I read the article, and as someone who does not have English as a first language and therefore know next to nothing on its literature, I am still amazed by its humanities focus on dissecting old texts and poems. Academic English in this respect looks very different to me than academic Dutch or French.
> On the other hand, having universities educate for the needs of the economy is one of the stupider, short-sighted things happening now.
What to do though? At some point after graduation the students would need to find someone to hire them and pay them a living wage. Even if they graduate without any debt like they might in Europe or other countries, what do they do next? Sure, the economy needs editors, and perhaps history majors could make good managers or programmers with some training, but it would be an uphill battle for them.
Most people I know who graduated with a humanities degrees ended up in jobs they hated. They only ones that liked their jobs stayed in the academia. But how sustainable is that, I wonder...
At least in US with the govt guaranteeing student loans, there is a perverse incentive for the universities to lie and tell students to apply and that everything will be fine, just so they get their hands on that loan money.
I worked for many years next office down from a programmer who dropped out of a doctoral program in history of religion. A couple of my best friends studied humanities in college and went on to work with computers. I was myself a liberal arts major in college, and have made my living first in tech support, then in systems administration and programming.
And no, I don't hate my job. I very much enjoyed school, but had no desire to stick around an teach.
Are the academic humanities even collapsing outside the US? The U.K. has five times as many history graduates as the US with a fifth of the population. Presumably someone is teaching those students.
Going from massive efflorescence and overproduction of PhDs to very large overproduction of PhDs doesn’t seem that big a deal. If people want to analyse pop culture as literature and undergraduates don’t find the classes appealing how is that a problem? I’m sure if you want to study classic literature now it’s much easier than it was in 1950 or 1970. There are certainly as many tenured instructors as in 1950, probably more than there were in 1970. And if you want to treat Sicario, Bloodborne or Collateral as literature who’s stopping you? The chances of these series being remembered in 50 years are low so the secondary literature will be almost entirely forgotten but if people are enjoying themselves no harm.
The collapse of the academic humanities is at least in part retreating up there own hole. English as the study of great art, timeless topics and eternal verities is reasonably healthy, if a sideline in the academic humanities beside Bourdieu, Foucault and Nietzsche but it’s possible to study great books of difficult at university. If you just want to study it Harold Bloom and others in the same tradition wrote books and they can still be read.
Going from 20x the number of scholars in 1950 to 10x is not an extinction event.
The books I've read on the professional craft of writing (written by successful authors) have emphasized that you can't expect to learn anything from your English professor - and many of those books were from decades before the collapse described here. This area of academe is widely considered a fraud, not just by evil Republican governors, but by the only people with externally visible expertise in its supposed subject matter. I don't know if it's collapsing because of the fraud, if there's causality; but my understanding is that the conventional belief among people who can actually write is that the MLA can't read.
You're talking about something slightly different than the article. What you're talking about might more precisely be directed at something like a creative writing program. What the article's author is discussing is, in layman's terms, the profession of being an analyst-, or the profession of giving "critique"-, of creative writers.
It's a bad sign if all the creative writers with external viability think the MLA obviously has no expertise on the underlying structure of books. I can imagine an art of critiquing proofs, but I'd expect it to be headed up by professional mathematicians or at least be in good standing with them.
No, I think it's exactly right. The "destruction" the author describes is the cause of the inwardness and nearsightedness that makes much of it useless.
I was just watching Thiel talk on a topic that touches this - the parallels between the academics and the priesthood.
There was a time when the Catholic church was seriously powerful; and that time was marked by important people wanting to have family in the church. The days when the Medici, for example, boasted of family members being Dukes and Popes and the church was strong in its broad influence. That is a far cry from today, even if the Catholics are still quite important.
Academics is similar in that it was once composed exclusively by people who were either clever enough to be sponsored or people wealthy enough to be able to afford to put their feet up and get educated for a few years. There has been a serious push towards a vision of universal education in the last 50 years. In a sense, that is driving a dilution of the level of wealth and power to be seen in a normal university.
It'd be fascinating to have some sort of historical compendium of wage, salary and social connections of the Arts Professorships and PhD students in the Arts. The trends would probably be quite revealing of something. Education is an area where culture is critical as both an input and an output, and there are clearly some massive cultural changes afoot there even if they are only partly quantifiable.
> Thiel is dead wrong.
Academics tend to be middle middle class
Hmm, how is he wrong? Sounds like you agree with him...
Universities didn't start like a place for the middle class. They were elite institutions. I guess depending how far back you look there was not much of a middle class to speak of..
The idea was then to make it universal so lower classes could participate as well. So now academics don't always live wealthy lifestyles and there is a chance they came from and stayed as middle class.
The "intelectuals" so to speak is in a way a separate class. Depending in the time and the context it may be desirable to become a member of this class. Just like at a time it was desirable to become a priest, a member of Communist party, or other parties or groups.
I agree with the author the decline of the humanities is about a narrative winning out on the other.
But what about what is actually desirable? Is going to the university to learn something that is only indirectly useful as a job skill something fundamental, or is it an historical aberration?
Depending on how you define it, the "humanities" are not going to die. The top comment at the time of writing is how analysis lives on even on YouTube. But is it something that has to be subsidised, or that we have to encourage students to spend precious years and frankly absurd amount of money in?
A pretty sombre article. In what were the "go go" days of academe, the MLA was the target of some fairly comic parodies and ridicule. A standout was David Lodge's "Small World" which formed part of his campus trilogy. [0][1]. Still a great read today.
Balanced with a technical trade, the mind and world broadening study of the humanities is useful for producing original thought and avoiding group-think within said technical trade. Bringing diverse thinking into a field, along with requisite skills for that field, is a healthy thing for the field.
Thus a way to "save humanities" is to have technical fields actually seriously promote at least some significant coursework in the humanities at an undergrad level.
I agree with this. We've talked a lot about math, CS, etc. being essential skills for humanities students, but I think the other thing is true as well.
One of the reasons I've pushed this more is an observation in my field - the people at the top of their game, delivering plenary talks at conferences, etc. often betray a grounding in the humanities even when discussing fairly technical problems.
"I had to admit I was happy that a Ph.D. had been a potent prologue to my current life, disciplining me into a more patient thinker, a slicker architect of arguments. Asinine and medieval it had certainly been, in many ways — prelims! The dissertation itself! — and had taken time, tracts and tracts of it. But the tracts of time — seemingly an endless postponement — had turned out to be their own reward, not least because I’d gotten to spend them with the person across the table, who’d built me up and modeled a new intellectual intensity for me."
Sometimes I read these articles and wonder if this is a sign that society is increasingly changing such that capitalism and commodities matter more than life enrichment and, in fact, are replacing life enrichment as a value (eg. People believe commodities are how their lives are enriched). Thus, education is devalued unless it lets you own more things (through labor). Or a sign of increasing economic insecurity such that humans are broadly less and less able to pursue highly educated topics on its own culture and study their broader effects, which almost seems to be like the opposite of what I’ve always understood a civilized society to be.
But at the same time by other metrics life has never been better... mostly commodity based metrics. There’s very little ways to quantify if we’re losing “culture” in the way I’ve understood it. What will happen to us if we lose there ability to examine the latest YouTube or Instagram phenomenon with historical and broader sociological framework? Or we become unable to accomplish the amazing innovations within the humanities, such as the revival of the Mayan language, simply because the study of linguistics is no longer within scope of modern society?
Not to be all capitalist-reductionist about it, but I think this is really a case of over supply - an English major bubble bursting - that will result in a new equilibrium. Not an extinction event.
Not to be all ecologist about it, but smaller populations trying to find an equilibrium that are also subject to external shocks (like the 2008 recession's impact on university budgets) are extremely susceptible to stochastic extinction.
Harold Bloom has written extensively on this subject calling the profession Literary Sudies nothing more that a "rabblement of lemmings" running off the cliff to their own destruction.
Literary Studies used to mean the study of great works as great works by their own literary and aesthetic merit. It valued the unimpeachable greatness of Shakespeare and Dante and Milton. It believed in genius, the author, aesthetic value, and literary beauty.
Today, Literary Studies is more cultural studies. It is collage of different perspectives: queer, feminist, marxist, ect, that treat the work nothing but a product of some external force with no intrinsic value.
Any sensible person, of course, would run away from that.
When would to describe the scope of this changing? Milton himself wrote literary essays on cultural topics of his times (areopagitica in 1644 was a pamphlet protesting the banning of unlicensed works, which was already a fairly debated and settled topic within the literary sphere by the time he published it).
Death Of the Author itself was written in 1967, which debates the merit of analyzing literature on the authors intent and not what is literally on the page regardless of the authors intent.
Yes, Milton wrote political and cultural topics, so has Harold Bloom. That is far different from believing that works of art are merely the product of cultural forces.
The experience of a work is entirely dependent on cultural context. I think the modern focus on perspectives/lenses is a natural reaction to this fact. I also think this didnt happen until recently because the utter lack of diversity in early humanities blinded us to that truth. "Litterary and aesthetic merit" has always been code for stuff old white dudes like.
>"Literary and aesthetic merit" has always been code for stuff old white dudes like.
You are confusing one thing for another. Until fairly recently, cultured, well-read people tended to be old white dudes. If history had been different and the upper classes had consisted of (for example) nothing but Pakistani women, then those Pakistani women would love Milton and Shakespeare, and people would say, "Literary and aesthetic merit has always been code for stuff Pakistani women like".
No. No matter how fashionable it is for postmodernists to shriek otherwise, the fact is, there is objectively good literature. Well-read, world-wise people will gravitate to this objectively good literature. Doesn't matter if those people are old white dudes, or middle-aged East African women, or whatever group it is that happens to occupy the upper classes. Shakespeare has genuine structural qualities inherent in it that allows it to stand the test of time. Kafka contains genuine truth that will stand the test of time. There's no evil conspiracy to promote Homer undeservedly. These works stand on their own, and they're stuff well-read, intelligent people like, whoever those people may be.
Interestingly enough, if there were such a thing, then objectively good literature would be the first thing taken over by AI. It would be that very ability to be objective that would make it definable in a way that could be machine produced. Of course, this flies in the very face of thing because something very different is afoot here, as the names demonstrate. And a comparison and a question arises: name who wrote Little Red Riding Hood. Which, of course, is an inanswerable question. One can name many famous author who have written versions, but past that one quickly becomes lost in the diffusion of oral tradition. So, here, what arises of importance is the contents, the flow and interplay, the fluxuations of intersecting generalities and particulars attached to nothing. Yet with the names one speaks not of 'Titus Andronicus' or 'The Penal Colony', one speaks of Kafka and Shakespeare. The question is has one read name, is not name truth. And it is the name that is the primary. The question is why can truth not seem to arise from anonymity? Why can it not arise from plurality? Why can it not arise from diffusion? Because those are the very opposite of the name. So are they truth then or are they sigil? If not, where are the anonymous truths?
There are plenty of anonymous truths. Euclid probably didn't actually invent geometry, he probably compiled many sources to compose the Elements. Depending which scholars you ask, half or more of The Bible is either totally anonymous (e.g. the Book of Hebrews) or attributed to authors who didn't actually write it (e.g. Deuteronomy, which Moses would have to have predicted his own death in order to finish). More recently there's the Bitcoin Whitepaper published under a pseudonym.
"Objective" doesn't imply "simple", the fact that so-called AI can't produce great literature is an indictment against the marketers calling it AI, not against great literature.
Euclid - a name, along with Newton, Einstein, etc. We don't say Geometry Theta, we say Euclidean Geometry, Newtonian physics, etc. Why speak of them at all? Why not the ideas divorced from the men (and the few women)?
The Bible - Promulgated mainly (for the most substantial part of its history) by those contending its ultimate authorship lay with God. And any appellation of greater significance would likely prove difficult to procure.
>Bitcoin Whitepaper published under a pseudonym.
Is this now Milton's competition?
> "Objective" doesn't imply "simple"
Yet simple enough to be described surely, to be circumscribed with pen and paper, surely, because if not, how is it known to be such? Or do we accept as fact the intuitions of those who had nothing more?
And if it is not the name that stands predominant, why should we fear veritas ex machina?
This sounds like more of the same rationalizing that the article posits as the reason for the decline. "Oh, our ludicrously obtuse screeds on Arethusa, her couch of snows, and the Acroceraunian mountains is not at all viewed as valueless in society. It's our ludicrously obtuse screeds on Morrison that people don't like. Let's write more ludicrously obtuse screeds on the Romantics! That'll fix everything!"
I guess there may have been more snark there than necessary. I guess I just want to throw out there the possibility that Literary Studies has a problem with respect to perception, accessibility, and utility that is at a lower, more fundamental, level. If people in Literary Studies are unwilling to accept this fundamental issue as a problem, unwilling to start addressing it in earnest, well, there is little that can be done to help them.
I know this comment is bad... I just want to point out how creepy the look on that guys face is in the graphic where he brings the pear torte to his advisor.
The demonic expression can be explained by an individual's artistic limits. The extreme misrepresentation points to a editorial system that doesn't care about accuracy.
"We have rhapsodized demolition as liberation"
Sounds like a conservative criticism of the Enlightenment.
"There was this sense that we were being broken down and built up again as new people, as these high-powered minds — only without the groupthink that gets enforced in a barracks."
Is he sure about that? It seems certain ideas are enforced with cult-like rigidity.
My experience heading toward the academic track, and then ducking out, wasn't a great one. I felt like I learned more on my own, out of my own interest in the subject, than in any classroom. It gave me a few starting points, but that's all. Academia seems to have ceased to be a place where people engage in and built upon the Western cultural project, and instead is a place of 'liberation' from that project, from the west, from the canon, from everything that put a foundation under our civilization, letting in everything that doesn't matter. In a sense, it deserves to die. And it deserve to die even more for not seeming to recognize why it's dying, and for placing all the blame on others. And yet, cultural studies, humanities, and history, are all absolutely necessary for democracy, and if it truly ends, what then?
If I'm allowed to be rude, another problem is a serious lack of thoughtful people, even this guy doesn't seem to be saying anything interesting or provoking, yet he thinks he's worthy of a position. I really noticed a lack of any kind of academic debate going on in my time at university. I felt alone in my desire to test and challenge ideas. One female student in an English class once attacked me for 'wanting to argue with ideas all the time'. What should I make of that?
I'll end with a provoking thought, the kind of thing that should be allowed in academe: so men together, in the good old boys club, built things, and women and men together produced what? too many heirs? :^)
Here's some great examples from Youtube:
OTH: How Bloodborne Transforms the Myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-gH_n3Yc
OTH: Bloodborne vs. Gothic Horror — Reanimating a Genre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-gH_n3Yc
Sicario: The Importance of Borders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5vK_tUg3w
Collateral: Taming the Bull of Masculinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2imk4PXic
I'm sure everyone has their own pet theories about the article, but it seems clear to me that there is no lack of demand for accessible humanities.