The Humanist Vocation
23rd June 2013
David Brooks astonishes me by having something quasi-sensible to say … although he still needs some work.
A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.
And, of course, Harvard is representative of the entire country. (Or maybe he means that if the trust-funders at Harvard can’t afford to be humanities majors, nobody can?)
Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don’t. And there’s obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.
A polite way of saying ‘perverted the living shit out of their own field’. But you can’t say that in The New York Times, unless you’re talking about George W Bush.
Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.
A polite way of saying etc. etc.
So now the humanities are in crisis.
Well, no, they’re not, unless you hold to some bizarre ‘disparate impact’ theory of college majors, where the humanities are entitled to a certain percentage of the student body, and if they don’t get it, it’s a vile plot by Somebody Nefarious Probably Republicans.