The Decline/Rethinking of The Humanities Major

[Lindagaf]

I started a long thread on this topic just a couple of weeks ago.

How can the Humanities evolve to remain relevant?

This article does a great job of explaining how and why the humanities are changing and the need to evolve to remain relevant. The shift away from humanities majors worries me. We still need to know how to write, to understand the impact of literature on society (it’s still there, or they couldn’t be trying to ban books in school libraries, right?), to understand how our past affects our future, and I could go on. The students I work with currently all seem to want to get into the business school for undergrad. If we have no range of majors, we have future job needs going unfulfilled. More students seem to think they must study preprofessional majors that are more narrowly focused, but I feel that the core principles of a liberal arts education are the best way for many students to find what interests them. People are motivated by studying their interests, and yet there are only so many career paths than can be categorized into a few boxes. Would love to hear thoughts from those ac…