Knowledge, Certainty, and Current Events, Part 4

I ran across a recent article from The New Yorker mourning the end of the English major, and it led to a train of thought I think was overlooked the author, one Nathan Heller. Were these obvious considerations missed by a professional journalist? Can a pseudo-anonymous unaccredited blogger address the unasked questions? Read on and determine that for yourself! This is a slightly-edited stream-of-consciousness comment-as-I-re-read post which has now probably exhausted by allotment of your patience for hyphenation. Here goes!

First, some clarification may be in order. I have considerable contempt for the culture of academia, but I wholeheartedly endorse individuals exploring art, literature, history, and other humanities disciplines. My favorite aspects of being a librarian might be helping people explore new subjects or try hands-on creative activities. Thanks to modern publishing technology, physical books are cheaper than ever before. The internet has blossomed into a museum of podcasts, video tutorials, virtual art gallery tours, and other opportunities beyond the wildest imagination of past generations.

The humanities are more widely accessible than ever before, so I question the concern expressed by the author in the first paragraph.

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.

Further in the article, the author cites the work of Robert Townsend, co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, who points out the widespread nature of this trend.

...[F]rom 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

Think like an economist for a moment. Demand has clearly plummeted. Does this indicate a shift in how people value the subject, or are people deciding the value of a degree is unwarrated? Tuition costs in the US have far outpaced inflation, but the earning potential of those credentials has plummeted as Gen X and Millennials were pushed to earn a college degree due to the clout they once offered in the workplace. Any degree was good, if it let you add letters after your name and hang a fancy bit of paper on your office wall! Meanwhile, the government subsidized loans in a poverty mitigation measure to even further stimulate artificial demand for these classes.

But what do the credentials really bring? Many are only useful for cycling in the next generation of professors in that subject, but supply has been outpacing demand in academia itself for years. Degree inflation leads to a spiral of absurd specialization and cutthroat competition for faculty positions inside universities, to say nothing of other institutions. What good is a women's studies degree in the real world? Again, I'm not (or at least not necessarily) denouncing the subjects for these degrees, but I am denouncing the pretense of degrees having inherent value. Critics have long been pointing to the bubble market of colleges and universities, so the decline in students should come as no surprise.

However, instead of trying to understand the reality of degree inflation, tuition cost inflation, market demand for credentials, and other real factors influencing the choices of students, the author is perplexed. The university is no longer the gatekeeper of knowledge or the portal to a wider world.

...[I]n the U.S., the percentage of college degrees awarded in health sciences, medical sciences, natural sciences, and engineering has shot up. At Columbia University—one of a diminishing number of schools with a humanities-heavy core requirement—English majors fell from ten per cent to five per cent of graduates between 2002 and 2020, while the ranks of computer-science majors strengthened.

This should signal where there is greater demand in the market of ideas, and where universities presently provide more value. Instead, the author quotes one academic who denounces modern techology and draws a graph suggesting the fault lies in declining funding for the humanities. Is this really a rational argument, or just excuses? However, further along, the article touches on another real issue with the American academic world as a whole.

Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Stepping back from the world of post-secondary education, let's look at the mess of US public schools. Even "under-funded" states spend thousands of dollars per pupil every single year. There are not really threats of spending cuts for primary and secondary school education, no matter what politicians and pundits may claim. It gets murkier when it comes to college funding, but this begs the question (yes, I am actually using that phrase properly here) of the legitimacy of government funding for college education in the first place. This is just taken for granted as a premise in all such discussions. Regardless, Public education spending has also far outstripped inflation.

A 20-year span seems sufficient for looking at trends. This chart is a screenshot from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to either usinflationcalculator.com or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the $7,750 spent per student in 2000 equals about $11,500, but $14,670 was spent per student that year. The US also spends more per student than most other countries.

Where is the money going? A big culprit at all levels from pre-school through universities has been administration positions for paper-pushing bureaucrats whose work has little (if any) bearing on the actual process of education. No doubt some criticism from conservatives regarding "woke" programs and the like contribute to some extent, but such partisan scapegoating is of little benefit if we want to peel back the onion of administration.

Ever since the progressive era of the early 20th century, there has been a deliberate expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus of academia and government in parallel with one another. Such parasites can survive and even thrive on a healthy host, but when the infestation hits the tipping point, the host begins to suffer. Academia has become more and more intertwined with government, and government is fundamentally a territorial monopoly in violence. There is no healthy feedback mechanism from competition, consumer choice, consent, and other factors that don't allow me to indulge my penchant for alliteration. The metrics by which schools at any level measure success have nothing whatsoever to do with fostering the individual growth of students into independent, curious, self-motivated individuals with the educational foundation for advanced studies.

The American education system has failed to spark the desire to learn, and I have personally seen it grind down those who cannot fit their mold, and drive people away from any interest in learning. "You don't meet our metrics, so you need to drill drill drill until you meet our standardized scored because that is how we measure progress!" I have always done well as a reader, writer, and self-motivated learner, but imagine how I would feel if my grades were based primarily on track lap times. I am chronically ill. I always have been, although it wasn't properly diagnosed when I was young. If the response to my athletic failure was more drills, I would swiftly break down into a catatonic daze. The education system treats kids as a factory product to be fit into a specific mold because its roots trace back to the Prussian model explicitly designed to churn out obedient factory workers and loyal soldiers. Even as we pretend to respect the individual to the point of bending over backwards catering to every real or imagined disability or identity, we are still using the model of a citizen factory where the standard citizen unit must meet certain specifications, and the standards have little to do with real academic metrics.

Tangent aside, I would also like to return to another point further along in the article sparking this now unwieldy post.

Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all that criticism—and art—can do.

I see a parallel problem in the people who want to censor library materials. "This offends me" has no real meaning, but such feelings are widely held as proof that something warrants condemnation, and therefore there is no room for discussion or examination. This culture is a perverse blend of old-fashioned puritanism and newfangled critical theory wherein people seem to seek opportunities to take offense on behalf of some group deemed oppressed, whether they are in fact offended or not. In a way, some of the humanities may have shot themselves in the foot here.

Similarly, I have been deeply enjoying the History of Philosophy Podcast, but it would be a completely different experience if the host was more concerned with shining a spotlight on the errors of these pioneers in thought. He doesn't shy away from their flawed presumptions, debates baout the validity of their reasoning, cultural misogyny, racism, superstition, or other failings we now see today, but neither does hoe dismiss them out of hand and condemn them as regressives from whom we can learn nothing. Quite the contrary, in fact. He primarily discusses how their ideas laid the groundwork for the gradual expansion of human knowledge, now they engaged with one another over the problems they found and questions they had. It is a dynamic story about big personalities and big ideas over thousands of years, but it can't be told if everything needs to be filtered through the ever-changing lens of political correctness or moral crusader censorship.

The author also seems to parallel these thoughts as his article continues.

Bring back the awe, some say, and students will follow. “In my department, the author is very much alive!” Robert Faggen, a Robert Frost scholar and a longtime literature professor at Claremont McKenna, told me, to account for the still healthy enrollment he sees there. (There are institutional outliers to the recent trend of enrollment decline; the most prominent is U.C. Berkeley.) “We are very concerned with the beauty of things, with aesthetics, and ultimately with judgment about the value of works of art. I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that comes from truth and beauty.”

I think we are seeing a conflux of many factors. Much is changing. Technology has brought significant changes from widespread electric lighting to high-speed internet access. We are also living through the first century or so of new art forms like film, television, streaming video, radio, podcasts, and more. This imay be in hindsight equivalent to the revolution wrought by the printing press. Cultures are colliding and clashing (ah, alliteration again...) while we struggle with new and old ideas. The universities are facing changes in demographics, student demands, and the collapse of primary and secondary education quality along with bureaucratic inertia and institutional prejudices. More and more people are questioning the value of degrees, but this does not necessarily mean a lack of interest in education. The ivory tower may be obsolete, but this does not necessarily spell the doom of the humanities.

Serendipitously, C.J. Killmer of the Dangerous History Podcast recently released Academia is a Racket: 13 Problems with Conventional Academia with an insider's view of the academic world, and it also covers several of these problems of degree inflation, absurd costs of college, perverse incentives masquerading as progress metrics, and more. I haven't finished listening yet, but it meshes with my thoughts on the article which sparked this rambling rant of a post.

Remember, I have no credentials, and this was a hasty post sharing my thoughts as I read an article, not a formal essay or precise philosophical rebuttal. As usual, I want to challenge what you think you know, what you believe is certain, and how you interpret current events. Please challenge my ideas, arguments, typos, and prejudices with a comment! And I do recommend reading the full article I referenced, because I certainly may not have given the author a fair shake here with my selected excerpts.

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