastan New Zealand, Vice chancellors and their PR departments almost invariably market Humanities degrees as ‘degrees in critical thinking’. The degree holder is armed not with specific knowledge of the vocations they may subsequently enter, but putatively have a brain incisively honed on how to research, present and weigh evidence etc etc.
The sheer gall and effrontery of such misleading marketing! With the youngest people in the workforce the most likely to prattle on about ‘harms’, ‘violence in language’, etc it really does some many humanities degree holders emerge with degrees in Uncritical thinking. Or, the progressive equivalent of a Fox News Addict — ie someone who emerges with less knowledge of the world compared to before their immersion.
“In a certain sense, the currently raging debates about the humanities are all too familiar. Critics like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball gained national notoriety for claiming that “tenured radicals” had corrupted humanities education way back in the 1980s and ’90s.” – Tyler Austin Harper
“Although the New Left saw itself as the victim of history, in at least one respect it became its beneficiary. In the sixties and early seventies American higher education expanded enormously. University enrollments increased and new campuses opened on the East and the West coasts to accommodate the postwar baby boom children now reaching college age. Consisting to a large extent of graduate students, the New Left entered the academic profession en masse and found respectable positions at virtually every distinguished university except Chicago. Appointed at a time of expansion, the “tenured Left” survived the budget-cutting contractions of the early Reagan years. With no new massive hiring expected in the immediate future, the remnants of the New Left are the most significant ideological presence on the American campus today and most likely will continue to be so well into the next century.”
(Diggins, John Patrick. /The Rise and Fall of the American Left./ New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992. pp. 288-9)
As for the question of the humanities’ usefulness, I side with Stanley Fish:
“I reject justifying academic work because to do so means to deny it its own value…” (p. 56)
“[H]ere we come to the heart of the matter, the justification of liberal education. You know the questions: Will it benefit the economy? Will it fashion an informed citizenry? Will it advance the cause of justice? Will it advance anything? Once again the answer is no, no, no, and no. At some level of course, everything we ultimately do has some relationship to the education we have received. But if liberal arts education is doing its job and not the job assigned to some other institution, it will not have as its aim the bringing about of particular effects in the world. Particular effects may follow, but if they do, it will be as the unintended consequences of an enterprise which, if it is to remain true to itself, must be entirely self-referential, must be stuck on itself, must have no answer whatsoever to the question, “what good is it?”” (p. 55)
“[T]he liberal arts are like poetry because they make no claim to benefits beyond the pleasure of engaging in them. They are also like virtue because they are their own reward. That is, the reward is here and now, not some intangible benefit—wisdom, grace, gravitas—you will reap later. If you are committed to an enterprise and have internalized its values, you don’t spend much time asking questions like “what is this good for?”. You have already answered that question by sticking with the job: it’s good because it’s what you like to do.” (p. 59)
(Fish, Stanley. /Save the World on Your Own Time./ New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.)
I completely agree with the general tenor of this–the humanities are about studying the things that characterize HUMANS, and are of use, at least potentially, to all HUMANS. I cannot imagine never having read Milton or Shakespeare, myself, despite my own later medical degree.
As for pre-med students “thinking” that studying evolution wasn’t of any use to their medical careers: Is there a way to keep such people OUT of medical school? As it has been said, nothing in biology makes sense without evolution, but with it, everything does, and that includes medical science. Infectious disease alone provides real world, real time examples of evolution, for crying out loud. How stupid ARE people?
This is all very depressing.
“This article in the new Atlantic was given two titles”
(My comment below is not about the article in the Atlantic, but about publications having two titles for their articles.)
For a variety of reasons I’ve long had a subscription to The New Yorker. I’ve noticed that it often has two titles for its articles — one title for the print edition and its digital replica (which is accessible only to subscribers), and another title for the free versions more widely available online à la carte.
It seems to me that the more widely available New Yorker articles online often have titles that are more provocative than those given for the print edition.
I’m thinking that the titles of the à la carte versions are more provocative in order to catch the attention of people surfing the internet, while subscribers are considered a captured audience.
Has anyone else noticed this difference in titles between the online and print versions of publications?
Yes. The NY Times does it all the time. The print headlines are less click-baity, among other things.
GCM
Hmm… Yes, I think I noticed this in NYT, too, though I cancelled my online subscription some years ago. (Much longer ago I used to subscribe to the paper edition even when I lived in New Jersey and San Francisco, as well as when I lived in New York City.)
Unpopular opinion here, backed up by no research:
Generations ago, most women majored in the humanities. The common assumption among students and teachers for the early to mid 20th century was that while men needed to focus on studies which allowed them to have well-paying careers and influence the world, women were freer to pursue whatever interested or enlightened them. Assumption was that if they weren’t going into teaching, most of them were probably marrying, having kids, and staying home.
Back then, the general belief was that university-educated housewives not only made for better families, but the women themselves and society as a whole benefitted from this education. Nobody raised an eyebrow at a girl majoring in 18th century French literature, wondering what she was “going to do with that.” It was for its own sake, obviously.
Whether this was wise or workable isn’t relevant to my point. I think the humanities as a thriving academic area of study suffered when women and the cultural zeitgeist no longer felt it was fine for women to major in something which wasn’t going to help them support themselves. The department lost numbers of bodies in seats, as well as an ability to preach art-for-art’s-sake while assuming a fair proportion of the population was nodding along.
I look at that chart and notice that the biggest drop in humanities bachelor degrees correlates with women’s lib, for better or worse.
In the early years of university education for women in the UK, it is clear that many of them envisaged a possible career in teaching. The Oxford degree in “Greats” (Greek and Latin followed by ancient history and philosophy) sent men students off to the Foreign Service and the Administrative class of the Civil Service, and sent both men and women off to teach in the sort of private schools they themselves had attended. While many of the women did think they might wind up in a marriage which made no use of their university education, many of the women did apparently expect to go into teaching, including classical humanities.
Interesting take. Parenthetically, I went to college during the war in Vietnam, mostly to avoid the draft. I majored in philosophy because I thought it was interesting, not for any potential “use.” However, I dropped out of college and ultimately got a 4F medical draft deferment.
Two psychologists (who were anti-war) noted in official letters that I don’t respond well to authority, which was true, especially then. The draft board didn’t even contest the letters. The intake officer made a quick and pragmatic decision, apparently assuming that I would be just too much trouble. I walked out on very light feet (though I continued to oppose the war).
My wife also majored in philosophy, briefly. Her parents thought it was a bad idea, wanting her to study something more useful. She dropped out, but ultimately went back in later life to get a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and a master’s degree in counseling — which she used with great satisfaction as a school psychologist until she retired.
Ahh, the days when students were taught to think for themselves. Now, social sciences/humanities is an ideology. It sees students as empty vessels to be filled with this ideology and sent out into the world as that ideologies good little foot soldiers. I consider it a form of child abuse. And funding this indoctrination is funding this abuse.
There is undoubtedly some truth in Harper’s analysis of recent administrative factors, i.e., the way Deans allocate funding. But the WSJ graph shows that the decline in Humanities degrees occurred during the 1970s and mid-1980s, well before the era of DEI. Something else was happening back then: postmodernism was happening.
I remember, during exactly that period, being puzzled that literature departments seemed increasingly populated by individuals who despised literature— and whose goal was not to appreciate literary art but to deconstruct it. They evidently thought that deconstructing texts was a political/philosophical action, thus superior in some way to mere literature scholarship. They also seemed to take actual pleasure in deconstructing, like the proverbial boy who pulls the wings off butterflies. This generation of deconstruction hobbyists then trained the next generation of academicians in the Humanities. And they have succeeded in pulling the wings off.
Another way to think about those simultaneous changes (postmodernism, counterculture, decline of the humanities) is as consequences of the end of the post-WWII economic boom. Piketty made a pretty convincing case that the material and philosophical culture of the 40s-70s was badly warped by the massive destruction of capital and the unnatural brief reduction in economic inequality that reversed itself in the 70s. My friends and I grew up thinking we’d do even better than our boomer parents did (because they had done so as well). When that started to look like it would not be true, people fled for the cultural exits. Critical social justice ideology can be seen from that pov as just another way for some people to give themselves economic and cultural rights in the fight over the scraps left behind by Goldman Sachs.
Wingless flight! Watch us soar! Alas, grounded by the grubby utilitarians and capitalists, the working-class schmucks who want only jobs, the elitists and supremacists who cling to the supposed “best which has been thought and said.”
How fortunate for all of us that art and literature are not the property of the academicians, that one can study, learn, appreciate, and even practice the arts without expensive laboratories. If one needs or wants a guide, then the libraries still abound in valuable works of earlier generations. At least while those libraries, more silent than ever, can survive.
Yes, and DEI is the radical reconstruction, such as the Republicans in the North carried out after his assassination.
Traditional Humanities is invaluable for becoming an educated, well-rounded person.
When it becomes revolutionary indoctrination, that utility is lost.
From the film “7 Days in Entebbe”
Le Moine -“Dignity comes when you are free. Running water makes you free.
A toilet makes you free.
One plumber is worth ten revolutionaries….
I am an engineer. Engineers can make things.
One engineer is worth fifty revolutionaries”
I love these subjects for their own intrinsic value. Unfortunately, that position- no matter how true- will not save the humanities.
What will continue to happen is that only a small elite will be educated in the humanities at the post-secondary level. Everyone else will focus on immediate ROI, even if that is short-sighted. I recently read an article showing that straight out of school, humanity majors did worse than others in terms of starting salary. After 10 years, they did better.
The dream of a citizenry of highly educated people who are well-read in the humanities has no power in our current world. It is the remnant of Enlightenment thinking. Higher education is reduced to only a pathway to economic stability, because the door to economic opportunity is closed to many. I would love to see that turn around.
A 10-year hobbling of earnings is a steep opportunity cost to make back, especially since the 10-year clock starts after graduation from a four-year college degree and maybe a master’s to make him/herself more competitive, or succumbing to the sunk-cost fallacy. A grad in that situation has already spent a good chunk of his/her twenties accumulating debt instead of investing wage income. Money put aside early in life compounds mightily.
Yes. Many academics (both humanities and STEM) spend their 20s and 30s in university, grad school and postdoc training with no money. That’s a lot of deferred saving & compound interest. The other cost of delayed earning is delayed reproduction: I’ll retire about the same time my youngest finishes university.
“The other cost of delayed earning is delayed reproduction.”
Some of us never got the memo.
Traditional humanities becoming identity and activist driven would be expected to result in minorities facing the worst of the fallout.
Since blacks and Hispanics are in general more socially conservative than religious whites, a progressive idealogical slant alienates disproportionately more minorities (the very people identity activism is supposed to help).
Also, people do not support institutions that are not representative of themselves. Minority scholars who make up larger portions of humanities faculty in general, and even more so in local universities outside of elite academic settings, will be the ones that have their positions defunded by non-urban conservatives pushing back against these progressive ideologies.
Being able to communicate well is one of the greatest assets for success in this life: a sure way to make friends at least, and that’s one of the best assets (excluding being born rich). Communication is not about speaking or listening. There are a lot of foundations lying below good communication: excellent reading/writing skills in one’s own language and hopefully in other languages, logic/critical thinking, a decent handle on literature, art, history, philosophy. But you don’t need all those skills to succeed, though I think one needs a smattering. If one can communicate, one can command… an action, a train of thought, an idea or belief, even a notion that a listener/reader is opposed to. This subject has come up on WEIT as of late, I guess my head is still stuck there and this (important, yet depressing) post stirred the pot again.
Last thought: simply being able to write well opens many doors for modern, literate humans. I bet poetry and music is a spandrel for seduction- a very important skill from a genetic point of view. 😉 Wild speculation aside, the skill of communication alone should prove humanities a worthwhile endeavor, and without humanities, where does one learn about humanity? Perhaps I’m pushing an elitist attitude and it’s passé at this point. I also wonder if AI plays a role in all of this.
When I taught the three courses psychology doctoral students must take in evaluation (cognitive, personality, integrative) five times each as an adjunct, I insisted that the evaluation reports be well written, as they were after all works in the English language, and they were making a case, and telling a person’s story, seriously grounded in data yes, but still necessarily to be rendered with clarity if understood to the reader, fleshing out a human being they were advocating for, therefore possibly even moving, making use on occasion, when relevant, of poetic language. Why should a work of science, after all, not also be literature, when the other option is deadly jargon? I urged my students to round themselves in life with literature, art, good films, challenging and beautiful music (old or new), because they were supposed to be practioners who exercised wisdom, compassion, understanding, which the humanities could deliver them, along with other life experiences. They might not get other skills, such as skeptical thinking, statistical understanding, cross-disciplinary scientific grounding, from the arts and humanities, but the latter could inspire feeling, humanity, and intelligence. Therefore, I think the humanities are extremely valuable. Art exists because it is necessary (and yes, very often it is rubbish).
I’m coming to understand that it’s not “speech absolutism” that is at risk (and nobody actually wants), but “truth absolutism”.
When people say you can combat bad ideas/bad speech/bad ideas with correct speech, they forget that truth is actually anathema to many. How can you combat a bad, but true, idea with free speech? Which I think is at the root here.
How could a true idea be bad, Craig? Honestly I can’t imagine what you mean, unless you are referring ironically to those who believe that about uncomfortable truths? You can’t get from an “oughtn’t” to an “isn’t”.
It’s possible for one’s mortal enemy to have true ideas that are, inconveniently, bad for your existential interests. You don’t solve that with free speech. Instead you go to war.
Isn’t the enrichment of ones life through the appreciation of the arts & humanities USEFUL? … since it makes for a happier person, someone who is more thoughtful, someone who can make conversation about multiple subjects, someone who has a deeper knowledge of the world & the people who inhabit it?
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make.
My first degree was in modern history, which seems to count as humanities, though I would say that is more of a social science. The value of history in terms of the job market is that it teaches you to assess evidence, espcially documentary evidence, and synthesise lots of different information. You have to be able to write fast and build an argument, both orally and especially in written form. It also exposes you to lots of different disciplines from economics to politics to science. If I were an employer I would hire a good historian compared to a business major any day. The same goes for someone with a first class in philosophy. I switched disciplines later to linguistics and spent half of my career working with scientists (hence my interest in evolution), and I am sure that my broad intellectual curiosity at least partly stemmed from my origins as a historian. So I would argue that a discipline like history also has a payoff in terms of its usefulness in the workplace.
I spent some time in the local Barnes & Noble bookstores this holiday season shopping for gifts. At least at the one I went to, the classics of the Western canon are everywhere, prominently displayed. I actually bought a copy of The Tale of Two Cities, something I haven’t read since high school, and so far have loved every page.
It’s occurred to me that it might be easier now to find these classics in a chain book store in the mall than it is to find them at a top university. How strange is that?!