How can the Humanities evolve to remain relevant?

Parents Forum
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“I would submit that the vast majority of humanities majors, particularly Studies, do NOT help improve critical thinking skills”.

You cited humanities majors… Particularly “studies”. And I’m pointing out that even in the much vaunted STEM disciplines, a kid can graduate without developing critical thinking skills.

But the demonization of “studies” majors is curious to me. Renaissance Studies- a fantastic and challenging major encompassing art and architectural history, literature, philosophy, political theory and fluency in a few languages… What is “lite” here? Similarly… Asian Studies? A rigorous course of study which includes geography and at some u’s econ in addition to the above.

I don’t get it. And not just because “classical studies” was one of the toughest majors at my college (Latin plus Greek plus either French or German) plus in-depth study of primary texts covering philosophy, religion, urban planning, economic history, the politics of warfare…

This is easier than a socially acceptable degree in marketing or finance?

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It may not be easier but it has less immediate applicability to employment. I do not think students care about social acceptability, they care about employability in majors. So rather than harp on kids to be humanities majors, we could harangue employers to hire them more and the rest will follow. Given that employers need kids to hit the ground running on day 1 for the 27 month average job period for gen Z, good luck with that.

There are majors with no direct employment relation that still place very well, usually because the major is universally regarded as hard. Physics, theoretical mathematics. If the courses you cite had the same reputation, those majors would lead to jobs too.

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Please no further posts about ChatGPT! If you are wanting to discuss, please start a new thread. Posts will be deleted going forward. Thank you!

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This old article about the value of humanities even to low income individuals, as a way to help them access middle and upper class “cultural capital” struck a chord:

This particular course was run by D’s favorite professor, who was an amazing teacher, and was part of this program: https://www.clementecourse.org/

But the number of courses seems to have diminished in recent years, in the same way as enthusiasm for ”Western Civilization” has faded more generally. For example, D’s professor wrote the biography of Lucien Nunn, founder of Deep Springs (D’s professor also ran Deep Springs for a decade) and TASS, and the latter at least seems to be in a rather problematic situation right now, as it tries to move away from its roots.
(A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell | Compact Mag)

But that raises the question of how much of study in the humanities should be devoted to analyzing shared “cultural capital” and how much to teaching actionable skills for the job market? Do some universities throw out the analysis when they decide to replace those Western Civilization courses? That’s the implication from the article about TASS.

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Students who are not proactive about fully engaging in the academic parts of their college experience may not care as much about employability in their specific major. What they may care about is being employable at all.

Many many jobs require a college degree, but not a degree in a specific field nor a minimum gpa. For instance, many municipalities have many jobs that require college degrees but not necessarily much thinking. I don’t say that to denigrate the jobs, simply to say they jobs are not intellectually demanding. Also, many large companies list a college degree as a employment requirement for most office jobs, but not a specific discipline. For instance, I know AT&T and such companies once required all/most “office” employees to hold a college degree - any college degree. There are stars at these companies, and there are the office grunts that power the economic engine of capitalism. Not every office grunt needs to employ deep critical thinking skills.

The lazy students who graduate with a degree in Humanities but did not attempt to be great learners are candidates for those jobs. I assume those jobs provide a great service to those companies, because I assume smart companies that gross billions of dollars for decades do not make employment decisions that do not benefit the companies.

On the other side, yes, some graduates (of many disciplines) will end up earning less than they need to repay student loans or maybe even live a comfortable life. But that’s not solely the responsibility of the major. Who is to say that lowly-employed student would have done any better if they had majored in a STEM field? Who is to say they would have graduated at all? Who has the right to declare “not completing a degree is better than a _______ degree” for all students?

I guess I don’t see the benefit of removing the option of a Humanities major simply because some people who choose to major in a Humanities major don’t have a great outcome. We should keep the option. Improve it if necessary in whatever ways we might decide, but ultimately keep the option.

And if we choose to keep the option, the next question is “how do we improve the option if we find it lacking?” And that is the topic of this thread. :slight_smile:

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I’ve been hiring for large corporations for over three decades, and have probably hired thousands of humanities majors during that time.

Strategic planning, corporate communications, speechwriter, facilities planning, marketing, investor relations, customer management…there are dozens of job functions where history and the other humanities excel.

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Cursive is not taught in many schools, but I would argue it should be. I work in a classical private school where we are teaching cursive, grammar, logic, rhetoric, history, reading and discussing great books, teaching philosophy, prioritizing the arts, etc… This is how we keep humanities relevant, by instilling a knowledge and love for it in k-12 education.

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Yes, you frequently cite your experience. And that is great. But today’s students have not found that to be true frequently enough, or they would be more willing to take a risk on a humanities major. Students are acting in response to market incentives.

Many state governments ( PA, MD, UT) and some companies ( Google, IBM, Tesla, Apple, Random House, Nordstrom)are now dropping college degree requirements to foster Inclusion.

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So long as we live in a society, the humanities are essential.

History: What circumstances led to positive outcomes? What circumstances led to poor outcomes? How did events/(in)actions/people/policies lead to a particular outcome? What patterns are seen over time? What aspects of history might inform the relationship between countries, cultures, sexes, etc? How does one assess the reliability of an account? How should we grapple with conflicting accounts of the same event(s)?

Foreign Languages: At the most basic level, how can we communicate with people from other parts of the world who don’t speak our own language? But also, there are aspects of language that also reflect cultural differences, whether it’s the (non)existence of certain grammatical markers or different cultural idioms or the (non)existence of certain types of words. This helps to think from multiple perspectives and also does a lot for brain development generally speaking.

Literature (in any language): This can provide a safe space where there’s some personal detachment but to think about different circumstances, situations, characteristics and either view them from another’s perspective, think of how one might react if placed in that situation, to experience something completely novel, etc. This is just in the reading of it…not to mention examining how an author uses the language to create certain effects in the reader.

Arts: What is the purpose of an art? What is beautiful? What emotions/thoughts are better conveyed or evoked through a picture or sound than in words? How can patterns be combined to create the desired effect? What tools/resources/techniques can be used to create a desired product?

Philosophy: What is ethical? Does it depend on the circumstances? What is logical? How can logic lead us astray?

Religion: What do people believe? Why do they believe it? What might people do because of those beliefs? How might people react in a situation given their beliefs?

If people don’t study and become more sophisticated at understanding one another and their motivations (historical, cultural, religious, etc) and how to communicate effectively (whether in expository writing, fiction, arts, film, etc), then I think there’s lots of harm that can be done to our society. From a purely pragmatic perspective, it can influence what products companies should try and design and engineer, who it should be marketed to and how, and pitfalls to avoid. Lots of business companies aim to do those things, not all of them successfully. A strong background in the humanities would certainly be able help with that.

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I agree, but many companies apparently do not in hiring.

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“students are acting in response to market incentives.”

Really? Then why so many bio majors who end up as lab techs (only an AA certificate required) and criminal justice majors working as probation officers with no degree required or hospitality majors working at the rental car desk for minimum wage? What market incentive would you call that?

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With the average cost of a university education in the ballpark of $30something thousand per year, employability is important to most parents who are paying the bills. But another important outcome is job satisfaction.

Are history and philosophy majors happy with a career in business at a large corporation? My kids were STEM majors and they may have been able to get a job selling pharmaceuticals, but they would have been miserable. They have good quantitative skills that could transfer to business areas, but that would result in the same dissatisfaction. What makes them happy is working as scientists and using their degrees.

To evolve, Humanities departments must address the job issue beyond a broad statement of “teaching important skills” that have value in a wide variety of settings. Students studying anything should put some thought into where they want to be post-grad, and take advantage of every possible opportunity within the university to get there.

I think humanities and social sciences have great value. I’d like to see graduates of those majors utilizing their expertise in their subject matter, not just their critical thinking skills, or writing skills, etc.

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Thank you for this article, I found it really fascinating and I wonder how many posters have really read it before jumping into this discussion. Personally, I love the irony that the author points out in the section that I quote below.

To be honest, I’ve been thrilled to observe how conversant my teens and their friends are on the topics that the author mentions. They are so much more sophisticated in their understanding/analysis of the world than I was as an adolescent and they are much more knowledgable about social and cultural trends.

The part that pains me is recognizing the giant gap between the sort of education that the most and least privileged students get in the US. In my observation, the knowledge and skills that my children and their peers have (in both STEM and the humanities) far exceeds the quite solid high school education that I received decades ago. They have been introduced to topics (indeed gone in depth in them) that I did not see until college. And they are definitely not parroting back talking points. They are thinking, researching, analyzing, and discussing/writing about those topics in depth. My kids are excited about these topics because they have had K-12 teachers (and now my oldest has had professors) who inspire their students and show them the relevancy of various disciplines. Yet I know many equally bright children are not receiving an adequate education in basic numeracy and literacy. My kids are bright but they are mostly exceedingly fortunate.

All this said, there’s a great irony that I think has been insufficiently appreciated. For all the talk about the humanities retreat and the decline of English as a discipline, high theory, critical theory and cultural studies have had an extraordinarily powerful impact of public discourse. We’re all deconstructionists and postmodernists now. Command of the language of critical theory signifies one’s status as knowledgeable and up-to-date.

In other words, supposedly arcane literary critics and philosophers with impenetrable prose actually succeeded in bringing a host of ideas into the cultural mainstream.

These included the Foucaultesque notion that power and hierarchy can be found everywhere: for example, in language, in cultural categories and narratives and in representations as well as in economics or politics.

There’s the concept of performativity and the cultural, social and political dimensions of performance.

There’s postcolonialism—the study of the cultural, political and economic legacies of colonialism and imperialism—and narratology, the study of the structure and function of narratives and their themes, conventions and symbols.

Especially influential is critical identity studies—the study of how identities are formed, constructed and perpetuated historically, politically and sociologically; how gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, dis/ability, nation, non-/religiosity and region influence identities; and how identities are shaped by structures of inequality and systems and practices of power.

Nor was the impact of critical theory and cultural critique restricted to literature departments. In my field, history, evidence, unitary conceptions of the nation state, master narratives and claims to objectivity were increasingly viewed as problematic. Within history, the most atheoretical of disciplines, more and more prominent scholars embraced not just revisionism but cultural critique, border studies and critical identity studies.

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I have a few other thoughts. Until I read the article, I found the question posed at the top of the thread and the debate that followed kind of baffling. How can the humanities evolve to remain relevant? It seemed like a strange question because I so strongly believe that the humanities and social sciences are not just relevant but essential to solving the most pressing issues facing the US in particular, but the entire world in general.

So if I list the issues that I consider essential to human welfare, it clear to me that most of these issues need the attention of scholars across many disciplines including in STEM, humanities, arts and social science fields: climate change, income inequality (within the US and globally), hunger, refugee displacement, educational achievement, crime, mental health crises, domestic violence, homelessness, city planning, poverty, access to health care, disaster preparedness, distribution of resources, pandemic planning. I could go on and on. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a contemporary problem that does not require expertise across many different disciplines.

If the debate is STEM vs non-STEM, it strikes me as a stupid debate. The engineers, doctors, and mathematicians are not going to solve homelessness or a refugee crisis or even climate change or preparations for the next pandemic by themselves though obviously those fields have a crucial role to play. And work like designing a new smartphone or social media platform will always be endlessly entertaining for end users --that sort of work can maybe even address some societal problems (while potentially causing others), but we need people skilled in other areas to know how to deploy those innovations in a way that does less harm than good.

Yes, on the surface, the arts and literature can seem less immediately relevant to some types of emergencies or crises except I think it is obvious to anyone who has thought about it for more than two seconds that arts, literature, and culture are the key ways that most people are able to find meaning in their lives at least once they rise above a subsistence level of survival. The humanities and arts are relevant because they are necessary to our survival. Despite the snarky remarks about sociology that I have read here, social science research is often incredibly rigorous (whether quantitative or qualitative) and the work in fields such as sociology, political science, economics, and international relations help agencies and governments make decisions about social policy and international policy. Those decisions impact all of us. Finally, all of the fields that look back and analyze the human condition such as history, philosophy and archeology are crucial in helping us understand where we’ve been and where we are going.

But that is my quick take, the article addresses so much more about the ways in which the humanities find itself in competition with other fields in trying to attract students and resources. I think part of the issue is not that the humanities are irrelevant, it is that teachers on the K-12 and college level are failing to inspire students and demonstrate the relevancy of those fields to them.

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It’s not supposed to be a debate. It’s a conversation on how to keep students (of all ages), admin, professors, academics, educators, etc… interested in the very issues you describe in your posts. Of course we need people to major not only in STEM subjects, but in humanities subjects too.

In short, continuing to educate students about

and not just steering more and more college students into “professional” majors.

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Yes! And to clarify, I didn’t think that your original post was asking us to debate STEM vs non-STEM. It is just that rather tiresome debate keeps cropping up in some of the threads on CC (or at least in the six months or so that I have been actively reading this forum). I would love to discuss the relevancy of non-preprofessional majors without it becoming a debate that pits some fields against others.

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Hear hear!

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I do wonder how many of the students espousing post colonial, deconstructionist or identity based viewpoints are merely parroting what others have said as ipposed to engaging in critical thought. From the link above, that sounds like what is happening at TASS now. Unfortunate, it used to be a well regarded program.

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Sounds like a fascinating program, but it’s not going to get you a job. Most people go to college in order to get a piece of paper that says they’re qualified for the work force. They don’t do it to become well-rounded individuals.

I actually don’t know how humanities can evolve to make itself more relevant. The idea that the humanities do a better job than STEM at teaching one critical thinking skills, or at turning people into leaders, is not something I find to be true. Those arguments come off as trite, fail-safe remarks that people resort to when they can’t come up with actual examples of why the humanities have practical relevance.

I remember reading or hearing about a famous philosopher who said that nobody should study philosophy until they’re 40, the reason being they didn’t have the life experience to understand it. I kinda agree, and that advice may apply to much of the humanities in general. Maybe humanities programs can be marketed to older or retired people like myself who have tired of the rigors of their STEM careers and want to study something fun and interesting for a change.

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