"Tectonic" i's no hyperbole, as you can see from a chart in James Engell's essay "Humanists All" in the January / February issue of the Harvard Magazine The chart, and much more is discussed in my new Then and Now Newsletter. Here's the Newsletter text (minus the chart, for technical reasons):
MARCH 2023 NEWSLETTER
THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETER
MARCH 2023 (almost )
A Tectonic Shift:
Nathan Heller’s essay “The End of the English Major” in The New Yorker .made me wonder if the Humanities in general were reaching the end of their rope. That question was answer may be contained in a chart in James Engell’s
essay “Humanists All!” in the January / February 2023 issue of the Hravrd Magazine.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/01/features-forum-humanists
T-he chart shows the STEM disciplines all gaining majors and the nHumanities all losing them. -
Scroll down to see the chart
--
Quotable and Ponderable:
““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 … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.” “
Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the Harvard English department.
Comment: The allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne is revealing. At Bowdoin College, we are told, he “read widely and received solid instruction in English composition and the classics, particularly in Latin.” The same could probably be said of his classmates including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future U.S. President, Franklin Pierce. They all knew how to find the subject and the verb; And the time gap of a century or two was for them nothing when compared to the two millennia or more.that they took in stride
(Quite a class ’25! I wonder if 2025 will match it.)
We have eliminated that old-time education without finding a substitute for it No wonder students feel lost.
,--
.
The Brave New World of English:
Another shift is taking place within some disciplines, - not only from past to present, but also , from text to margin. An egregious example is called out in my blog post of March 28th.
--
The Death of the Humanities?
Tectonic shifts do not of ten reverse themselves, But remember Mark Twain’s comment when a newspaper published an obituary of him-
the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.“.
Heller’s article in The New Yorker contains several examples on institutions where the English major is surviving, maybe even flourishing. (UC-Berkeley;s English department seems to be one.) Success stories may be easier to find in other fields. including Classics. .Jane Chaplin provides some guidance from her perch at Middlebury College:
“”At Middlebury, the ‘crisis’ in Humanities is really a crisis of English majors, and to a lesser extent of American Studies, History, and modern language majors. Enrollments and majors in Classics have not declined over the past 20 years; in fact enrollments are slightly up (in keeping with a growth in the overall number of students). Enrollments in Religion, Philosophy, and Art History have also remained consistent. The co-directors of the Humanities here have made a big push in the direction of digital humanities and humanities in action; it would be nice also to see us embrace what we can really offer – service courses in reading and writing.
--
Can Success Stories Be Generalized?
The American Council of Learned Societies, under the leadership of Joy Connelly, is trying out a promising approach, “developing a survey of success stories – examples of sustainable approaches to undergraduate teaching and research that enable humanistic study to flourish. These stories make the strongest arguments for the value of humanistic knowledge “ That’s the only initiative that I knowe of in this area.
--
Quotable (and Pondrqable, oo):
“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’”
G.K. Chesterton (Thanks to Ros Douthatr).
--
Are Majors the Right Metric?
It depends on your goals. If the goal is to produce skilled workers, including Ph.D.’s,, then the number of B.A. majors field by field is a helpful metric. . But if the goal is to help students clarify their values, think and write more clearly, argue cogently, and bring a fresh perspective to bear on perennial problems, then the number of majors is only a small part of the story.
We need better metrics, specifically ones that recognize where students are developing capactoes that will enrich their lives and their contrubutions to society.
--
The War of the Words:
What’s happening to our language? An overview in The Economist sketches some of what’s going on. (Thanks to Jane Chaplin for providing the link.)
The Associated Press through its stylebook joined the War of the Words recently, as Nicholas Kristof has reported. The AP to;d its writers ““We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizlng ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.””
The French? In response the French Embassy in Washington proposed renaming itself “The Embassy of Frenchness.”
The absurdity rolls on . Good! Such language tinkering usually gets so absurd that it falls on its face. The sooner the better since the abuse of language can lead to the abuse of friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Aux armes, cityoens!
--
Nietzsche on art (and Riddles)
: "If we think of the original germs of the artistic sense and ask ourselves
what different kinds of pleasure are evoked by the firstlings of art,
for example among savage peoples, we discover first of all the
pleasure of understanding what another person means; here art is a
kind of solving of a riddle that procures for the solver enjoyment of
his own quick perspicuity."
No 119 in the second volume of Human, All-Too Human. Thanks toClaude Cernuschi who pointed me to this passage reminding me that Nietzsche is not saying that art is itself a riddle but that “our interpretation of art is like solving a riddle, which generates self-congratulatory pleasure.”.
-
Word of the Month:
ghost (vb.):: …
The dictionary says under use 2 of the verb ghost: ”the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.”
This usage has been around for a long time, but has steadily increased since the 1950s. Ghosting is nasty enough in a face-to-face society, but is more common, and more virulent, in an age dominated by social media, when one no longer has to look someone in the eye. The practice very likely exacerbates the current mental health pandemic among adolescents and young adults.
How to deal with it? . A few suggestions can be found in in “When People Ghost - and How to Get Over it.” Other ideas are welcome
--
Congratulations to Carolyn Walker Bynum on being awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Catholic Historical Association. I hope this results in much happy feastihgfr the author of Holy Feasts and Holy Fasts
--
News from New College
The February 29th meeting of the newly appointed Board of Trustees at New College in the Florida state university system showed their priorities. They abolish the programs of the college’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.. See the coverage on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/us/new-college-florida-board-meeting-reaj/index.html Prefer the news in print? Here it is.
The next engagement in the ongoing Florida higher education battles is House Bill 999 in the Florida legislature. It’s important because by curtailing the autonomy of state funded universities it may provide a model for other state legislatures to adopt.
Here’s the text of the bill., and here’s a statement by the American Historical Association endorsed by many academic oroganizations. (Thanks to Judith Hallett for calling my attention to it.
--
A Strange Lenten Abstinence:
No cookie at lunch? No pre-prandial potation? Not challenging enough. I decided to give up politics for Lent. No Tr*np, no St*my, no p*lls, no speculation about 2*24.. And, beginning right now, no Fl*r*d*..
I’ll report on some surprising results in the next Then and Now Newsletter.
Generative Artificial Intelligence
”We have passed the point where people argue whether Generative AI (ChatGPT, BARD) are more than a curiosity, and start focusing instead on what they do best, and where they are likely to mislead. A discussion in Axios is a good starting point. Don’t be surprised if some of the discussion sounds like Plato’s distinction between the plausible (doxa) and the real. So far it seems that Generative AI is not very good at distinguishing plausible fictions from true facts. If so, it will exacerbate an already wide-spread problem in our political culture. .
--
Palindrome from Paradise:
“Madam, I’m Adam.”
--
College: What It Was, Is and Should Be:
A second edition of Andrew Delbanco’s book of that that title mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all.
--
Gold Medal: New Philology Award:
It’s the job of Philology, as I see it, to blow the whistle on abuses of our language, but also to commend those who use it in fresh vigorous ways to illumine problems obscured by jargon. Example: ,my eyes glaze over when I hear once again about the “serious consequences that will result if global temperatures rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels “. German Lopez has called attention to Katherine Hayhoe’s fresh way of presenting the same fact:, a comparison of climate change to a fever: Think about how much worse you feel when you run a fever of 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. That fever is the equivalent of what the whole planet will soon be experiencing.
Nice. If I had a gold medal I’d give it to Prof. Hayhow.
--
--Ponderable:
“The dead are better than the living in nourishing the soul. After all, they’ve been through it all, so what they leave behind, whether fleeting memories or enduring masterpieces, has already passed one test.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
--
Beyond the Riddle:
Is the Zen Koan just a step beyond the riddle? Try this one”
There was a Japanese Zen master named Nan-in who lived during the Meiji era (1868-1912). During his days as a teacher, he was visited by a university professor curious about Zen.
Being polite, Nan-in served the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but Nan-in kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
The Master’s response will be in next month’s Newsletter. .
----
Quotable:
“Men are divided into two great classes: those who predominantly live in hopes and those who predominantly live in recollection. Both have a wrong relation to time. The healthy individual lives at once both in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life acquire true and substantial continuity.”
Richard Moran “Notes of Living in Time.” following Judge William, ‘On the Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,’” who was following Soren Kierkegaard,
-
A Problem with Race:
“ After all this work, clarity on the basic question of what a race was still lay a long way off, even farther away than it had been before the work had begun. There was, for starters, no consensus on the number of races, with authorities arguing for numbers ranging from one (the human) to sixty-three. At one time or another, Franks, Gauls, Caucasians, Americans, Lapps, Celts, Negroes, Border-Scots, Nordics, Irish, Jews, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Hottentots, Malays, Slavs, Yankees, and Europeans had been described as separate races.
“Nobody knew for certain how many races there were because there was no agreement on what race was, or even where it was. What was the site of race? Was it in the skin, hair, bones, blood, culture, language, geography, brains, skulls (shape or volume), teeth, souls, smell, or semen? All these possibilities had been proposed by someone or other, but by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly understood that the sheer number of them made it impossible to take any of them seriously. “
Geoffrey Harpham in a lecture given at Tulane University.
--
Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, etymologies, neologisms, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
--
Inflict it on the Innocent and the Vulnerable:
Please forward this Then & Now Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it. If they’d like to subscribe, let me know at [email protected]. (You can unsubscribe there, too.)
Thanks!
Bob Connor
MARCH 2023 NEWSLETTER
THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETER
MARCH 2023 (almost )
A Tectonic Shift:
Nathan Heller’s essay “The End of the English Major” in The New Yorker .made me wonder if the Humanities in general were reaching the end of their rope. That question was answer may be contained in a chart in James Engell’s
essay “Humanists All!” in the January / February 2023 issue of the Hravrd Magazine.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/01/features-forum-humanists
T-he chart shows the STEM disciplines all gaining majors and the nHumanities all losing them. -
Scroll down to see the chart
--
Quotable and Ponderable:
““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 … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.” “
Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the Harvard English department.
Comment: The allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne is revealing. At Bowdoin College, we are told, he “read widely and received solid instruction in English composition and the classics, particularly in Latin.” The same could probably be said of his classmates including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future U.S. President, Franklin Pierce. They all knew how to find the subject and the verb; And the time gap of a century or two was for them nothing when compared to the two millennia or more.that they took in stride
(Quite a class ’25! I wonder if 2025 will match it.)
We have eliminated that old-time education without finding a substitute for it No wonder students feel lost.
,--
.
The Brave New World of English:
Another shift is taking place within some disciplines, - not only from past to present, but also , from text to margin. An egregious example is called out in my blog post of March 28th.
--
The Death of the Humanities?
Tectonic shifts do not of ten reverse themselves, But remember Mark Twain’s comment when a newspaper published an obituary of him-
the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.“.
Heller’s article in The New Yorker contains several examples on institutions where the English major is surviving, maybe even flourishing. (UC-Berkeley;s English department seems to be one.) Success stories may be easier to find in other fields. including Classics. .Jane Chaplin provides some guidance from her perch at Middlebury College:
“”At Middlebury, the ‘crisis’ in Humanities is really a crisis of English majors, and to a lesser extent of American Studies, History, and modern language majors. Enrollments and majors in Classics have not declined over the past 20 years; in fact enrollments are slightly up (in keeping with a growth in the overall number of students). Enrollments in Religion, Philosophy, and Art History have also remained consistent. The co-directors of the Humanities here have made a big push in the direction of digital humanities and humanities in action; it would be nice also to see us embrace what we can really offer – service courses in reading and writing.
--
Can Success Stories Be Generalized?
The American Council of Learned Societies, under the leadership of Joy Connelly, is trying out a promising approach, “developing a survey of success stories – examples of sustainable approaches to undergraduate teaching and research that enable humanistic study to flourish. These stories make the strongest arguments for the value of humanistic knowledge “ That’s the only initiative that I knowe of in this area.
--
Quotable (and Pondrqable, oo):
“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’”
G.K. Chesterton (Thanks to Ros Douthatr).
--
Are Majors the Right Metric?
It depends on your goals. If the goal is to produce skilled workers, including Ph.D.’s,, then the number of B.A. majors field by field is a helpful metric. . But if the goal is to help students clarify their values, think and write more clearly, argue cogently, and bring a fresh perspective to bear on perennial problems, then the number of majors is only a small part of the story.
We need better metrics, specifically ones that recognize where students are developing capactoes that will enrich their lives and their contrubutions to society.
--
The War of the Words:
What’s happening to our language? An overview in The Economist sketches some of what’s going on. (Thanks to Jane Chaplin for providing the link.)
The Associated Press through its stylebook joined the War of the Words recently, as Nicholas Kristof has reported. The AP to;d its writers ““We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizlng ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.””
The French? In response the French Embassy in Washington proposed renaming itself “The Embassy of Frenchness.”
The absurdity rolls on . Good! Such language tinkering usually gets so absurd that it falls on its face. The sooner the better since the abuse of language can lead to the abuse of friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Aux armes, cityoens!
--
Nietzsche on art (and Riddles)
: "If we think of the original germs of the artistic sense and ask ourselves
what different kinds of pleasure are evoked by the firstlings of art,
for example among savage peoples, we discover first of all the
pleasure of understanding what another person means; here art is a
kind of solving of a riddle that procures for the solver enjoyment of
his own quick perspicuity."
No 119 in the second volume of Human, All-Too Human. Thanks toClaude Cernuschi who pointed me to this passage reminding me that Nietzsche is not saying that art is itself a riddle but that “our interpretation of art is like solving a riddle, which generates self-congratulatory pleasure.”.
-
Word of the Month:
ghost (vb.):: …
The dictionary says under use 2 of the verb ghost: ”the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.”
This usage has been around for a long time, but has steadily increased since the 1950s. Ghosting is nasty enough in a face-to-face society, but is more common, and more virulent, in an age dominated by social media, when one no longer has to look someone in the eye. The practice very likely exacerbates the current mental health pandemic among adolescents and young adults.
How to deal with it? . A few suggestions can be found in in “When People Ghost - and How to Get Over it.” Other ideas are welcome
--
Congratulations to Carolyn Walker Bynum on being awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Catholic Historical Association. I hope this results in much happy feastihgfr the author of Holy Feasts and Holy Fasts
--
News from New College
The February 29th meeting of the newly appointed Board of Trustees at New College in the Florida state university system showed their priorities. They abolish the programs of the college’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.. See the coverage on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/us/new-college-florida-board-meeting-reaj/index.html Prefer the news in print? Here it is.
The next engagement in the ongoing Florida higher education battles is House Bill 999 in the Florida legislature. It’s important because by curtailing the autonomy of state funded universities it may provide a model for other state legislatures to adopt.
Here’s the text of the bill., and here’s a statement by the American Historical Association endorsed by many academic oroganizations. (Thanks to Judith Hallett for calling my attention to it.
--
A Strange Lenten Abstinence:
No cookie at lunch? No pre-prandial potation? Not challenging enough. I decided to give up politics for Lent. No Tr*np, no St*my, no p*lls, no speculation about 2*24.. And, beginning right now, no Fl*r*d*..
I’ll report on some surprising results in the next Then and Now Newsletter.
Generative Artificial Intelligence
”We have passed the point where people argue whether Generative AI (ChatGPT, BARD) are more than a curiosity, and start focusing instead on what they do best, and where they are likely to mislead. A discussion in Axios is a good starting point. Don’t be surprised if some of the discussion sounds like Plato’s distinction between the plausible (doxa) and the real. So far it seems that Generative AI is not very good at distinguishing plausible fictions from true facts. If so, it will exacerbate an already wide-spread problem in our political culture. .
--
Palindrome from Paradise:
“Madam, I’m Adam.”
--
College: What It Was, Is and Should Be:
A second edition of Andrew Delbanco’s book of that that title mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all.
--
Gold Medal: New Philology Award:
It’s the job of Philology, as I see it, to blow the whistle on abuses of our language, but also to commend those who use it in fresh vigorous ways to illumine problems obscured by jargon. Example: ,my eyes glaze over when I hear once again about the “serious consequences that will result if global temperatures rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels “. German Lopez has called attention to Katherine Hayhoe’s fresh way of presenting the same fact:, a comparison of climate change to a fever: Think about how much worse you feel when you run a fever of 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. That fever is the equivalent of what the whole planet will soon be experiencing.
Nice. If I had a gold medal I’d give it to Prof. Hayhow.
--
--Ponderable:
“The dead are better than the living in nourishing the soul. After all, they’ve been through it all, so what they leave behind, whether fleeting memories or enduring masterpieces, has already passed one test.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
--
Beyond the Riddle:
Is the Zen Koan just a step beyond the riddle? Try this one”
There was a Japanese Zen master named Nan-in who lived during the Meiji era (1868-1912). During his days as a teacher, he was visited by a university professor curious about Zen.
Being polite, Nan-in served the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but Nan-in kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
The Master’s response will be in next month’s Newsletter. .
----
Quotable:
“Men are divided into two great classes: those who predominantly live in hopes and those who predominantly live in recollection. Both have a wrong relation to time. The healthy individual lives at once both in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life acquire true and substantial continuity.”
Richard Moran “Notes of Living in Time.” following Judge William, ‘On the Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,’” who was following Soren Kierkegaard,
-
A Problem with Race:
“ After all this work, clarity on the basic question of what a race was still lay a long way off, even farther away than it had been before the work had begun. There was, for starters, no consensus on the number of races, with authorities arguing for numbers ranging from one (the human) to sixty-three. At one time or another, Franks, Gauls, Caucasians, Americans, Lapps, Celts, Negroes, Border-Scots, Nordics, Irish, Jews, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Hottentots, Malays, Slavs, Yankees, and Europeans had been described as separate races.
“Nobody knew for certain how many races there were because there was no agreement on what race was, or even where it was. What was the site of race? Was it in the skin, hair, bones, blood, culture, language, geography, brains, skulls (shape or volume), teeth, souls, smell, or semen? All these possibilities had been proposed by someone or other, but by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly understood that the sheer number of them made it impossible to take any of them seriously. “
Geoffrey Harpham in a lecture given at Tulane University.
--
Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, etymologies, neologisms, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
--
Inflict it on the Innocent and the Vulnerable:
Please forward this Then & Now Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it. If they’d like to subscribe, let me know at [email protected]. (You can unsubscribe there, too.)
Thanks!
Bob Connor