The New York Times on Halloween reported more scary news about the Humanities – students at Stanford and elsewhere were scurrying away from these subjects, like kids scared by a haunted house.  It’s an informative article, but its  statistical base is flawed in part by the persistent error of measuring the health of the humanities by the percentage of students majoring in various humanistic fields, without calculating the increase over time of the total number of departments in which students can major. That skews a lot of the data. 

The article also fails to take into account  the hitherto untapped demand for skilled presentation of the humanities. MOOCs are one indicator of that,-  43,000 enrolled in the first iteration of Andy Szegedy-Maszak’s Greek History, 35,00 in Greg Nagy’s  “HeroesX,” 50,000 enrolled in Peter Struck’s  Classical Mythology   Even after high attrition, the numbers of those  finishing and passing a final test are impressive   – around 4,000 for example in the second iteration of Szegedy-Maszak's Greek History.

The interest is out there, whether or not it translates into majors at elite universities.

But there is one statistic about the humanities that really matters.  Andy Delbanco verbalized it in the Times article :

“Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments.” 

There’s some partial  support for that view from a statistic in a report issued last spring by Harvard University called ”Mapping the Future“: Over the last 8 years, more than half of students who as pre-Freshmen indicate an intention to concentrate in a Humanities concentration end up in a different division” p. 8.  You can see the movement in figure 10 of the report.  The pre-freshmen who said they were likely to concentrate in the humanities migrate to other fields more than other groups do.  But they don’t head primarily for the natural sciences, but to Government and Economics.

That statistic has to be combined with another troubling one from Harvard, that  since 2,000 the percentage of admitted students indicating they were likely to concentrate in a humanistic field has declined from 27% to 18% (fig. 6 of the report). So are the “brightest and best” moving away from the humanities, even at a university with the strength and tradition of Harvard?

Is that the situation on other campuses?  If so, what’s going on?  There are three possible explanations, it seems to me:

1. Pre-freshmen interested in the humanities are more intellectually adventurous than those heading into other fields. They are more inclined to explore and when they think they see the promised land, they migrate.
2. Student today want, as John Medlin once put it, “either to save the world or own it.” If you want to save it, maybe a Government (or Politics as Woodrow Wilson would say) is the right major. If you want to own it, better head off to Economics Department.
3. The kids are driven away by what is taught and how it is being taught in the humanities these days – it’s all too trendy, too theoretical, too based on identity-studies, etc.  One way to test that hypothesis is to look at what’s being offered in the Harvard English department this year.  Here’s the link to their offerings.

Which of these hypotheses seems most plausible to you–or is it something else entirely?

 

“Big History”  may be the next big thing. Bill Gates thinks so and who are we to doubt his wisdom?  He is funding online course created by David Christian of  Macquarie University in Australia.  From the Big Bang to today. The courses  will roll out in  high schools in Australia, then the U.S.  Colleges interested in general education may soon be using them, too. Here’s a video to check out.

But little history still hath its charms.  The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library ("The Medieval Loebs")   has now brought out Bob Babcock’s edition and translation of Egbert of Liege.  You know, the tenth century schoolmaster addicted to the dactylic hexameter.  His work,  The Well-Laden Ship, gives a glimpse of things we might otherwise miss --  riddles,  proverbs, folk tales in a medieval classroom. Oh yes, and practical advice, too. Don’t name your cow “Abundance.”

 



Peter Thiel, the renegade philosopher turned entrepreneur, is at it again.  Last weekend he came to an event at MIT with his message that for aspiring entrepreneurs college is a waste of time and money .  The Boston Globe reports his advice to drop out and start a business instead.

Thiel puts his money (or some of it) where his mouth is, through the Thiel Fellowship Program), cool cash for cool kids on the path to big bucks.  It’s John Dewey dumbed down for the 21st century, “The best way to learn isn’t by sitting in a classroom but by doing,” as one Thiel Fellow put it. After all, the knowledge one needs for entrepreneurial success is all available on line, most of it for free.  Why pay tuition?

I think Thiel is right. Right, that is, if the goal of a college education is indeed entrepreneurial success, and if success means happiness for the individual and well-being for the society.  That’s not John Dewey; that’s Ayn Rand.  And implicitly, that’s the message that colleges and universities give, implicitly, not so much by what they say as by what they leave unsaid.  Thiel puts nit on the line. Higher education can be reduced to a simple syllogism. Money is Success;’ Success is Happiness. Therefore Money is Happiness.

$ = S

S = H

$ = H

Q.E.D.

Thiel puts it on the line for everyone who says “Go to college and learn the skills that will produce a high income for you. That’s what it’s all about. Period.”  If that’s the whole story, then lots of bright young people might do well to follow Thiel’s advice and Thiel would indeed be right.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences  has issued a “Report Card”  (at http://www.amacad.org/binaries/hum_report_card.pdf)

 with various  indicators of strength and “challenges”.  Here’s one tidbit: “Between 2000 and 2009 humanities majors scored 9% higher on the Graduate Management Admissions test than business majors.”  I don’t put much weight on figures like that, but maybe parents anxious about the economic status of their children will find it reassuring when one of them goes off and majors in something “crazy wild,” like Classics.  

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SHAKESPEARE’S  CLASSICAL CURRICULUM

Elizabeth Lynn’s  An Ongoing Experiment, a disquisition on the states’ humanities councils, has  just released by the Kettering Foundation: http://kettering.org/wp-content/uploads/An-Ongoing-Experiment.pdf.  I especially liked  Peter Levine’s Foreword, and especially his  quotation from  Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew:

Only, good master, while we do admire

This virtue and this moral discipline,

Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;

Or so devote to Aristotle’s cheques

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured:

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have

And practise rhetoric in your common talk . . . (I.i)

So ancient philosophy is just fine, but why not a little pleasure from Ovid as well, and why not put the great legacy of ancient rhetoric to use in our individual and civic lives?  Not a bad start for a classical education. One could do worse. Many students do.