The author of the article below kindly sent me a copy of his piece calling for separation of humanities instruction from that of science. Such a tactic would even produce universities that taught one or the other but not both. The end result would be the death of universities offering a liberal education, and probably of humanities instruction as well.
This is a short but provocative read at The Dispatch, so click on the title below to read it. The author is Evan D. Morris, a Professor of Radiology Biomedical Imaging at Yale.
I’ve heard similar arguments from colleagues in the science, but I’m not sure I fully agree. The reason is that I had a fantastic liberal-arts education at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, an education that sparked a lifelong love of learning in the humanities, including literature, art, and philosophy (I am deficient in my knowledge of classical music). I am by no means a polymath or public intellectual, but I read tons of literature, go to art museums, and read a lot of philosophy for a scientist. I wouldn’t be doing that if I hadn’t studied these things in college.
Click below:
Morris’s main argument for separating science from the humanities is that the Trump administration is punishing science for the sins of people in the humanities, even if a few scientists do submit DEI-related grants. Ergo, we should preserve science, with all its virtues, by keeping it away from humanities scholars. I put below some quotes, all indented (Morris was at the Heterodox Academy Conference in NYC a month ago):
The best argument I heard at the HxA conference in defense of the humanities in today’s university was: “We cannot afford to lose all of that important cancer research.” Come again? Translation: The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us—grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences—with them. This begs the question: Do we scientists need them? Or, more to the point, must the fate of the sciences be tied to that of the humanities?
Since January of this year, the sciences have been hit with delays of some federal grants and cancellations of others; proposed reductions in indirect rate costs; and draconian budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) going forward. Keep in mind, it is the humanities that have sinned: Why else would the Trump administration’s settlement with Columbia call for an internal review of Middle East programs or for adding new Jewish Studies faculty slots? But if the humanities have sinned, why has the government targeted the sciences for funding cuts? As Willie Sutton purportedly remarked when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Most universities have divisions or departments of the humanities, social sciences, law, business, medicine, and hard sciences. But it is the latter two that bring in the bulk of federal dollars, in the form of NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
. . . . Some will claim that scientists’ hands are not clean, that we endorse rampant DEI, that we misuse science funding for bizarre investigations. But such instances are a few fleas on the fur of a noble hound. We in the hard sciences do work that is largely apolitical, and we are more oriented toward much-needed objective evaluation of data and merit than many of our brethren in the humanities. Yet, the scientists, and all their life-giving and technology-producing work, are being punished for the sins of others because we all live under one roof. I cannot see a compelling reason for our continued cohabitation.
I can! Well, I can so long as humanities are taught in a way to stimulate thinking rather than propagandize students. We all know that much of the humanities is morphing into ideological “studies” programs, but I still have confidence that somewhere in this great land English literature, music, and art are being taught in a way to stimulate students rather than propagandize them. Further, there is cross-pollination of the disciplines. Philosophy, for example (a “humanities” field) can help us straighten out our thinking about science (Dan Dennett is one example), while science can instill an attitude of doubt into studies of humanities, training students to meet assertions by saying, “How do you know that?”
I do, however, agree with Morris, as I did when I spoke at the conference, that the ends of science studies differ from those of much of the humanities:
In the university, we also see a clash of cultures. Scientists at research universities run labs that are funded by government grants. To secure those grants, the scientist proposes a circumscribed set of experiments with verifiable (or more correctly, rejectable) hypotheses. Objective truth as it applies to such narrow lines of inquiry is attainable. But objective truth cannot be achieved in the humanities—nor is it the point. Professors in the humanities are trained in a completely different paradigm and culture. Writing about art or history or religion seems to elude any possibility of objectivity that is central to the scientific process. If you are a Calvinist, there may be only one proper way to read the Bible. But that is not the same as there being one objective meaning of the Bible for all of us.
There’s a lot more to be said about this, and I hope to say it in a longer written explication elsewhere. I do agree that in most of the humanities (not all, for they include sociology and economics), the aim is not finding truths about the world, but to stimulate reflection and the realization of subjective “truths” (well, ways of thinking) that are specific to the reader, viewer, or listener. But those subjective truths are also important: imagine a world without novels, paintings, or music! How can we teach liberal arts without such subjects? Even Morris agrees with me here, but would reorganize universities to have the humanities taught by instructors:
Does this mean that scientists should strive to be illiterate or ahistorical? Of course not. We need to be able to read and write and absorb lessons from history and politics and ethics. But we don’t need to be part of a larger university to do so. For those topics that students need to learn but for which no scientist professor is prepared to teach, our Institute of Technology and Medicine can hire qualified instructors. But they need not be the world’s expert on Shakespeare or Poe to teach writing or English literature to undergrads. And for those polymathic students who want to learn their physics from a famous physicist and their Hobbes from a leading Hobbesian, there can still be such a thing as cross-registering at the nearby Institute of Humanities.
I disagree here. First of all, as scientists we should strive not to unyoke ourselves from humanities, but to improve the teaching of humanities so that they become places of inspiration, stimulation, and arguments, even if there is no objective truth to be found (I have to add that we can learn how to view paintings, read novels, and listen to music from experts so that we get more out of them. Even if humanities can’t give us “objective truths”, they can show us what we’re missing.
This unyoking is really a recipe for the death of the humanities, for students, as my friend Luana is constantly reminding me, now go to college to get jobs, not to learn, and you can’t get good jobs if you’re a humanities major. She doesn’t like this trend, but has always told me that this presages the death of liberal-arts colleges: one conclusion from Morris’s article. He ends this way:
We are at an inflection point in the public’s valuation of the academy. For good or ill, we academics must each make our own best case for our continued existence and for whatever resources we seek from the public. There is an efficiency and a clarity that can come from unyoking the sciences from the humanities. Let the market of public opinion assess each discipline on its own merits and let the practitioners of each discipline be allowed to make their own case for their continued value. That seems only fair. I am confident I can make my most persuasive case for a university of science, engineering, and medicine, if the humanities are not housed under my roof.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be buying so blithely into “the market of public opinion”, but making the case for a liberal education.
Now I have considered that my opposition to this unyoking may derive from my own history: the fantastic education I got at the liberal-arts, teaching-specialized College of William & Mary. But I haven’t given up hope that this kind of education could still be proffered to students now.
However, maybe I’m naive and unrealistic.
Two thoughts: First, to quote Dr. Coyne: “The reason is that I had a fantastic liberal-arts education at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, an education that sparked a lifelong love of learning in the humanities, including literature, art, and philosophy…etc.” Could you get that enlightenment view of a liberal arts education in major institutions of higher ed today when the views of educators in the humanities and social sciences are reportedly so culturally and politically monolithic?
Two, would separating the hard sciences and medicine from the social justice oriented influence of the humanities and social sciences protect the former from stinkin’ thinkin’? Finding some ways to protect the hard sciences and medicine from emotionally laden and mushy perceptions is more than worth exploring, it may be neccessary to protect the objectivity of scientific disciplines in the academy.
The humanities should be reformed as needed. However, as a philosopher (And the son of an engineering professor), I think philosophy and science can be excellent partners. In previous years’ AI future capabilities debates, it was the philosophers, most notably Hubert Dreyfus at MIT and Berkeley, not the computer scientists, such as Marvin Minksy and Herbert Simon, whose insights proved to be technologically correct.
Where i used to teach, it was the social sciences, not humanities, where a lot of the nonsense originated.
I think the social sciences are formally lumped into the humanities, though I always try to distinguish those part of the humanities that do resolve empirical issues about the world.
Social sciences are distinct from humanities. The latter use abstract reasoning the former use empirical observation and study observable patterns. They have different tenure standards as well. In humanities it is publishing a book, in the social sciences it is publications in peer-reviewed journals.
This is from UPenn, https://lpsonline.sas.upenn.edu/features/humanities-vs-social-science-exploring-dichotomy
Unlike the social sciences approach which focuses on observable patterns, humanities focus on abstract or theoretical ideas when examining everything from ethics and poetry to how to live a life of meaning. Students of the humanities primarily employ a qualitative research approach, making analytical, moral or speculative interpretations regarding the traditions, creations, and cultures of the past and the present.
+1
Most humanists would be horrified at the idea that the social sciences are among the humanities, and I expect that most social scientists would have the same response. Counting economics, sociology, political science, and psychology among “the humanities” is at best an eccentric opinion. German and French have terms for lumping the two together: “Geisteswissenschaften” and “sciences humaines”; so, if you want a term for humanities and social sciences, you can speak of the “human sciences.” But the latter term has never gained traction in the English-speaking world, where the term “science” is understood more narrowly.
Addendum: I wonder if Dr. Coyne is using the word “humanities” mainly with the “studies” departments and programs in mind (women’s studies, media studies, gender studies, queer studies, fat studies, give-me-money-and-recognition-for-spewing-pretentious-bullshit studies, etc.). Those certainly can’t be split between humanities and social sciences, and certainly have none of the rigor of sciences—or even of the humanities as traditionally understood.
At Case Western back in the sixties the STEM students were required to take a ‘humanities sequence’. It averaged out to one humanities class per semester and three had to be in the same discipline and in order of increasing difficulty (not the correct word). One could not simply take every introductory class but had to work up at least one 300-level.
Not only did psychology count as a humanity but it was overwhelmingly popular since it required no papers to be written and one could get extra credit by volunteering for experiments.
On a tangent, while many of us appreciated at least some of the non-STEM parts of education, the sequence was a sore point since the humanities majors had nothing similar. They could satisfy their STEM requirement with special, watered-down courses. Physics for Poets and the like where frightening equations were held at bay.
At my university and many others it’s the Faculties of Education that are the wellspring of applied critical theory.
I also loved my liberal arts classes at university, the few that I could squeeze in around my engineering classes. I got As in all of them.
I agree that a (classically) liberal education is important for all students. In some specialties, it’s hard to fit them in. Many engineering programs used to be 5-year programs. Squeezing that down to 4 years is hard.
Most of my classmates hated having to take LA classes. And they probably really needed them more than I did. I was already a voracious reader before entering university. I have continued to learn through broad reading my entire life.
Same here, I loved my humanities classes while getting a science degree from a liberal arts university. Life travels a very winding road, and a diverse background helps us navigate the curves. For example, on one of those curves I made my living as a wildlife artist, thanks to a “throwaway” life-drawing art class. Science is not the only interesting thing in life.
Humanities (and Commerce) courses often subsidize STEM courses (math obviously less so). A Philosophy course with 100 students very inexpensive to run. Of course, a large Philosophy course subsidizes say, a small language or music course–unless you have 100 students learning oboe in a large lecture theater. Get rid of Humanities, STEM would need to self-fund or get further subsidized by Marketing, Commerce courses.
I don’t understand this. It seems to me that it is the other way around. Science departments receive federal grants from which the university extorts a large tax called “overhead,” which is often well over half the grant. Those moneys basically go into the university’s general funds where they are available to subsidize other departments. What moneys do humanities departments bring in besides tuition?
Think how universities outside the USA work, those with no or very little federal funding and puny endowments. At those, tuition indeed is the large bulk of “income” — maybe even 90% –and one generally needs 50+ students per class (at upper levels) to cover costs. Academics in the USA usually horrified to hear about 50+ students!
Could create a big market for mergers-and-acquisitions consultants. Universities could hire Deloitte or McKinsey to analyze the assets and then spin off the
losershumanities departments as a new separate enterprise, Social Justice University, and leave behind the stuffy old science departments in Truth University. As Jon Haidt said, universities really have to choose one telos or the other. By divorcing each could have what it says it really wants.Comment by Greg Mayer
It’s not “could hire”; they already have. The University of Wisconsin System hired Deloitte in 2024 to produce a report. The only result seems to have been the ability of System administrators to hold up the report as evidence they are doing something. Millions more went to a consultant called Huron, which convinced the University to buy a software package called Workday; Huron will now get paid millions of dollars to explain how to use the software.
GCM
Abby Thompson’s “Two Universities Redux” in The War on Science talks about “Dogma U” and “Knowledge U”. But I like your term Social Justice U as it ties us closer to what I see as the precipitating Antiracism of Kendi and company. I always explained to people that social justice is a fair and good idea, but the trademarking of it into Social Justice with capital letters (and similarly as dei became DEI) is the act of thought becoming ideology and an unforgiving ideology at that.
I still have a couple of hundred pages to read in “The War on Science” before getting to the “What can be done?” final section. So not yet having the experts’ answers, let me just say that creating pure scientific institutes is a horrible idea for undergraduates. Now I too was at William and Mary at the same time as Jerry (the 1960’s) though I must say I had a scientist’s arrogant view of our required liberal arts courses, only tolerating them rather than embracing them as Jerry and many others did. I am poorer in so many ways because of that attitude, but richer than I would have been without being required to at least simply to sit in those classes, hear the discussions and read the required books. As the years have gone by, I find myself pulling my musty Norton’s Anthology of English Lit off the shelf for a reference and when I was teaching high school recalled something that had me consulting my old Sociology text. Sophomore government introduced me to the idea of self-regarding and other-regarding rights and acts of John Stuart Mill while informal conversations with Prof David Jones of our philosophy dept introduced me to “A Theory of Justice” from John Rawls, one of his professors at Harvard.
My point is that even a mediocre scholar benefits from exposure to the humanities and humanities scholars even as he pursues a full double major in math and physics and his life spent in a career as an engineer is much richer due those courses.
I am also reminded of our annual Raft Debate at the College in those years pitting humanities faculty against science faculty in an argument as to which should survive. While always entertaining…each side rolled out its big guns…it seemed that neither side ever actually won.
Jim, I really appreciate this comment and envy your experience at W&M. My experience only a few years after yours was very different. My family couldn’t afford to send me away to college so I lived at home and went to Big State U. I had a real go at choosing between a humanities degree and a science degree: in my first year I took no prerequisites for either, and took just courses from the English department (to be a writer) and from the Zoology department (to be a marine biologist). My zoology professors were smart, knowledgeable, demanding professionals. By contrast my English professors were snobbish, sweary obscurantists. Possibly I didn’t cast my net sufficiently widely, and some other humanities department at State U would have done better. But under the circumstances it was easy to choose which degree to do, and easy to turn my back on any more humanities courses (at least at State U, I’m sure your courses at W&M were fabulous). l don’t think I missed out on anything at State U, but admit my education wasn’t as good as yours at W&M.
Thanks Mike. W&M is/was a “little” state U, a public college significantly smaller than the public University of VA and the big state land grant university, VA Tech. I do not know what it is like today other than the couple of good direct experiences I have had with the chair of the physics dept volunteering to support a team of subject matter experts I led out of our Governor’s office in 2007 in a review of the state’s K12 STEM curriculum standards and then him asking me to listen and comment as a layman on colloquium presentations from several candidates for a faculty position as they were told that while the department was PhD granting, professors were expected to prepare for and take undergrad teaching very seriously. My other experience on campus was in 2019 when I audited a freshman biochem class and found the professor to be extraordinary and the students to be serious, hardworking, and very bright. But both of these were STEM.
Perhaps the open market offers the best future for the humanities. If unyoked, I suspect that profitable colleges will be those that provide their graduates with better employment opportunities. Simple economics will keep courses like Transgender Archaeology off the table and the humanities will become less diluted than they are now.
Well, in an open market, it pretty much looks to me that all a college would offer is intercollegiate sports of every invention…competitions to support the gambling market writ large and the mass media/advertizing market. Any academic pursuits would be an afterthought at best with the career and technical education institutes such as ecpi picking up the slack to “train” people for STEM jobs but not careers.
Gee I think I recall that science only became a word in the first third of the 19th century with much of today’s STEM stuff mostly under the sobriquet of natural philosophy. Well… philosophy…how about that?
+1
Comment by Greg Mayer
A few quick comments. First, Morris seems to have a narrow view of what science is; he makes it sound like a sort of Popperian technology development system. (It’s ironic that Morris notes the correctness of “rejectable” versus “verifiable” hypotheses, one of the major debates in 20th century philosophy of science, thus showing his familiarity with the work of professors of philosophy, even if he acquired it en passant.) There are large swaths of science that promise no immediate technologies or cures.
Second, Morris thinks the “humanities” are Trump’s target, but much of what Trumpists object to is social science– sociology, economics, human behavioral sciences in general.
Third, to think that for Trump the “hard” sciences are not an intended target, and that he is only using attacks on it to get at the humanities, is to be willfully blind. Trump has fomented the most sustained attack on the health sciences I have ever seen. RFK. Jr. is doing all he can, with Trump’s blessing, to create a poorly funded biomedical kakistocracy. Climatology and ecology are other sciences under attack, and I fear evolutionary biology, a perennial target of conservatives, isn’t far behind.
And finally, to support Jerry’s defense of the university, the institutes of technology that Morris wants would not be universities at all, places where, as Ezra Cornell put it, “an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” It would be a complete abandonment of the Humboldtian ideal of higher education, and the principle that animated Robert Hutchins, the most influential president of the University of Chicago since its founding: “The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.” MIT, despite its name, is not a Morris-style institute of technology; it is a university.
(The Dispatch is paywalled, so I can only go by the excerpts, so apologies to Morris if in other parts of his essay he alleviated the concerns raised here.)
GCM
Thank you Greg…especially for the Hutchins reminders. An example of the administration disdain for basic science is the halving of the Nasa science budget from ~$8B to ~$4B; Nasa science is almost all aimed at basic science…fundamental knowledge of the Earth’s atmosphere, the Sun, other planets, and the cosmos. They also zeroed out STEM outreach to K12. The only healthy Nasa budget area remaining is human spaceflight which is almost all big engineering and bereft of science research.
Re iDJT’s attacks, science is an enemy because it isn’t post-truth. Anything that opposes his personal “common sense” and “gut” is a target, e.g. BLS’s objective data collection.
Greg, your comment says it all. Here’s to it. In praise of learning. No regrets. I loved every second of it. Wouldn’t trade it for a thing. We all belonged there. Great books, great minds, great inventions, all of it.
“Morris’s main argument for separating science from the humanities is that the Trump administration is punishing science for the sins of people in the humanities… .”
If this really is Morris’s reason for separating the sciences from the humanities, then I would say that he’s looking at too short a time horizon. Trump will be gone in four years, and the current Republican hegemony in government will not be permanent. The sciences and the humanities* have been tied at the hip for hundreds of years in the academy, and when the currently fashionable attack on academic funding comes to the end, the sciences and the humanities will be able to resume their long-standing, if tense, co-existence. Isolating the sciences from the humanities is not a great answer, as doing so to avoid being punished by President Trump would be an irreversible response to a temporary problem.
*and the social sciences, and education, and … .
To be fair that is pretty much the system this (UK) side of the pond. It is very rare for someone majoring in a science subject to do anything except science throughout their time as an undergraduate. Sure they might inhabit the same campus but there is little academic ( maybe more social – I, a biochemistry graduate, am married to a classics grad but we met after uni) crossover, even in the ̶b̶a̶r̶ coffee shops.
“I am by no means a polymath.” I disagree. I believe you are in fact a polymath with deep interests in multiple subjects.
Pyres Symon mentions the UK system, in which students are basically committed to a particular subject throughout their undergraduate years. This is a very bad system, because at the age of 18, young people’s interests may change dramatically. I went to a liberal arts college in the US, and was able to change my understanding of what I wanted to do by taking a variety of courses in sciences and humanities. My two nephews, in the UK system, got started in subjects they had done at school, and both of them quit university without a degree because of the rigidity of the system there.
IMO the relevant cause is a 3-year degree vs a 4-year one.
Separate education from government.
Intriguing idea. Would the academy be able to meet its research, education and public service missions without federal government assistance if it returned to the percentage of administrative staff it had, on average, in 1980 let’s say?
AIUI “the pursuit of happiness” requires the government not only to not oppress the governed (“liberty”, freedom from) but also to actively open up opportunities (freedom to). Public education in the US has a long and generally positive history — Jefferson, land-grant colleges, the GI Bill, etc.
In addition to quality, it’s proabably also a matter of the degree of inclusion or separation of the two.
A salutaory lesson from NZ… it was in 2012 that humanties were legislatively melded into the Royal Society of NZ. At the time I had been a professional member for a few years and felt it was a bad move, but hopeful of no more than a small derailment. Sadly, it’s been a trainwreck.
Readers of Jerry’s posts will know the sorry state of science here since at least that time – although the current government has slowly been doing a few things to try and change the situation and return the focus to ‘proper’ science. Unfortunately, the embarrassingly naive RSNZ whinges and whines about this, like a dim-witted spolied teenager told they can’t drink and drive (perhaps my earlier analogy should have been ‘flat tyre’ and ‘car crash’?).
To be fair, the fault does not lie entirely with the humanities as politicians, NGOs and others have drank deeply of the ‘anti-Western science’ / ‘decolonisation’ / ‘other ways of knowing’ / related battiness Kool-Aid. It’s hard to get headway against this when (1) the response ends up being ‘those facts don’t matter’; and (2) most of us sensible types have quite of lot of important stuff to do and not a lot of time to get it all done.
I should also mention that I have remained a member of the RSNZ in the faint hope things may improve. Perhaps that makes me the battiest of the batty? 🙂
“Humanities” covers a large range of disciplines, some of which are not concerned with objective truth, but some of which are. For example, my own field of study, linguistics, is (mostly) concerned with uncovering the structure and function of human language(s), and is usually (but not always) placed in humanities. As others here note, though, there is not a strict line between “humanities” and “social sciences”, and where a discipline is placed is often a matter of history and differs from university to university.
Right now I would be very careful about arguing for getting rid of particular disciplines on the basis of considerations like grant-getting or differences in ideology. As our host notes, most students nowadays go to university to get a job, not to learn, which is what guides the decisions of administrators. Universities around the world facing financial problems are cutting programs and faculty not only in humanities but also in any discipline – including many sciences – that does not draw students in large numbers because of perceived job prospects, regardless of how much grant money it brings in.
Besides, both students and faculty benefit from the co-existence of a range of disciplines at a university. As a student I started out in astronomy and physics but lost interest by the end of my first year and transferred into linguistics – I would have dropped out otherwise. At the faculty level, I have seen fruitful collaboration in both research and teaching between humanities and sciences.
+1
Fully agree. Re faculty benefiting, I attended many of the weekly Philosophy department seminars in my spare time. And even selected Sociology talks were interesting. (Being part time I had more spare time than most faculty.)
Re higher education now being valued less for its content than for getting a job, ISTM the looming mass employment disruption from AI™ will shift those values.
It cannot escape notice that scientists’ recollections of their experiences in non-STEM education have a generational character. Positive recollections and nostalgia (e.g., our esteemed host) refer to the liberal education of 50 years ago;
the experience of recent years will be different, if Abigail Thompson’s account of Dogma U. is accurate and widely applicable.
Could it be that something happened to the Humanities in academia in recent decades? Could this have something to do with the worship of words above all else in the fad called post-modernism; and with the various new Humanities departments called This or That “Studies”?
I suggest that the Humanities transition of recent decades was modeled in English departments, some of which have actually disappeared. But before disappearing, many shifted focus from Literature to the deconstruction of Literature–i.e., from writing as an art to “Criticism” as a phony imitation of what is done in STEM subjects or History.
Hmm. Interesting thoughts about the dynamics of transition, Jon. A slowly but steadily changing education of replacement faculty over fifty plus years until today we have a complete state change.
It would be good to hear from some cis-English faculty from over this time period for comments.
Jim, here is one such comment:
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/
Excerpt: “What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.”
Thanks for the Am Scholar article link…wow 2009. I recall a kerfuffle, maybe even earlier about moving from the great books of western literature but did not really pay a lot of attention to details. Guess I should have!
What ever happened to “close reading”?
One of the main ways that relativist and identity-based ideas permeated certain areas of the academy is through the creation of courses and programs, which unfortunately at universities I’ve been involved in has become an increasingly insular process. That is, courses and programs in the humanities are largely vetted within faculties and Senate becomes more a rubber stamp than an opportunity for critical (in the good sense of the word!) evaluation by more rigorous departments. Another factor I think is the tendency for like-minded individuals who might be a minority in their discipline finding each other and gravitating towards interdisciplinary courses and programs of weak quality that eventually morph into their own hires and ultimately independent departments. Interdisciplinarity appears to be much in vogue. Perhaps good in some disciplines but not so much in others. The irony of the emerging identity-based and social justice programs is that they are bad fiscally as well as academically. They don’t bring additional students with them but poach from existing departments at additional cost. Not clear how it can be undone to weed at the weak approaches and retain the strengths of departments. I recently did a talk at my institution on the Universality of Science. There were people from the humanities there who agreed and were as dismayed as we are with the current situation, at least many aspects of it.
A probable cause of the rampant epistemic relativism within academia at large is likely a loss of a proper foundational humanities education and especially epistemology; in other words what is knowledge and what are the students learning and what are the researchers researching in aim of? By this I mean a constant discussion across all subjects of what it is all about: why we are leaning, what learning is, what differentiates science from pseudoscience, why some stuff is bullshit and other stuff is not. This of course ties in to previous posters discussion on subjectivity/objectivity but also truth-seeking, the scientific method, statistics, deduction versus induction versus abduction. It seems that there is precious little knowledge about knowledge or discussion about knowledge. If neither teachers nor students learn how to differentiate between what different subjects produce and how analysis, heuristics, belief and most importantly justification play part of knowledge production then academia is reduced to an opinion party where anything is considered knowledge no matter how baseless. This is indeed an inheritance of postmodernism but also a lazy man’s idea of academia. This is also why postmodernists rejection of not just truth but empiricism is seen on both the left and right: it is so much easier just making claims about the world than grounding them in either reality (science) or in serious contemplation bolstered by previous generations’ serious contemplation (humanities). This plague is not just a humanities problem but a problem for society – we see the same indifference to proper investigation in journalism, in lower education, in business, in politics. Opinion and belief are valued higher the louder someone screams whereas rational, thoughtful discussion – even across divides of belief – and respect for difference of opinions and free speech is increasingly seen as pandering to bigotry and conservatism of belief.
+++ , But I would modify one point. “This is indeed an inheritance of postmodernism but also a lazy man’s idea of academia.” Rather, postmodernist cliches now are the lazy man’s (and woman’s) idea of academia—an easy path for careerists, slackers, and habitual plagiarists. All reminiscent of the academic vogue once labelled “Michurinism” in the galaxy far away.
True dat.
Trump should sign an executive order demanding that all social science/humanities programs have a cross-section of mainstream political views of US society represented in all of their courses or all federal funding will end for those offending programs.
Predators and prey keep each other healthy. Opposing views keep both sides centered instead of falling off their respective cliffs.
Not bloody likely. iDJT is an enthusiastic opponent of wrongthink, even in a debate — wrongthing is not just wrong, it’s evil.
One thought I had about this issue is that as brilliant as scientist he may be, he is politically naive if he truly believes this or any authoritarian administration doesn’t have their eye keenly on controlling the sciences. Concerns about anti-semitism are a cover. Look at who is in charge of HHS. Thursday a new executive order was published “requiring political appointee oversight of federal grant-making”. Politicians, not scientists, will be directing research grants. This is only one of several reasons I disagree with Prof. Morris. There is no safe haven from authoritarian control of all Intellectuals.
I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the importance of an understanding of the principles of science and math to a student of the humanities. As someone holding University of Chicago degrees called “General Studies in the Humanities,” I was required to take year-long courses in science and math and valued them at the time and subsequently–that good old common core. They have been fundamental in my thinking even with a career based on the humanities.
BTW, since then, I’ve realized the almost total emphasis in all parts of academia–the works thelmselves and the people who carried out that work–of white males. If you want to revile DEI, think back a few decades.