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1 the Humanities Crisis Then and Now Notes 1 The Humanities Crisis Then and Now 1. http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/03 /on_february_25_2009_an.html. 2. See Bérubé, 2002. 3. Yale, Saul points out, is an “extreme case, since its humanities pro- grams were historically so popular and since its administration has worked hard to build up its science programs.” 4. See http://goo.gl/1M85Zl. 5. Of course it can be argued that such deep budgetary cuts in the humanities, initiated under the guise of economic hard times, are in fact being used to roll back an overly politicized humanities. This argument, for example, is at the center of Christopher Newfield’s book, Unmaking the Public University. He argues, “Conservative elites who had been threatened by the postwar rise of the college- educated economic majority have put that majority back in its place. Their roundabout weapon has been the culture wars on higher edu- cation in general, and on progressive cultural trends in the public universities that create and enfranchise the mass middle class” (5). “[T]he culture wars have coincided with the majority’s economic decline for the simple reason that these wars propelled the decline by reducing the public importance and economic claims of the American university and its graduates . the culture wars were eco- nomic wars” (6). 6. Indeed, as a recent New York Times editorial pointed out (“Who Says Math Is Boring,” December 8, 2013), the STEM disciplines are doing just as bad or worse in terms of declining interest. According to the Times editorial students are not flocking to math, engineer- ing, science, and computer science programs. Instead, they find them boring. Nearly 90% of high school graduates express disinterest in pursuing majors in these fields. “The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer sciences is actually falling,” the Times points out, and rather “precipitously,” at that. For example, between 1995 and 2005, according to a study done by the American 174 Notes College Testing (ACT), students majoring in engineering dropped from 4.5% to 2.9%. 7. The Georgetown survey Weissmann cites pegs humanities and liberal arts graduates’ median earnings at 66K versus median salaries in the 80K and 90K range for graduates in the social and natural sciences, and in computing. 8. “Employer Perspectives on Liberal Education,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, http://www.aacu.org/leap /students/libedemployerperspectives.cfm. 9. Occupational Outlook Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Winter 2007–2008), http://goo.gl/qagNB. 10. “Google Leads Search for Humanities PhD graduates,” Matthew Reisz, The Times Higher Education, http://goo.gl/WV2mC. 11. “From Technologist to Philosopher: Why You Should Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 17, 2011. 12. See “Steve Jobs on the Humanities,” for a collection of his obser- vations about the centrality of the humanities and the liberal arts for technology innovation, http://4humanities.org/2011/10/ steve-jobs-on-the-humanities/. Walter Isaacson stresses Jobs’s com- mitment to the humanities throughout his biography of Apple’s founder. 13. For background information on how the survey was conducted see the website of the Association of American Colleges and Universities at http://www.aacu.org/leap/presidentstrust/compact /2013SurveySummary.cfm. The entire report from which I am quoting is available at http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/2013 _EmployerSurvey.pdf. 14. For another recent example of the value CEOs place on humanities graduates, see Vivian Giang’s article about the CEO of Logitech, Bracken Darrell, who seeks out English majors wherever he can find them for their communication and interpersonal skills. 15. The authors “predicted 2007 CLA scores” by field of study had busi- ness and education/social work students ranked the lowest at 1120 and 1130, respectively, while humanities and social sciences students’ scores were 1190 (Figure 4.4, p. 99, e-book edition). Again, the authors found a direct correlation between extended writing assign- ments and higher scores on the CLA. 16. See Kevin Carey, “‘Academically Adrift’: The News Gets Worse and Worse,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/Academically-Adrift-The/130743/. As Carey notes, Roksa and Arum report that “despite a barren job market, only 3.1 percent of students who scored in the top 20 percent of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures critical-thinking skills, were unemployed. Not infrequently, their Notes 175 colleges helped them land the jobs they had. Many struck out on their own and were engaged in civic affairs. Those who got mar- ried or cohabitated often did so with someone they met in college. For students like these, the college-driven job and mating mar- kets are functioning as advertised. Graduates who scored poorly on the CLA, by contrast, are leading very different lives. It’s true that business majors, who were singled out for low CLA scores in Academically Adrift, did better than most in finding jobs. But over all, students with poor CLA results are more likely to be living at home with their parents, burdened by credit-card debt, unmarried, and unemployed.” 17. This attitude has sometimes thwarted the success of the few pro- grams that have recognized that humanities graduates have much to offer the worlds of business, technology, arts agencies, and philan- thropic foundations. The most promising of these efforts was a pro- gram in the 1990s developed by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation under the leadership of its then director, Robert Weisbuch. First called “Unleashing the Humanities” and later “The Humanities at Work,” the program according to Weisbuch “had persuaded forty non-profits and for-profits to reserve meaningful positions for Ph.D. graduates in the humanities and had placed a large number in well- paying and interesting positions—at places ranging from Verizon to AT Kearney to the Wall St Journal to the National Parks Service.” Unfortunately, Weisbuch reports, “only a few humanities graduate programs enlisted their alumni and the influential corporations and others in their areas of influence to revolutionize the possibilities for employment of humanities doctoral graduates,” as most faculty mem- bers “continued to expect their graduate students to look for jobs much like their own and to consider any other outcome a failure.” 18. A “blue ribbon” task force appointed by Florida governor Rick Scott suggested a different approach, proposing what they called “differential tuition.” Under this scheme, according to a report in Forbes magazine, “tuition would be frozen over the next few years for bachelor’s degree programs identified by the state’s legislature as ‘high-skill, high-wage, high-demand’ but allowed to rise in other programs—history, philosophy, anthropology.” See http://goo.gl/ sDzhlF. 19. “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives,” The New York Times, Opinionator, October 11, 2010, http://goo.gl/cK1jhX. 20. See “University at Albany Announces Measures to Rethink, Balance and Reallocate Resources in Face of Reduced State Fiscal Support,” University of Albany News Center, http://goo.gl/J6jnnS. 21. “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives.” 22. For example, the Times marked the occasion by convening a group of educators just a few days after the Phillips announcement to 176 Notes discuss the crisis in the humanities. See “Do Colleges Need French Departments?,” October 17, 2010, at http://goo.gl/uzju. 23. “Chiseling Away at the Humanities,” http://goo.gl/hUJnwJ. 24. “In Tough Times the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” h t t p : // goo.gl/5n0YJq. 25. “Are the Humanities on the Ropes? Maybe Not,” http://goo.gl/ RuIfd9. 26. “The Liberal Arts Are Not Elitist,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 2010, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Liberal-Arts- Are-Not/64355/. 27. See, for example, Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) and D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991). 28. Bennett, of course, was the newly appointed secretary of education. 29. “Humanists Seek to Regain Their Public Voice,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 1993, http://goo.gl/u7KWMG. 30. See Carolyn J. Mooney, “A Lull in the ‘Political Correctness’ Debate?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 1993, h t t p : // goo.gl/5dnf9W. 31. “Sheldon Hackney on the Role of the Humanities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 1993, http://chronicle.com/article /Sheldon-Hackney-on-the-Role-of/73128/. 32. Martha Nussbaum takes up these issues in a more sustained and complex way 19 years later in Not for Profit (2010), both arguing against the idea that a humanities education should be measured by narrow economic criteria, and for the idea that the humanities have a practical value because they teach the kinds of communicative and cross-cultural skills Hackney stresses and that I have been emphasiz- ing. For another, somewhat different argument in favor of the value of a literary education, see Garber, 2011. 33. “Restoring ‘Literary Literacy’ to the English Curriculum,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2011, http://goo.gl/ SyCNhA. 34. In his conclusion to Literary Theory (1983) Eagleton wrote that his advocacy of a focus in literary studies on “the effects which dis- courses produce” envisioned a return to “what was probably the oldest form of ‘literary criticism’ in the world, known as rhetoric” (205). On the historical centrality of rhetoric in literary studies see Scholes. 35. See in particular Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. 36. “Making English Majors Marketable,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 23, 2001, http://chronicle.com/article/Making- English-majors/108296/. 37. Her article, under that title, appeared in the February 24, 2009, edi- tion of The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25 /books/25human.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
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