The Corsair
A Bonfire of the the Humanities
Marymount University — a Catholic college in northern Virginia — is cutting 10 traditional degrees, including: English, History, Art, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Economics, Mathematics, and Sociology. This is a fairly resolute bonfire of the humanities, considering that this 73-year old college, founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, is grounded in the liberal arts. “The University’s commitment to a values-based education is intricately linked with Marymount’s Catholic foundation and traditions,” their Ethics and Values page states. “At its best, a university inspires students to search for the truth and provides a forum for discussion and reflection on timeless questions and their ethical implications.” The absence of a History, Religious Studies, Art or Philosophy major might hinder that discussion, of course.
“The impacted majors are rarely selected by Marymount students and, in fact, have only graduated a handful of students in the past decade,” the Board of Trustees argues, not unjustly. “This decision reflects not only our students’ needs, but our responsibility to prepare them for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”
Ah, the career argument. While the unemployment numbers of humanities graduates is not at crisis levels, the perception overwhelmingly suggests otherwise. The median wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for humanities graduates is $50,000 as opposed to $60,000 in other fields. And then there is the matter of student loan debt, which further complicates matters.
From 2012-2015 there was a significant drop in in humanities majors, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Since the Great Recession, the notion that STEM — short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — is the only safe career harbor in today’s turbulent economy has become conventional wisdom. Students are gravitating towards the Sciences. Or, in the words of Noah Smith’s article in Bloomberg in August 2018, “The Great Recession Never Ended for College Students.” In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt argued in The Atlantic that the humanities are indeed in crisis, and that they had been in precipitous decline since 2008:
Right now, the biggest impediment to thinking about the future of the humanities is that, thanks to this entrenched narrative of decline—because we’ve been crying wolf for so long—we already think we know what’s going on. The usual suspects—student debt, postmodern relativism, vanishing jobs—are once again being trotted out. But the data suggest something far more interesting may be at work. The plunge seems not to reflect a sudden decline of interest in the humanities, or any sharp drop in the actual career prospects of humanities majors. Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market. And something essential is being lost in the process.
And what is making gains? "Of the 20 majors with over 25,000 graduates in 2017, by far the fastest growing was exercise science, followed by nursing, other health and medical degrees, and computer science,” writes Dan Kopf, also in 2018, for QZ. And — educated, humanities-graduate guess — the statistics of student interest in health and medical degrees will probably continue to rise after the Great Pandemic.
Nathan Heller of The New Yorker adds to our understanding of this alarming trend by looking at the (end of the) English degree, using Arizona State University as his laboratory:
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft.
Heller certainly gets moxy points for softening the edges of the sky in a piece on the decline of the English major. But it is more than just that. The piece is also a study of the maneuverings of the students at ASU, and how they navigate the growing inequalities in American life, while trying to minimize debt after graduation and maybe gain wealth for themselves and their families. “One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors,” explains Heller. “(English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)” Further, this is not just happening at ASU, which Heller uses as a jumping point in the piece for discussion about higher educational trends in America. It is happening at Tufts, Boston, Vassar, Bates, Harvard and Notre Dame. What happens when stalwart liberal arts colleges like Vassar and Bates give up on the humanities?
The article makes an interesting mention about how our most recent Presidents have nothing at all to say about the humanities, Barack Obama included. Clinton loved to tell journalists out of the side of his mouth that he was reading Borges, or whomever was at the peak of literary popularity at the time. But the highest levels of ambition — the American Presidency — the ardent promotion of the humanities, a worthy goal of a leader, beyond a nebulous “the Arts” reference at a Kennedy School honors is naught else but nil. Not Biden; not Clinton; not Obama; and most certainly not semi-literate Trump. We are inundated with nuanced discussion of ChatGPT, of STEM, but, not surprisingly, far less of Shakespeare or Austen. The rock stars of the present age are CEOs of tech startups, not literary poets like Bob Dylan or even Bonnie Raitt, recent Grammy notwithstanding, who are — or at least were — actual rock stars. The music industry, to be honest, aren’t what they used to be (largely, of course, because of Big Tech). Tech, finance and consulting is where the big power (and the big money) falls these days, and the kids know it.
If we are indeed becoming a quantitative society, as the article suggests, then what does this augur for an institution like The New Yorker?
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