That just indicates that Harvard gives out a lot of A grades and has nothing to do with whether the majority of its students are capable of reading historical fiction. I see no reason to disbelieve the Dean, that a standard high school text is beyond the ability of some students. And there are never enough developmental admits to sway things one way or the other-perhaps 25 kids per class, often fewer, are both willing and able to meet the baseline of an eight figure donation in additionto other requirements.
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I attended Harvard back in the dark ages and even read The Scarlet Letter in my sophomore tutorial class which to this day is the most demanding academic class I ever took (including grad school classes). I can assure you that contrary to the rumors, nobody was awarded an easy A. Iâm also certain that our literary and historical/contextual analysis of both the time period in which the story is set and the time period when Hawthorne wrote it was not focused on identifying 19th C subjects and verbs. So do I think the Dean is lying? No. But certainly high school preparatory courses have evolved since then, and the skills students come with are not exactly the same skills that we came with. Is that awful and some sort of signifier of the decline of Western Civilization or something? Not in my mind. YMMV.
Given that Harvard is 4+ times more selective than it was back in my day, Iâm pretty comfortable saying that the students who matriculate today are exceedingly talented, well-prepared kids who can âread.â
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The grade distribution relates to earlier comments, implying that Harvard students were getting Câs or below in English classes. I do not think this is true, regardless of their initial ability to identify subject/verb in a specific text from a specific class.
You are reading more in to the quote than what was said. The quote did not say the majority of Harvard students are not capable of reading historical fiction, or reading a standard high school text is beyond their ability. As noted, I expect the 2 sentence quote was taken out of a larger conversation. Itâs not a lie, but when you only list 2 sentences out of a larger conversation, it can change the suggested conclusion.
If Harvard students really are not capable of reading a standard HS text, then there should be some other evidence of this problem besides the 2 sentence quote. Have you seen any such evidence? Or anyone else make such a claim?
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Thereâs no shortage of good literature, but there has long been an unfortunate trend of scholars in many humanities disciplines writing almost exclusively for an audience of other humanities scholars, and itâs not uncommon for people in academia to avoid writing any popular books until theyâve gotten tenure. Itâs surprisingly difficult to find nonfiction books that are well written, well researched, and affordable.
Most students interested in history arenât picking up books published by Oxford University Press or Routledge; theyâre looking up random Youtube videos and listening to podcasts like Dan Carlinâs Hardcore History. The accuracy is decidedly hit or miss to say the least, but theyâre much more approachable, cost little to nothing, and take less time to consume, so itâs no surprise that theyâre more popular than (in my opinion) they should be.
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Never said it was a majority who could not; I questioned whether the majority could. It was apparently enough that the Dean decided to drop that text from the syllabus, so it is likely more than 1. I am aware of how selective admissions has become, but the lack of preparation of some even elite high school students to delve deeply into the humanities texts suggests the problem begins at the high school level far before college.
There was a time when I assumed everyone in high school had read Romeo& Juliet or Macbeth; maybe that is no longer true.
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Absolutely! I have been teaching in higher ed (Humanities) for 25+ years, including 2 years at an Ivy and 9 at a T20 university. Student preparation has decreased significantly. And itâs not something thatâs always indicated on high school transcripts. At my current LAC, I have students that enter college with a 4.0 HS GPA who canât understand why they earned a B or even C on a paper. âI got straight As in high school,â they insist. And some of these students are from some the top private schools in the Northeast.
The problem is only getting worse now that weâre seeing the results of the early pandemic years. The grading standards are shifting and HS transcripts are not always great indicators of academic performance. Students constantly ask me about being able to rewrite a paper and resubmit it for a higher grade, or they are expecting extra credit to help boost their average. This is what they have been able to do in HS. I understand why institutions like Princeton require a graded student essay with teacher comments for admission. At least they can get a better sense of the high school standards and the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.
A lot of faculty at my university have adjusted their grading standards as a result. I even have colleagues that admit they heavily weight content over writing because the writing quality has plummeted over the years. These issues start long before they get to college.
I know this is anecdotal and we are always lamenting the decline in student preparation, but I have been a professor for 25+ years at some of the top institutions in the country. I have started adjusting my pedagogy and grading standards over the last 5-7 years though.
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I didnât seen anything in the 2 sentence quote about dropping the text from the syallabus. Looking up the course history, I didnât see the class being offered since 2010. When offered in 2010, the Scarlet Letter was included in the reading lost, along with many other works from the 19th century America (Irving, Cooper, Stowe, Melville, James, Howells, Twain, Dreiser, Wharton, âŠ)
Harvard currently offers a variety of other courses that cover different groups of literature â multiple Shakespeare courses, an Asian American literature course, a science fiction literature course, etc. The closest current course to the previous 1800s American Novel course is 178x â The American Novel: Dressier To Present. The course description mentions the following texts:
Wharton, Age of Innocence ; Cather, My Antonia ; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and stories; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and stories; Ellison, Invisible Man ; Nabokov, Lolita ; Robinson, Housekeeping ; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye and stories; Ha Jin, Waiting; Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station. Stories by James, London, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gaitskill, Wallace, Beattie, Lahiri, and Ford.
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I canât speak to student preparation but have been involved in executive education for relatively senior folks. We have found over the years that people are much less willing to a) read anything of length; and b) read at all. This is increasingly true of younger folks.
Our family has a couple of dyslexics (ShawWife and ShawSon) and we purchased audiobooks by the wazoo when ShawSon was in school. By now, our book consumption is almost all audiobooks (including ShawS and me). One of our three audible libraries has over 800 books in it. So, book consumption is still happening but the mode has definitely changed.
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About the Harvard quote, I do recognize that tastes vary, but I have to say that Hawthorne rubs me the wrong way. I have read and enjoyed Moby Dick, Clarissa, Poe, and works by Charles Brockden Brown, all of which have their archaisms, but are not awkward. I do not enjoy reading Hawthorne, so I am not particularly surprised if todayâs kids spit it out.
Regarding the Humanities, the job market is a problem not because of what the humanities ârepresentâ to employers, but because the skills most fields teach are simply not in demand. Lots of companies and organizations require biologists, chemists, or mathematicians in technical fields, or economists or political analysts in social science areas. Those are all liberal arts. While museums may require some historians and art historians, English and religion majors are simply not required in many areas outside of academia itself. Falling back on the argument that the skills taught may have other applications is weak. I could also say that biology or math majors have interesting skills that might be useful in business or elsewhere.
An English major is not really taught to write and communicate these days, but rather taught about how to do literary criticism or think about literature. Only academia pays for that skill, so if the number of English profs needed to teach the shrinking number of English majors shrinks, then youâre looking at a death spiral forming.
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Iâm sure this is true. The problem and the remedy lie in K-12 education. Students need to read great books. They need to learn actual grammar. At the school I teach at, when we have students transfer in from public school, the often cannot identify a noun or a verb in a sentence, let alone, a gerund, participle, subordinating conjunction, etc⊠We have to start at ground zero with those students and back fill what the should have learned in grammar school.
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For those truly interested in the elite corners of US higher education and whatâs going on with students, I highly recommend âExcellent Sheep: The miseducation of Americaâs elite âŠâ by William Deresiewicz. He suggests (as a former Ivy League student and Ivy League professor of literature) that our present generation of students (granted, the book is getting older, from 2014) are buying into a system that inculcates much busy-ness but little time for actual scholarly curiosity, much achievement but little thought.
Just looking at my own kids: their (public) high school education has been so much more demanding than mine ever was. Even with the pandemic. BUT - I read more for pleasure, and simply had more time to think. I despise the proliferation of AP classes - maybe your schools are different, but those classes are not teaching my kids how to think, theyâre teaching them how to take a test.
I suspect the fate of the humanities is tied to the same forces that have led to the crazy fixation with rankings, admission rates (Yay! Down to 3%!!), and attendance at elite schools. I mean - after going through all of that, years of carefully curated extracurriculars, AP courses starting in 9th grade, test prep, paid âvolunteerâ hothouse experiences and travel, college counselors to help with essays and presentation, parents spending their free time on websites like collegeconfidential 
, I mean, whoâs going to do all of that work and then take the off-ramp into four years of humanities? There are more hoops ahead! Challenges to meet! McKinsey is hiring! Or Blackrock ⊠or google ⊠or ⊠(incidentally, rant aside, a humanities degree like Philosophy is excellent prep for all three mentioned)
I have recently been fascinated with the % of students from top colleges going into finance, consulting, tech. It is HUGE, and from lots of majors. I think of that as a proxy for the prevalence of curiosity versus hoop jumping at a school. Unfair? Probably.
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I am confused-you think anyone going into consulting/tech/finance is not intellectually curious or scholarly? Compared to who? Why?
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It is, if the kid is also numerate. Not otherwise. For tech jobs at google youâll need some more, obviously. It is a myth that a Philosophy major can fit all jobs just by being a Philosophy major.
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One would need more to pass the quantitative tests at consulting firms as well.
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Agreed obviously - not all philosophy majors are numerate. But plenty are (symbolic logic is basically math, I hear).
From the McKinsey Website: Who do we look for?
Our undergraduates join us from many backgroundsâthere is no single ârightâ major or course of study. Our people do share some common qualities including excellent academic performance, leadership abilities, and experience working on or off campus. We look for strong problem solvers with potentialâwe will teach you the rest.
Right. But in the interview for McKinsey you will be given math problems to solve immediately and there better not be any mistakes. Plus the screening test âgamesâ which also measure ability to some extent. Being merely numerate doesnt come close to qualifying.
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Note: talking about my children, nephews, friendsâ children, etc. I note that this is probably unfair in that comment. But relying on the writing of Deresiewicz and others, a large, perhaps growing, subset of the high-achieving late millenials/gen z seem less interested in exploratory academic inquiry than practical academic inquiry leading directly to a particular type of work. Note that these are ferociously smart young people, curious in their lives, but not in their academic choices, where they are perhaps somewhat risk averse and somewhat conformist.
Though I am disquieted by this, I can also make the counter-argument about traditional elite education as a form of elite entitlement to navel gaze rather than get on with the work of the world, etc.
Apologies if I came off as insulting!
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Elite schools preferentially admit the risk-averse and conformist. That is how the students were admitted to begin with.
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Another and probably much larger English major related profession is high school English teacher, which is not likely to go away.
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Agreed. I shouldâve said conformist, perhaps, rather than curious. That gets closer to what I meant.
(And - I donât know as much about consulting as you, but google suggests that McKinsey math screening is at most algebraic⊠in other words, I suspect safely in the range of many students who excelled on the Math section of the SAT? But maybe without a calculator, long division and percentages are a lost art for many!)