I have humanities academics on both sides of my family tree (dad and maternal grandfather, both tenured with long careers at good schools) and classics as an omnipresent topic in my growing years. Out of my undergrad program, I got accepted to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. I opted instead to get a history degree at a smaller school and dropped out after my MA.
It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
I had the same experience and also dropped out after my MA. It's pretty sad. One of my professors told me, "You should have been here in the 70s, you would have loved it."
An older CS professor (whose book, I’m guessing, about half of HN posters have read) told me essentially the same thing.
He’s one of the best people to talk to in the department. Kind, passionate and compassionate, interested first and foremost in ideas and people. No ego, doesn’t care about telling anyone he’s smarter than them (he is though), just wants to figure things out together.
I agree that this is very important. The flip side of that you will also have entrenched lazies who refuse to keep up with new knowledge, get comfy in their chair, plus grow a big ego etc. It's a tradeoff.
You have to give breathing room for creativity to unfold, but the breathing room can also be taken advantage of.
Also, it used to be more accepted to play elite inside baseball, hiring based on prestige, gut feel and recommendation. Today it's not too different in reality, but today we expect more egalitarianism and objectivity, and do literature metrics become emphasized. And therefore those must be chased.
Similar to test prep grind more broadly. More egalitarianism and accountability lead to tougher competition but more justice but less breathing room and more grind and less time for creative freedom.
In the 70s, academia in general was still growing so there were opportunities for many of the people who wanted a career in that field. Now that the field is shrinking due to demographic changes the competition has become much more vicious.
The baby boomers were going to college, ergo colleges and universities were expanding.The Ph.D. from a Tier-N school who didn't catch on there could find a tenure-track position in a Tier-N+M school.
Back in those years, at I suppose a Tier-3 school, I went to some academic ceremony where the professors wore their robes. I was impressed at how spiffy the crimson Harvard robes looked. Somebody more sociologically aware would have thought, Hmmm, there sure are a lot of Harvard Ph.D.s on the faculty here, and considered why.
How was it before then? Surely you can't expect that N PhDs minted by one doctoral advisor will each be able to take an equivalent spot at the same institution as the doctoral advisor. Or did people expect that? Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math, but the emotions and egos seem to make this discussion "complex".
>Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math
Yes, and the US population went from about 130 million in 1940 to 330 million in 2020, while the percent of adults with a college degree went from about 5% to about 40%. There were a few decades of particularly rapid growth.
I think that the American college and university system had previously been expanding slowly. The GI Bill and the then the baby boom greatly increased the rate of expansion. Expansion still goes on, but maybe at quite a low rate.
Colleges and Universities have, out of necessity, started thinking more like a company. Part of that is often new accounting models. One such way of modeling costs anscribes indirect costs to programs (utilities, building maintenance etc). Low enrollment graduate and doctoral programs look really bad on a balance sheet when you factor in these indirect costs and they will never look good. In fact they will always lose millions per year under this model. It is frankly an inappropriate budgeting model for colleges to adopt because academic programs are not product lines, but here we are.
It seems like it's just poor management. I understand they are not product lines, but a university has bills to pay. They have to pay people salaries, benefits, maintain those builds, labs, libraries, etc. The money to do that has to come from somewhere and in the hard times, the fields with the least likely chance of generating revenue to keep the university afloat will see hits. It seems like the university though has put itself in the hard times by taking on a large amount of debt: https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u.... It seems like its less malicious and just risk taking gone wrong.
It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing, recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't responsible for the issues that the company is facing.
Similar but less prolific experience. I had this idea that I could make a career out of loving books and ideas and sharing those things with other people in a spirited way.
It's totally possible to make a career out of loving books and ideas, and sharing those things with other people in a spirited way: create a YouTube channel. Here are a couple I found at random but there are many more.
Running a YouTube channel is not a viable way to make a living unless you have an existing audience or get blessed by the algorithm. There is an oversupply of people making video content, and only a small portion of them succeed. Plus you are at the mercy of YouTube’s frequently changing ad revenue terms (the “Ad-pocaplyse”) and opaque demonetization/takedown rules.
Lol that's like saying you can make a career out of your love of playing and releasing music. Sure, get to the end of the line. Or playing games and streaming it. Yes, a few make money that way. But theres a vast vast oversupply of people who would want to do that. You have to be very good, work hard, and be very lucky in addition.
I hate to inform you "Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields" has applied to STEM just the same as the humanities.
STEM has the same issues as humanities when it comes to academia, but the difference is that for graduate students, there's often (although not always) a straighter path into industry.
I’ve noticed that, but I think it hit the humanities in the 1980s and arrived at STEM more recently. It’s just the MBA-driven financialization and enshittification of everything.
But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.
It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect. People noted that the college educated earned more, so assumed that expanding college will confer that same status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high school and look the other way even if they don't match the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high school diploma instead of giving the previous high school graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage premium for having studied English literature or psychology or communication at some low tier college.
It's worth noting since the STEM explosion the world has gotten more violent and inequality has gotten much worse. They might not relate but perhaps they do.
Has it, or has the Internet just made problems much more visible?
Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.
Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't necessarily say anything about overall trends.
It seems like violence likely has not gotten worse globally, although it has increased in some specific ways that scare first-world dwellers. I think inequality though has indeed increased.
Inequality has increased, but not in the way most people assume. Almost everyone is materially better off than their prior-generation equivalents. It's just that some people (typically, those closest to the source of the improvement) have seen significantly more improvement than average.
Where do you date that "STEM explosion"? The Scientific Revolution (Newton's time), or more the quantum and atomic age or the computer tech age or what?
There were plenty of wars in the middle ages and the nobles and peasants weren't exactly equal either.
That's just economics burying obvious problems under the rug.
Economics has become a clown science to me personally, because you can even tell them that you have a method to accomplish everything they claim happens automatically through a handful of policies and they will laugh you out of the room, while they keep juggling (and sometimes dropping) chainsaws and telling you that you just need to hold them right.
I'm not sure that I get your point but I dig your style. I too am skeptical of economists especially after reading the Nassim Taleb books. Elaborate friend.
The mistake you're making is confusing confidence for intelligence and insight. Taleb has a few good ideas but most of his writing consists of arguing against strawmen and making invalid assumptions about fields where he lacks any practical experience. It's mainly suckers who admire his writing.
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
A combination of bad bets and mismanagement. Ah! Well I have a friend who is currently going their for law school, so I shouldn't be celebrating this, it harms them and their career prospects.
I'm not that shocked honestly, I did a humanities degree and when I checked UChicago's departments they were large and pretty good but not really cutting edge or doing anything radical or interesting. Seems like they were coasting on their reputation for a while.
I know for Classical literature it's largely the theoretical approach to interpreting texts. Lit theory is always evolving and tenured faculty don't always keep up with the changes. There are also new interdisciplinary departments that pop up. I imagine it's more varied in fields that study things created in the last 2000 years though.
By what metrics are literary theories judged against each other? What makes the new "cutting edge" ones better than the old? It seems like there is no actual advancement going on, but rather just ever changing fads, which is why I question the value of the entire enterprise.
I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. Of course the correctness of proofs is a checksum, but that doesn't answer which direction one should develop it or whether the thing you developed is found to be useful and interesting and elegant to other pure math people (often like a dozen worldwide).
There's not further justification needed than the fact that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-blowing.
Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By all means go write great novels that express the human condition. But better go live a real life with adventure and real non-academics around you and write about that. Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful paintings. But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Well yes but its not what you think. Philosophy as a field in the US has become too narrow. I remember taking a class in the German department on German Romanticism, which was actually very important for understanding later developments in German philosophy and some of the authors involved are even referenced directly by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. But when I was doing my Philosophy MA one of the faculty members was complaining once, in a class on Aesthetics, that they couldn’t teach German Romanticism as a class because the school had deemed it “too literary” and we just had one seminar on it.
Its also the case that you wouldn’t have a great understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the latter you actually read and analyze the text at the level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don’t actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty and the course obviously, I just wouldn’t trust most philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
Yes, this is the curse of specialization due to ever more intellectual works in existence but the same amount of time per person.
I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way, so history, art, science, politics, philosophy, technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal, cross-cutting way.
For example to understand the political relevance of some art movement, you need to know the history of the period, understand the art, the political climate, the philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical context, and I'd argue you should actually understand evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but quantitatively including our modern understanding and what he couldn't know then), also his religious background, you should understand what is Unitarianism and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted, and how their general situation was at that time, etc. etc.
But in my experience academics really dislike interacting with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any benefit in an exchange because their publications are aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course sometimes it works, but in my experience "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well known bubble and be left alone.
> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too.
That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality.
> Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer".
> But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.
What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature, without any real world experience.
I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way.
It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines.
So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.
I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system.
Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto.
Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge.
In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist, but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this is the reality already, we just don't admit it.
The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc.
Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.
idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure to humanities courses and my take is that more people need to take them.
The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation.
Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important.
Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
This is a symptom of a much deeper issue. The education system is completely broken because quite often if the student memorizes answers, that's already huge success. There is very little attention towards teaching students new ways of thinking. Not to mention that even in prestigious schools, teachers are often dropouts who failed to secure a more lucrative career in private sector, which means they themselves aren't competent. And even besides this, many people have too much shit going on in their lives to dedicate attention to education.
I agree that this is a problem with how humanities is often (or at least sometimes) done in colleges, and I suspect it's a significant contributor to the animus directed at the humanities. There has been a blurring of the line between fact and opinion such that some professors think it is worthwhile to teach students about their or other people's opinions, as if those opinions had value in themselves in the way that facts do.
This isn't to say that opinions don't or can't have value, but just having someone say "I think X" or "Professor Blah thinks X" isn't in itself important by virtue of the content of X. This is especially true if the subject of the opinion (what it is about) is something that is rather far removed from the realm of fact. There is not really any meaningful sense in which a given text, for instance, "really does" instantiate a Jungian archetype or a Freudian urge or whatever. But I get the impression some humanities scholars think there is, that when they debate among themselves about such things, there is a "fact of the matter".
Not all humanities scholarship is like this, but I think the proportion has increased over time. To my mind what it misses is that the important thing about such humanistic opinions is not their content in and of itself but the ways such opinions are formed and what kinds of "evidence" can be found to support them. An alternative goal would be for students to read things, engage with them from their own perspective, and learn how to solidify and articulate their response, as well as (importantly) to elucidate its sources both in themselves and in the text (i.e., "my reaction to this story is X, and I think that because the story says Y but also I have had experiences A, B and C that led me to think about things in such-and-such way"). This is likely more valuable than simply being taught someone else's opinion.
I think this approach is sometimes shunned because it is perceived as navel-gazing or having students "just learn about themselves". But this perception may partly be due to a fear of acknowledging that what I said above is true, namely that opinions on such matters have little intrinsic value, and therefore the students' opinions are almost as valuable as those of more senior scholars.
All this is basically to say that I think the humanities could be perceived as much more "valuable" and positive if they shifted more towards the idea of "these are some ways to have a rich life, gain an awareness of other people's opinions and how to infer their sources, and learn how to extract a meaningful experience by careful attention to what you're confronted with in life".
Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride and Prejudice or Baudelaire’s poetry. The entire content of literary study is not “general rules for life” but careful attention to aspects of the empirical world through things that appear in its history and conditions, which are ever changing and thus require constant re-evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is prone to violent convulsions.
Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really nails it:
Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with difficult texts—they were the living embodiment of institutional melancholia.
The faculty—and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring even Enigma would envy—presided over this misery with what can only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was not to be remarked upon.
Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely demoralize students—they actively corrode the very institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants too much awareness of cause and effect.
Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find themselves unable to justify continued investment in these programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having replaced them with something else entirely—a cargo cult version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to fund its own negation indefinitely.
You aren't talking to ChatGPT. I agree with you that the humanities would be "fixed" ideally. I don't know how you do that, though. I never said you should get rid of them. Just that I can't really blame UChicago et al. for not supporting what's going on. There are so many other issues with contemporary humanities departments I am not even touching on. Also, no one is "getting rid of the humanities" writ large -- in this case, we're talking about a particular program at a particular institution. Seen another way, retracting support from a broken branch is a good way to redirect resources to better-functioning departments at UChicago and elsewhere.
Curmudgeonly professors are part and parcel of universities. These are intellectuals, by default they don't fit into normal society. Universities are where they thrive.
Don't worry be happy, is that what you're saying?
What's hilarious about this is how short sighted and stupid universities are. Their cash cow programs are the ones DIRECTLY TARGETED by AI. What's going to distinguish some grade seeker that walks through Uni looking for 4.0 atop a pile of AI generated crud, and a real thinker?
It's going to be humanities. It's going to be the "liberal arts".
Not that I'm saying humanities won't need to adapt. The take home term paper will probably need to be replaced by verbal argument and defense, so they can prove they actually understand without an AI.
Humanities and actual intellectualism, as opposed to degree rubberstamping, is how universities will survive AI.
It's also amazing to me that as college costs have skyrocketed 10x higher than they used to be, humanities require almost none of that increase. Nor does it need the administration.
You can't afford humanities? I know "where is the money going" has reached comically Kafkaesque levels in modern "education", but this takes the cake.
As a Chicago resident, I’ve always felt that University of Chicago is a more hardcore science and math research institution and that Northwestern is a more humanities driven social science institution.
It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.
U of C notably does not have an engineering program. When I attended (in the 90s), the rumor was that, over the years, several alumni had offered to make significant donations to start one, but it was always rejected for being "too applied."
We didn't even has a CS major for a long time, instead having "Mathmatics with a emphasis on computer science." When CS was introduced as a major, it was still very heavy in theory. I would estimate I didn't touch a computer for half of my classes?
They can keep acceping PhD students to these programmes every other year (or even once every three years). This will keep the esoteric fields alive, even if we assume that only UChicago can support them, and cut costs.
Chicago has a $220 million annual deficit before the Trump issues. You can’t blame this fiscal mismanagement on the ebbs and flows of politics.
Everything has an opportunity cost.
Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
If you take it as profit over people, you've grossly misunderstood it.
Friedman explained numerous time how he went from a New Deal left (having grown up in the Great Depression) to an fervent free market capitalist because he believed capitalism was more effective in helping people.
Now you may disagree, perhaps vigorously, but you should still be honest over their motivations.
(Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards. It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a humanities PhD than retirement at 35.
There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them.
TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
Probably a good thing considering the decline of science and tech in the US and Western world in general. A casual visit to any major labs and observing their demographics makes it clear where all the talent in STEM is being created.
It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
The death of intellectualism in public discourse aside
This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.
It’s sad that many people need to spend years on liberal arts education to learn to learn independently. Where has our society failed that 11 years of schooling and upbringing can’t provide that?
Oh I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. I think our society would be substantially healthier if we required civics, philosophy, economics, etc in high school. But if we're already struggling to have evolution taught in schools and we have state boards of education removing references to the slave trade and founding fathers from history curriculum (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-...), expanding liberal arts in public education is a non-starter. Hell, half the country would love to see it wiped from post-secondary education. Best I figure we can do at this point is defend the idea itself to the extent we can - for instance, in Hacker News threads where the liberal arts are being dismissed as an unnecessary lesser-than academic pursuit.
You do realize that an engineering degree is better to learn how to learn than a typical liberal arts degree? Read academically adrift, this is well studies.
In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.
Hard disagree. I gave up a top-10 engineering scholarship and switched to liberal arts largely because my entire curriculum was predetermined in the former. Five courses in calculus and two slots for electives in your entire undergraduate schedule - that doesn't teach you how to think. Political philosophy, symbolic logic, comparative history, econometrics - having the freedom to explore and dabble and push yourself into new ideas instead of being fast-tracked into a pipeline, that's how you learn how to learn. And the "difficulty" is entirely what you make of it. Sure, if you show up to college and want to major in anthropology and put no effort in, you get nothing out. But I saw very quickly that with absolute unfailing effort applied to my engineering degree, I was still going to get exactly one and only one thing out of it. The liberal arts gave me a cornucopia of possibility. I've gone on a human trafficking sting op with the FBI, I've presented my research at the White House, I've been cited by the Pope - that's all wild shit that an engineering degree never would have enabled. Breadth of learning and soft skills matter. I'd be a shell of a person today if not for my liberal arts education. I owe everything to it, and the constant condescension towards non-STEM education in tech would frustrate me more if I didn't run laps around my peers.
I entirely agree - I have a 30 year career in STEM and am now a senior software architect at a $5b company. I also read, write and speak classical Latin at an advanced (almost fluent) level.
My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.
I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...
Is that in both respective fields of study, though?
It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues more strictly pursue relevant titles.
Well that's kind of my point - liberal arts and humanities set you up with a very versatile baseline. With a proper education in those disciplines you learn how to think, and that's applicable to a wide range of fields. The woman I dated in grad school at UChicago studied war history and wound up being an analyst for a prominent wine auctioneering firm as a key researcher. My master's thesis was on the meaning of life, and now I'm running data science at a non-profit. So many of my fellow liberal arts grads have gone on to do incredible things entirely unrelated to their chosen subject of study.
>It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out:
that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
I don't think culture war catchphrases are intended to be accurately projected back onto real-life institutions. It's better for you to explain than to insult, but ignoring is probably the move.
For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities, consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical; there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! - ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're there to be understood all the same.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
What is the relation of this to studying humanities? It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
> What is the relation of this to studying humanities?
A fair question! Put briefly, I would say that studying the humanities would make one more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations (which is... most of them), with the example I gave being one situation that I figured would be more familiar to the crowd here at Hackernews.
> It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
It seems like that because it is like that :) In other words, I DO consider it good to have a broader view of situations that otherwise might be considered narrowly "technical" because I believe that understanding the human element as part of the situation helps me understand the situation (whatever it may be) way better. I relate it to "the humanities" because it IS related to the humanities.
This argument, which I find very typical of arguments in favor of humanities education, kind of drives me nuts. It's very nebulous in terms of how these benefits are actually related to humanities classes. I place very little value on degrees in general, but at least I can sometimes see very clearly how other engineers I work with sometimes know useful things that I don't know from CS classes because they are directly related to the subject matter at hand. But nothing you are mentioning here is at all like that.
Yes, of course it is beneficial to be "more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations," but there isn't a class on that and I see no relation between social skills and education (at any level or field of study). I would take a HS dropout sales guy over a phd in humanities any day in terms of this particular skill.
Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it.
P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.
> Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.
A real question for you. How have you attempted to interact with modern humanities research? I'm married to a historian. A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership. Presses ask "how will this be of interest to the general public" when engaging with scholars to decide what books to publish.
I have a CS PhD. In comparison to my experience doing CS research, history research is vastly more likely to consider a non-expert audience. I cannot speak to other fields within the humanities, but this data point makes me rather skeptical of your claim.
> A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership.
There's a ton of interest in history. Always has been in pop culture (with WW2 producing a looooooot of material based off of it, ranging from truly authentic such as Schindler's List to loosely affiliated such as the MCU), to be honest. And it's not just pop culture. No matter what, history tends to be a staple subject in schools, every town worth its name has some sort of local museum telling the story of said town. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
In contrast, there isn't much money to be made discussing gender identities so no one cares about it outside of the humanities and non-cisgender people, so where's the incentive for researchers to write "in layman's terms"?
I do not understand what you would expect from research work. Do you expect that research work in mathematics be written in such a way that any lay person could understand it? Or computer science? Physics? Biology? I would assume that the answer is no. Why then do you place this expectation on research in the humanities?
I am now going to speculate, though if this isn't your reason, I apologize. Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
You also say: "It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public." Is any research? In any field? Looking at the remaining unsolved Millennium Problems in mathematics, do you think that the general public has any interest in the "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture?" Whatever that is? I don't. I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's quite interesting if you do.
> Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer), but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.
It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because, if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions, statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.
I could compare this to my average experience attempting to approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's concept of différance. Here I find myself reading explanations that seem to recursively invoke other neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
> but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard.
Yes, I think humanities people are having STEM-envy and it's bad. They should not frame it in terms of rigor and complexity. The humanities are much closer to art, and that's fine. We need art and culture. As commonly said, politics is downstream of culture. Storytelling and myths and fables and parables form a bedrock and a platform for living together. In its ideal form it is more like holistic wisdom, not a narrow rigorous specialization like designing more efficient internal combustion engines or something.
And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it.
Also, essentially fake fields exist in abundance. A lot of business management stuff is like that. Basically someone makes up cute acronyms and bullet lists (what are the 5 characteristics of XY, what are the 7 criteria for Z), and definitions and the actual content behind it is super thin. I had classes like that in college and all STEM students learned the whole thing on the day before the exam. Also, the more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.
There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces. I like them, if they are written well. But it's not rigor.
It would be great to hear the opinion on this from someone who thinks the humanities research (eg. literary criticism journals) are rigorous AND have also passed a college-level serious STEM course like Electromagnetic Fields or Graph Theory or Linear Algebra with a good grade. I think most humanities people just don't really understand what rigor actually means. It's not just about using words that have special definitions for more efficient communication or something.
-----
> If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
Yes, it's on purpose. It's the statement itself. The content of the message is reflected in the form it is presented. It's in the same lineage as Dadaism, or the empty-canvas-as-painting etc. His philosophy is literally called "deconstruction". And if you ask "but what is the result?", well it's the influence on other academics and thinkers. Surely you heard a lot in recent years that X or Y thing is just a construct and should be deconstructed or dismantled etc. That's the result.
> And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it ... The more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.
Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)
But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
> I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
This is a good point. Gödel was interested in theology for example. Or look at Warren McCulloch (of McCulloch & Pitts, 1943 fame, the paper that first modeled neurons mathematically and built logic networks with it), who had a theological early education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw These thinkers had a much broader view of humanity and science and knowledge than common today, where academics follow an extremely narrow specialty and PhD students often proudly admit they never read any paper older than 5 years, but mostly just from the last 2 (in AI), since the work is always anyways extremely incremental and will be anyway irrelevant in a few years. And vice versa, the humanities people closed up among themselves and cooked up an unrecognizable thing to an educated person from 100 years ago.
Every field can be esoteric, but math eventually gets applied. People might not care about conjectures or proofs but they like being able to cook up a pic of a capybara playing piano on Midjourney or have their chats protected by unbreakable cryptography. All that is a product of esoteric math.
With some of the humanities I feel like the lightning never strikes the ground.
A huge chunk of the humanities have been neck deep in esoteric discourse about social justice for decades. Meanwhile down here on the ground things are going backward. More and more people are rediscovering things like “race science” and “traditional” ideas about the roles of women, etc. This is happening all over the world.
When is some dude in a toga going to descend from the ivory tower with a powerful rebuttal and a new way of framing these issues that renews the flame of liberalism and free society?
I’m not holding my breath.
If I were post-economic I’d consider taking a crack at it, but what do I know?
I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world history and the history of thought, and that applies some kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what Humanities is supposed to be.
Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?
At a pre-protest meeting of a cause I wanted to support, I noticed that the organizer had on their desktop background a kind of propagandistic poster of Mao leading the cultural revolution. Keep in mind, this is in the USA. I'm no expert in world history by any means, but the level of ignorance is astounding.
> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.
The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
That too, but I was being generous. Honestly it kind of doesn't matter if it's meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit or if it's meaningful but impenetrable jargon-laden discourse aimed only at other members of the field. In either case, it has no effect on the world outside the field.
Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for escapist fun, like a fandom).
You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because same disease, different patient.
Peterson was firmly within academia and he got famous by putting his academic lectures filmed at university online. It's not some other thing. He taught in prestigious institutions like Harvard and U of Toronto.
To me it seems like you're trying to paint the picture of misguided goodguy academics VS outsider grifter meddlers. But JP is just not a good example of that.
> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
You just described a lot of research in mathematics
I wonder, have you personally been in a university environment recently? Within the past ten or fifteen years? I ask because, as someone who attended a supposedly "good" university in the USA, before going I had an interest in the humanities but was quickly discouraged by the number of individuals who seemed to be possessed by propaganda. I mentioned in another comment, for example, that I saw another student have as their desktop background a photo of Mao and the cultural revolution. So this is the backdrop against which Jordan Peterson is saying, you know, there actually are Western intellectuals worth reading and listening to and thinking about. And yes, on a personal level, I did get to read some of those writers you mentioned. It did not surprise me that they turn out to be much deeper than Jordon Peterson himself, but I don't think he ever claimed to be a revolutionary thinker? I consider him more of an evangelist than anything else. How many intellectuals can we say have truly had an impact with their ideas? The number is small. I think the reason Jordan Peterson suddenly became a phenomenon is because he was at least brave enough to call out ridiculousness when he saw it (at least at the very beginning of his celebrity, I cannot speak for his recent comments because I stopped paying attention once he started going into politics).
The stuff Jordan says about there being some value in the classics is good. Some of his stuff about meaning is good. Little to none of it is original.
He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit. I mean it would bother me if I didn’t have two daughters, but that makes it more personal.
Peterson is one of those people who sounds reasonable and even compelling at first, but as you keep listening eventually you get to the part where he starts clucking like a chicken. Unfortunately that is his original stuff.
People who start reasonable then lead into nonsense always make me think of the Monty Python lumberjack song skit. They had several skits with that premise. The woman who does Philomena Cunk is a modern comedian who riffs on this.
His wife and his daughter are public personas. Both have Youtube channels. I like his wife's channel quite a bit, and I spent a few hours years ago listening to his daughter. Both have talked about him at length while I was listening, and neither has said anything that would suggest they are unhappy with him or his influence on their lives.
His daughter has a husband and her own income stream, i.e., is no longer economically dependent on him.
I've also listened to the man himself for at least a hundred hours. I would be interested to read an explanation in support of your statement "he’s also a raving misogynist" because I've heard nothing that would lead me to conclude it or even to suspect it.
He probably believes that marriage and motherhood are best for most women. Is that contributing to your belief that he is a misogynist?
> But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field
I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John Adams:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
-- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)
In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire to devote years of their lives to studying the arts.
Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of study.
In Adams letter it seems that studying poetry, tapestry, and porcelain are leisurely and enjoyable. For most kids I know today, this would be torture. Are there modern equivalents to this? Film and comics?
Studying in that context didn't mean spending years and years in an institution, it meant regularly taking the time to read up and immerse yourself in those things. One of the greatest tragedies of modernity is that we've created a society where the majority of people believe studying is just something done at university, and stop studying anything difficult after they graduate.
Adams may be correct, but isn't the lesson that we need people to study political science right now? The lesson surely isn't to drop all studies that aren't capitalistically profitable. I don't think the current situation requires even more ruthless profit-seeking.
isn't the lesson that we need people to study political science right now?
That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend. John Adams studied political science because his business was the business of government. Studying political science today -- as an otherwise directionless middle-class student relying on loans and scholarships for tuition -- is not really hearing the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended.
I'm actually not an American and I don't reject the proposal outright. I think the pragmatic approach is still best though: study polisci if you are actually serious about going into politics (or at least policy). But if you don't know what you want to do with your life then it's not a great idea to go into the humanities and hope for the best (while racking up a lot of debt).
Yeah going all in into political science is a bit risky, but just including some course is free and might help understanding society issues and political manipulation.
Oh yeah. I studied mathematics but I took a minor in philosophy. I studied philosophy of economics and philosophy of law, in addition to the usual metaphysics and epistemology stuff.
> That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend.
Yes, but considering the contemporary assault on democracy and the rule of law, it seems apt.
> the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended
It depends on what you mean by pragmatism. I'd call it public pragmatism, not mere private pragmatism. Adams calls it his "duty" to study, and goes on to talk about the "liberty" and "right" to student other subjects. The obvious interpretation, I think, especially given who Adams is and his role in the founding of the US, is that he has the obligation to fight for democracy and liberty. Otherwise, he could probably just accumulate person wealth and allow his literal descendants, and those only, to study whatever they want.
Only shows the slow road to turning colleges and universities into Trade Schools is proceeding as planed by the US oligarchs.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.
Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors.
The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
As a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.
That just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact from my experience in school the humanities classes were much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.
There's a correlation that smart people study things they find interesting. As soon as it became clear that computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of students taking doing CS majors who weren't really interested in anything except making money.
Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.
It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks.
The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
I associate the University of Chicago with a kind of religious exercise in economic theory, a movement dedicated to justifying a political stance in pseudo-intellectualism at the direct expense of empiricism.
The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
The U of C is affiliated 101 Nobel Laureates (amongst the highest in the world) -- not to mention 10 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award winners, 58 MacArthur Fellows, 30 Marshall Scholars, & 55 Rhodes Scholars.
https://archive.ph/GWBEl
I have humanities academics on both sides of my family tree (dad and maternal grandfather, both tenured with long careers at good schools) and classics as an omnipresent topic in my growing years. Out of my undergrad program, I got accepted to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. I opted instead to get a history degree at a smaller school and dropped out after my MA.
It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
I had the same experience and also dropped out after my MA. It's pretty sad. One of my professors told me, "You should have been here in the 70s, you would have loved it."
An older CS professor (whose book, I’m guessing, about half of HN posters have read) told me essentially the same thing.
He’s one of the best people to talk to in the department. Kind, passionate and compassionate, interested first and foremost in ideas and people. No ego, doesn’t care about telling anyone he’s smarter than them (he is though), just wants to figure things out together.
The junior faculty can’t afford to be that way.
I agree that this is very important. The flip side of that you will also have entrenched lazies who refuse to keep up with new knowledge, get comfy in their chair, plus grow a big ego etc. It's a tradeoff.
You have to give breathing room for creativity to unfold, but the breathing room can also be taken advantage of.
Also, it used to be more accepted to play elite inside baseball, hiring based on prestige, gut feel and recommendation. Today it's not too different in reality, but today we expect more egalitarianism and objectivity, and do literature metrics become emphasized. And therefore those must be chased.
Similar to test prep grind more broadly. More egalitarianism and accountability lead to tougher competition but more justice but less breathing room and more grind and less time for creative freedom.
What was it like in the 70s that we are now missing?
In the 70s, academia in general was still growing so there were opportunities for many of the people who wanted a career in that field. Now that the field is shrinking due to demographic changes the competition has become much more vicious.
The baby boomers were going to college, ergo colleges and universities were expanding.The Ph.D. from a Tier-N school who didn't catch on there could find a tenure-track position in a Tier-N+M school.
Back in those years, at I suppose a Tier-3 school, I went to some academic ceremony where the professors wore their robes. I was impressed at how spiffy the crimson Harvard robes looked. Somebody more sociologically aware would have thought, Hmmm, there sure are a lot of Harvard Ph.D.s on the faculty here, and considered why.
How was it before then? Surely you can't expect that N PhDs minted by one doctoral advisor will each be able to take an equivalent spot at the same institution as the doctoral advisor. Or did people expect that? Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math, but the emotions and egos seem to make this discussion "complex".
>Unless the population is growing, the steady state is that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever become professors. It is very basic math
Yes, and the US population went from about 130 million in 1940 to 330 million in 2020, while the percent of adults with a college degree went from about 5% to about 40%. There were a few decades of particularly rapid growth.
I think that the American college and university system had previously been expanding slowly. The GI Bill and the then the baby boom greatly increased the rate of expansion. Expansion still goes on, but maybe at quite a low rate.
Colleges and Universities have, out of necessity, started thinking more like a company. Part of that is often new accounting models. One such way of modeling costs anscribes indirect costs to programs (utilities, building maintenance etc). Low enrollment graduate and doctoral programs look really bad on a balance sheet when you factor in these indirect costs and they will never look good. In fact they will always lose millions per year under this model. It is frankly an inappropriate budgeting model for colleges to adopt because academic programs are not product lines, but here we are.
It seems like it's just poor management. I understand they are not product lines, but a university has bills to pay. They have to pay people salaries, benefits, maintain those builds, labs, libraries, etc. The money to do that has to come from somewhere and in the hard times, the fields with the least likely chance of generating revenue to keep the university afloat will see hits. It seems like the university though has put itself in the hard times by taking on a large amount of debt: https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u.... It seems like its less malicious and just risk taking gone wrong.
It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing, recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't responsible for the issues that the company is facing.
Funding.
Departmental politics has always been bad. That is nothing new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmographia_Academica
This is an insightful response. Thank you to share.
Your last sentence:
... reminded me of Sayre's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_lawSimilar but less prolific experience. I had this idea that I could make a career out of loving books and ideas and sharing those things with other people in a spirited way.
What a stupid fucking idea that was!
It's totally possible to make a career out of loving books and ideas, and sharing those things with other people in a spirited way: create a YouTube channel. Here are a couple I found at random but there are many more.
https://www.youtube.com/@EllieDashwood
https://www.youtube.com/@QuinnsIdeas
Running a YouTube channel is not a viable way to make a living unless you have an existing audience or get blessed by the algorithm. There is an oversupply of people making video content, and only a small portion of them succeed. Plus you are at the mercy of YouTube’s frequently changing ad revenue terms (the “Ad-pocaplyse”) and opaque demonetization/takedown rules.
Lol that's like saying you can make a career out of your love of playing and releasing music. Sure, get to the end of the line. Or playing games and streaming it. Yes, a few make money that way. But theres a vast vast oversupply of people who would want to do that. You have to be very good, work hard, and be very lucky in addition.
Right so if you're not very good at then pick a different career and quit whining.
"What a stupid fucking idea that was!"
It is a great idea.
We just don't live in a great society where your naive thinking would have been fitting.
Find a patron who finances it, as it always was. There never was a society that would fund everyone full time just for having neat fun chats.
Alternatively take up a day job like everyone else and join a philosophy / arts / book club as a hobby.
We have more access than ever to the materials.
"There never was a society that would fund everyone full time just for having neat fun chats."
That was not the request, nor claim.
STEM has eaten the world (in a good way!)
In a bad way. If we didn't have such hubris maybe we wouldn't have fed the capital with our souls?
It’s not hubris that caused that, but the quite reasonable desire not to live in mud huts.
I think you know I didn't mean it like that. The esprit de corps of STEM and the humanities, the view of society.
I hate to inform you "Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields" has applied to STEM just the same as the humanities.
STEM has the same issues as humanities when it comes to academia, but the difference is that for graduate students, there's often (although not always) a straighter path into industry.
I’ve noticed that, but I think it hit the humanities in the 1980s and arrived at STEM more recently. It’s just the MBA-driven financialization and enshittification of everything.
But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.
It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect. People noted that the college educated earned more, so assumed that expanding college will confer that same status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high school and look the other way even if they don't match the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high school diploma instead of giving the previous high school graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage premium for having studied English literature or psychology or communication at some low tier college.
Some people just don't seem to understand that the value of a credential rests entirely on the fact that other people don't have it.
In part, but that wouldn't be enough. The value is that only/mostly people with certain skills and talents have it.
It's worth noting since the STEM explosion the world has gotten more violent and inequality has gotten much worse. They might not relate but perhaps they do.
Has it, or has the Internet just made problems much more visible?
Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.
Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't necessarily say anything about overall trends.
It seems like violence likely has not gotten worse globally, although it has increased in some specific ways that scare first-world dwellers. I think inequality though has indeed increased.
Inequality has increased, but not in the way most people assume. Almost everyone is materially better off than their prior-generation equivalents. It's just that some people (typically, those closest to the source of the improvement) have seen significantly more improvement than average.
Where do you date that "STEM explosion"? The Scientific Revolution (Newton's time), or more the quantum and atomic age or the computer tech age or what?
There were plenty of wars in the middle ages and the nobles and peasants weren't exactly equal either.
That's just economics burying obvious problems under the rug.
Economics has become a clown science to me personally, because you can even tell them that you have a method to accomplish everything they claim happens automatically through a handful of policies and they will laugh you out of the room, while they keep juggling (and sometimes dropping) chainsaws and telling you that you just need to hold them right.
I'm not sure that I get your point but I dig your style. I too am skeptical of economists especially after reading the Nassim Taleb books. Elaborate friend.
The mistake you're making is confusing confidence for intelligence and insight. Taleb has a few good ideas but most of his writing consists of arguing against strawmen and making invalid assumptions about fields where he lacks any practical experience. It's mainly suckers who admire his writing.
Citation needed. The rate of violent deaths per capita worldwide is at a historically low level.
Keep down voting stem haters.
People here don't hate STEM, they just understand that STEM is not the only thing that matters.
If you want the reader to do something, it's polite to say please.
Chicago had lower annualized endowment returns than similar universities, and so it couldn't support it's aggressive expansion.
https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0...
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
A combination of bad bets and mismanagement. Ah! Well I have a friend who is currently going their for law school, so I shouldn't be celebrating this, it harms them and their career prospects.
I'm not that shocked honestly, I did a humanities degree and when I checked UChicago's departments they were large and pretty good but not really cutting edge or doing anything radical or interesting. Seems like they were coasting on their reputation for a while.
Honest question. What is considered radical or cutting edge in the humanities? I confess my ignorance upfront.
I know for Classical literature it's largely the theoretical approach to interpreting texts. Lit theory is always evolving and tenured faculty don't always keep up with the changes. There are also new interdisciplinary departments that pop up. I imagine it's more varied in fields that study things created in the last 2000 years though.
By what metrics are literary theories judged against each other? What makes the new "cutting edge" ones better than the old? It seems like there is no actual advancement going on, but rather just ever changing fads, which is why I question the value of the entire enterprise.
I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. Of course the correctness of proofs is a checksum, but that doesn't answer which direction one should develop it or whether the thing you developed is found to be useful and interesting and elegant to other pure math people (often like a dozen worldwide).
There's not further justification needed than the fact that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-blowing.
Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By all means go write great novels that express the human condition. But better go live a real life with adventure and real non-academics around you and write about that. Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful paintings. But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Well yes but its not what you think. Philosophy as a field in the US has become too narrow. I remember taking a class in the German department on German Romanticism, which was actually very important for understanding later developments in German philosophy and some of the authors involved are even referenced directly by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. But when I was doing my Philosophy MA one of the faculty members was complaining once, in a class on Aesthetics, that they couldn’t teach German Romanticism as a class because the school had deemed it “too literary” and we just had one seminar on it.
Its also the case that you wouldn’t have a great understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the latter you actually read and analyze the text at the level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don’t actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty and the course obviously, I just wouldn’t trust most philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
Yes, this is the curse of specialization due to ever more intellectual works in existence but the same amount of time per person.
I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way, so history, art, science, politics, philosophy, technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal, cross-cutting way.
For example to understand the political relevance of some art movement, you need to know the history of the period, understand the art, the political climate, the philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical context, and I'd argue you should actually understand evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but quantitatively including our modern understanding and what he couldn't know then), also his religious background, you should understand what is Unitarianism and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted, and how their general situation was at that time, etc. etc.
But in my experience academics really dislike interacting with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any benefit in an exchange because their publications are aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course sometimes it works, but in my experience "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well known bubble and be left alone.
> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too.
That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality.
> Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer".
> But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.
What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature, without any real world experience.
I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way.
It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines.
So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.
I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system.
Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto.
Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge.
In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist, but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this is the reality already, we just don't admit it.
The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc.
Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.
idk man, I'm a humanities major whose spent all of my career, which spans about a decade and a half now, around people who have had very little to no exposure to humanities courses and my take is that more people need to take them.
The quality of analysis and opinion outside of academia is just, I'll be blunt, incredibly poor. I think claiming that literary analysis courses are just a bunch of people spouting opinions is an unfair reduction. You learn analytical techniques, you learn how to identify theme and structure, how to perform a historical analysis versus a contemporary reading, close reading, logical analysis etc etc. There's not just depth at the level of an individual work, there's tons of technical and analytical and procedural depth to uncover in the practice of interpretation.
Inadequacies in this practice lead directly to bad societal outcomes imo. People who are unable to critically dissect narratives are also easy to manipulate. Worse, a lot of people who lack exposure to these ideas do not even ask important questions in the first place, even basic ones like, "how might this tech actually impact society" because they simply have never had the training to learn that asking these kinds of questions is important.
Also I do think it is an actual research field, which, just like any other field, changes as available tech changes. For example digital humanities is a relatively new approach that was mostly enabled by the advent of statistics and computers. This unlocked a whole new suite of literary analysis techniques and perspectives, and these new techniques have actually furnished novel interpretations and second looks at previous works (a really concrete example, these techniques have been used to resolve questions of disputed or unclear authorship) just like technological innovations do the same in other sciences and research fields.
This is a symptom of a much deeper issue. The education system is completely broken because quite often if the student memorizes answers, that's already huge success. There is very little attention towards teaching students new ways of thinking. Not to mention that even in prestigious schools, teachers are often dropouts who failed to secure a more lucrative career in private sector, which means they themselves aren't competent. And even besides this, many people have too much shit going on in their lives to dedicate attention to education.
I agree that this is a problem with how humanities is often (or at least sometimes) done in colleges, and I suspect it's a significant contributor to the animus directed at the humanities. There has been a blurring of the line between fact and opinion such that some professors think it is worthwhile to teach students about their or other people's opinions, as if those opinions had value in themselves in the way that facts do.
This isn't to say that opinions don't or can't have value, but just having someone say "I think X" or "Professor Blah thinks X" isn't in itself important by virtue of the content of X. This is especially true if the subject of the opinion (what it is about) is something that is rather far removed from the realm of fact. There is not really any meaningful sense in which a given text, for instance, "really does" instantiate a Jungian archetype or a Freudian urge or whatever. But I get the impression some humanities scholars think there is, that when they debate among themselves about such things, there is a "fact of the matter".
Not all humanities scholarship is like this, but I think the proportion has increased over time. To my mind what it misses is that the important thing about such humanistic opinions is not their content in and of itself but the ways such opinions are formed and what kinds of "evidence" can be found to support them. An alternative goal would be for students to read things, engage with them from their own perspective, and learn how to solidify and articulate their response, as well as (importantly) to elucidate its sources both in themselves and in the text (i.e., "my reaction to this story is X, and I think that because the story says Y but also I have had experiences A, B and C that led me to think about things in such-and-such way"). This is likely more valuable than simply being taught someone else's opinion.
I think this approach is sometimes shunned because it is perceived as navel-gazing or having students "just learn about themselves". But this perception may partly be due to a fear of acknowledging that what I said above is true, namely that opinions on such matters have little intrinsic value, and therefore the students' opinions are almost as valuable as those of more senior scholars.
All this is basically to say that I think the humanities could be perceived as much more "valuable" and positive if they shifted more towards the idea of "these are some ways to have a rich life, gain an awareness of other people's opinions and how to infer their sources, and learn how to extract a meaningful experience by careful attention to what you're confronted with in life".
Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride and Prejudice or Baudelaire’s poetry. The entire content of literary study is not “general rules for life” but careful attention to aspects of the empirical world through things that appear in its history and conditions, which are ever changing and thus require constant re-evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is prone to violent convulsions.
Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really nails it:
Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with difficult texts—they were the living embodiment of institutional melancholia.
The faculty—and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring even Enigma would envy—presided over this misery with what can only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was not to be remarked upon.
Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely demoralize students—they actively corrode the very institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants too much awareness of cause and effect.
Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find themselves unable to justify continued investment in these programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having replaced them with something else entirely—a cargo cult version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to fund its own negation indefinitely.
Strikes me as victim blaming and misses the point.
Humanities are critical to society and have been for many thousands of years.
Getting rid of the department because of "glum" people, is downright silly.
I think you are confounding "The Humanities" and the humanities practiced by contemporary faculty.
As the above comment indicates, I guess I may be arguing with ChatGPT, but if it's broke, fix it, don't get rid of it.
You aren't talking to ChatGPT. I agree with you that the humanities would be "fixed" ideally. I don't know how you do that, though. I never said you should get rid of them. Just that I can't really blame UChicago et al. for not supporting what's going on. There are so many other issues with contemporary humanities departments I am not even touching on. Also, no one is "getting rid of the humanities" writ large -- in this case, we're talking about a particular program at a particular institution. Seen another way, retracting support from a broken branch is a good way to redirect resources to better-functioning departments at UChicago and elsewhere.
What?
Curmudgeonly professors are part and parcel of universities. These are intellectuals, by default they don't fit into normal society. Universities are where they thrive.
Don't worry be happy, is that what you're saying?
What's hilarious about this is how short sighted and stupid universities are. Their cash cow programs are the ones DIRECTLY TARGETED by AI. What's going to distinguish some grade seeker that walks through Uni looking for 4.0 atop a pile of AI generated crud, and a real thinker?
It's going to be humanities. It's going to be the "liberal arts".
Not that I'm saying humanities won't need to adapt. The take home term paper will probably need to be replaced by verbal argument and defense, so they can prove they actually understand without an AI.
Humanities and actual intellectualism, as opposed to degree rubberstamping, is how universities will survive AI.
It's also amazing to me that as college costs have skyrocketed 10x higher than they used to be, humanities require almost none of that increase. Nor does it need the administration.
You can't afford humanities? I know "where is the money going" has reached comically Kafkaesque levels in modern "education", but this takes the cake.
Why would someone learn humanities from a university instead of AI + the internet?
As a Chicago resident, I’ve always felt that University of Chicago is a more hardcore science and math research institution and that Northwestern is a more humanities driven social science institution.
It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.
Harvard perhaps, but definitely not MIT.
U of C notably does not have an engineering program. When I attended (in the 90s), the rumor was that, over the years, several alumni had offered to make significant donations to start one, but it was always rejected for being "too applied."
We didn't even has a CS major for a long time, instead having "Mathmatics with a emphasis on computer science." When CS was introduced as a major, it was still very heavy in theory. I would estimate I didn't touch a computer for half of my classes?
Maybe a university that is better run?
https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
All of that (and all of the title article) was written before this was made public:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acqui...
The significance to the University financial picture cannot be understated.
It’s insignificant. There, I understated it.
UChicago is definitely defending the humanities. This is an emotional piece that does not touch on the reasons that UChicago is rescinding support.
U.S. schools are facing a huge and permanent drop in enrollment as the fertility decline starts hitting too.
They can keep acceping PhD students to these programmes every other year (or even once every three years). This will keep the esoteric fields alive, even if we assume that only UChicago can support them, and cut costs.
Chicago has a $220 million annual deficit before the Trump issues. You can’t blame this fiscal mismanagement on the ebbs and flows of politics.
Everything has an opportunity cost. Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
Interesting trivia: there is such a thing as "Chicago school of economics" with one major agenda since 70": profit over people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
If you take it as profit over people, you've grossly misunderstood it.
Friedman explained numerous time how he went from a New Deal left (having grown up in the Great Depression) to an fervent free market capitalist because he believed capitalism was more effective in helping people.
Now you may disagree, perhaps vigorously, but you should still be honest over their motivations.
(Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards. It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a humanities PhD than retirement at 35.
There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them.
TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
Probably a good thing considering the decline of science and tech in the US and Western world in general. A casual visit to any major labs and observing their demographics makes it clear where all the talent in STEM is being created. It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
The death of intellectualism in public discourse aside
This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:....
For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.
It’s sad that many people need to spend years on liberal arts education to learn to learn independently. Where has our society failed that 11 years of schooling and upbringing can’t provide that?
Oh I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. I think our society would be substantially healthier if we required civics, philosophy, economics, etc in high school. But if we're already struggling to have evolution taught in schools and we have state boards of education removing references to the slave trade and founding fathers from history curriculum (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-...), expanding liberal arts in public education is a non-starter. Hell, half the country would love to see it wiped from post-secondary education. Best I figure we can do at this point is defend the idea itself to the extent we can - for instance, in Hacker News threads where the liberal arts are being dismissed as an unnecessary lesser-than academic pursuit.
You do realize that an engineering degree is better to learn how to learn than a typical liberal arts degree? Read academically adrift, this is well studies.
In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.
Hard disagree. I gave up a top-10 engineering scholarship and switched to liberal arts largely because my entire curriculum was predetermined in the former. Five courses in calculus and two slots for electives in your entire undergraduate schedule - that doesn't teach you how to think. Political philosophy, symbolic logic, comparative history, econometrics - having the freedom to explore and dabble and push yourself into new ideas instead of being fast-tracked into a pipeline, that's how you learn how to learn. And the "difficulty" is entirely what you make of it. Sure, if you show up to college and want to major in anthropology and put no effort in, you get nothing out. But I saw very quickly that with absolute unfailing effort applied to my engineering degree, I was still going to get exactly one and only one thing out of it. The liberal arts gave me a cornucopia of possibility. I've gone on a human trafficking sting op with the FBI, I've presented my research at the White House, I've been cited by the Pope - that's all wild shit that an engineering degree never would have enabled. Breadth of learning and soft skills matter. I'd be a shell of a person today if not for my liberal arts education. I owe everything to it, and the constant condescension towards non-STEM education in tech would frustrate me more if I didn't run laps around my peers.
I entirely agree - I have a 30 year career in STEM and am now a senior software architect at a $5b company. I also read, write and speak classical Latin at an advanced (almost fluent) level.
My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.
I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...
> Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:....
Is that in both respective fields of study, though?
It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues more strictly pursue relevant titles.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-p...
Well that's kind of my point - liberal arts and humanities set you up with a very versatile baseline. With a proper education in those disciplines you learn how to think, and that's applicable to a wide range of fields. The woman I dated in grad school at UChicago studied war history and wound up being an analyst for a prominent wine auctioneering firm as a key researcher. My master's thesis was on the meaning of life, and now I'm running data science at a non-profit. So many of my fellow liberal arts grads have gone on to do incredible things entirely unrelated to their chosen subject of study.
>It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out:
that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
I don't think culture war catchphrases are intended to be accurately projected back onto real-life institutions. It's better for you to explain than to insult, but ignoring is probably the move.
For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities, consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical; there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! - ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're there to be understood all the same.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
What is the relation of this to studying humanities? It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
> What is the relation of this to studying humanities?
A fair question! Put briefly, I would say that studying the humanities would make one more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations (which is... most of them), with the example I gave being one situation that I figured would be more familiar to the crowd here at Hackernews.
> It just seems like another common example of people taking things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
It seems like that because it is like that :) In other words, I DO consider it good to have a broader view of situations that otherwise might be considered narrowly "technical" because I believe that understanding the human element as part of the situation helps me understand the situation (whatever it may be) way better. I relate it to "the humanities" because it IS related to the humanities.
This argument, which I find very typical of arguments in favor of humanities education, kind of drives me nuts. It's very nebulous in terms of how these benefits are actually related to humanities classes. I place very little value on degrees in general, but at least I can sometimes see very clearly how other engineers I work with sometimes know useful things that I don't know from CS classes because they are directly related to the subject matter at hand. But nothing you are mentioning here is at all like that.
Yes, of course it is beneficial to be "more aware of/able to comprehend situations involving others and their motivations," but there isn't a class on that and I see no relation between social skills and education (at any level or field of study). I would take a HS dropout sales guy over a phd in humanities any day in terms of this particular skill.
I place some blame on the humanities themselves.
Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it.
P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.
> Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.
A real question for you. How have you attempted to interact with modern humanities research? I'm married to a historian. A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership. Presses ask "how will this be of interest to the general public" when engaging with scholars to decide what books to publish.
I have a CS PhD. In comparison to my experience doing CS research, history research is vastly more likely to consider a non-expert audience. I cannot speak to other fields within the humanities, but this data point makes me rather skeptical of your claim.
> A ton of books are published open-access (literally free) and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a target readership.
There's a ton of interest in history. Always has been in pop culture (with WW2 producing a looooooot of material based off of it, ranging from truly authentic such as Schindler's List to loosely affiliated such as the MCU), to be honest. And it's not just pop culture. No matter what, history tends to be a staple subject in schools, every town worth its name has some sort of local museum telling the story of said town. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
In contrast, there isn't much money to be made discussing gender identities so no one cares about it outside of the humanities and non-cisgender people, so where's the incentive for researchers to write "in layman's terms"?
I do not understand what you would expect from research work. Do you expect that research work in mathematics be written in such a way that any lay person could understand it? Or computer science? Physics? Biology? I would assume that the answer is no. Why then do you place this expectation on research in the humanities?
I am now going to speculate, though if this isn't your reason, I apologize. Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
You also say: "It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public." Is any research? In any field? Looking at the remaining unsolved Millennium Problems in mathematics, do you think that the general public has any interest in the "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture?" Whatever that is? I don't. I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's quite interesting if you do.
I do not believe that your point is correct.
> Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer), but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.
It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because, if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions, statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.
I could compare this to my average experience attempting to approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's concept of différance. Here I find myself reading explanations that seem to recursively invoke other neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
> but I kind of do carry the opinion that the literary humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are completely incomparable to STEM in this regard.
Yes, I think humanities people are having STEM-envy and it's bad. They should not frame it in terms of rigor and complexity. The humanities are much closer to art, and that's fine. We need art and culture. As commonly said, politics is downstream of culture. Storytelling and myths and fables and parables form a bedrock and a platform for living together. In its ideal form it is more like holistic wisdom, not a narrow rigorous specialization like designing more efficient internal combustion engines or something.
And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it.
Also, essentially fake fields exist in abundance. A lot of business management stuff is like that. Basically someone makes up cute acronyms and bullet lists (what are the 5 characteristics of XY, what are the 7 criteria for Z), and definitions and the actual content behind it is super thin. I had classes like that in college and all STEM students learned the whole thing on the day before the exam. Also, the more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.
There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces. I like them, if they are written well. But it's not rigor.
It would be great to hear the opinion on this from someone who thinks the humanities research (eg. literary criticism journals) are rigorous AND have also passed a college-level serious STEM course like Electromagnetic Fields or Graph Theory or Linear Algebra with a good grade. I think most humanities people just don't really understand what rigor actually means. It's not just about using words that have special definitions for more efficient communication or something.
-----
> If you ask "but what is the result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure, maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
Yes, it's on purpose. It's the statement itself. The content of the message is reflected in the form it is presented. It's in the same lineage as Dadaism, or the empty-canvas-as-painting etc. His philosophy is literally called "deconstruction". And if you ask "but what is the result?", well it's the influence on other academics and thinkers. Surely you heard a lot in recent years that X or Y thing is just a construct and should be deconstructed or dismantled etc. That's the result.
> And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it ... The more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.
Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)
But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
> I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
This is a good point. Gödel was interested in theology for example. Or look at Warren McCulloch (of McCulloch & Pitts, 1943 fame, the paper that first modeled neurons mathematically and built logic networks with it), who had a theological early education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wawMjJUCMVw These thinkers had a much broader view of humanity and science and knowledge than common today, where academics follow an extremely narrow specialty and PhD students often proudly admit they never read any paper older than 5 years, but mostly just from the last 2 (in AI), since the work is always anyways extremely incremental and will be anyway irrelevant in a few years. And vice versa, the humanities people closed up among themselves and cooked up an unrecognizable thing to an educated person from 100 years ago.
Every field can be esoteric, but math eventually gets applied. People might not care about conjectures or proofs but they like being able to cook up a pic of a capybara playing piano on Midjourney or have their chats protected by unbreakable cryptography. All that is a product of esoteric math.
With some of the humanities I feel like the lightning never strikes the ground.
A huge chunk of the humanities have been neck deep in esoteric discourse about social justice for decades. Meanwhile down here on the ground things are going backward. More and more people are rediscovering things like “race science” and “traditional” ideas about the roles of women, etc. This is happening all over the world.
When is some dude in a toga going to descend from the ivory tower with a powerful rebuttal and a new way of framing these issues that renews the flame of liberalism and free society?
I’m not holding my breath.
If I were post-economic I’d consider taking a crack at it, but what do I know?
I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world history and the history of thought, and that applies some kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what Humanities is supposed to be.
Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?
At a pre-protest meeting of a cause I wanted to support, I noticed that the organizer had on their desktop background a kind of propagandistic poster of Mao leading the cultural revolution. Keep in mind, this is in the USA. I'm no expert in world history by any means, but the level of ignorance is astounding.
> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.
The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
That too, but I was being generous. Honestly it kind of doesn't matter if it's meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit or if it's meaningful but impenetrable jargon-laden discourse aimed only at other members of the field. In either case, it has no effect on the world outside the field.
Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for escapist fun, like a fandom).
You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because same disease, different patient.
except for the example of math from which after about a thousand years of number theory you get cryptography and computers.
Peterson was firmly within academia and he got famous by putting his academic lectures filmed at university online. It's not some other thing. He taught in prestigious institutions like Harvard and U of Toronto.
To me it seems like you're trying to paint the picture of misguided goodguy academics VS outsider grifter meddlers. But JP is just not a good example of that.
> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
You just described a lot of research in mathematics
> You just described a lot of research in mathematics
You mean every research article in any subject that I have ever read.
But that’s the audience for research.
Read the survey articles if you’re looking for a more palatable exposition. Research is written for researchers.
I wonder, have you personally been in a university environment recently? Within the past ten or fifteen years? I ask because, as someone who attended a supposedly "good" university in the USA, before going I had an interest in the humanities but was quickly discouraged by the number of individuals who seemed to be possessed by propaganda. I mentioned in another comment, for example, that I saw another student have as their desktop background a photo of Mao and the cultural revolution. So this is the backdrop against which Jordan Peterson is saying, you know, there actually are Western intellectuals worth reading and listening to and thinking about. And yes, on a personal level, I did get to read some of those writers you mentioned. It did not surprise me that they turn out to be much deeper than Jordon Peterson himself, but I don't think he ever claimed to be a revolutionary thinker? I consider him more of an evangelist than anything else. How many intellectuals can we say have truly had an impact with their ideas? The number is small. I think the reason Jordan Peterson suddenly became a phenomenon is because he was at least brave enough to call out ridiculousness when he saw it (at least at the very beginning of his celebrity, I cannot speak for his recent comments because I stopped paying attention once he started going into politics).
The stuff Jordan says about there being some value in the classics is good. Some of his stuff about meaning is good. Little to none of it is original.
He’s also a raving misogynist. I have two daughters. He can fuck right off with that shit. I mean it would bother me if I didn’t have two daughters, but that makes it more personal.
Peterson is one of those people who sounds reasonable and even compelling at first, but as you keep listening eventually you get to the part where he starts clucking like a chicken. Unfortunately that is his original stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZOkxuNbsXU
People who start reasonable then lead into nonsense always make me think of the Monty Python lumberjack song skit. They had several skits with that premise. The woman who does Philomena Cunk is a modern comedian who riffs on this.
His wife and his daughter are public personas. Both have Youtube channels. I like his wife's channel quite a bit, and I spent a few hours years ago listening to his daughter. Both have talked about him at length while I was listening, and neither has said anything that would suggest they are unhappy with him or his influence on their lives.
His daughter has a husband and her own income stream, i.e., is no longer economically dependent on him.
I've also listened to the man himself for at least a hundred hours. I would be interested to read an explanation in support of your statement "he’s also a raving misogynist" because I've heard nothing that would lead me to conclude it or even to suspect it.
He probably believes that marriage and motherhood are best for most women. Is that contributing to your belief that he is a misogynist?
Obligatory: Oh the humanities.
> But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field
I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John Adams:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
-- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)
In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire to devote years of their lives to studying the arts.
Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of study.
In Adams letter it seems that studying poetry, tapestry, and porcelain are leisurely and enjoyable. For most kids I know today, this would be torture. Are there modern equivalents to this? Film and comics?
By their children they mean their children when they grow up.
Studying in that context didn't mean spending years and years in an institution, it meant regularly taking the time to read up and immerse yourself in those things. One of the greatest tragedies of modernity is that we've created a society where the majority of people believe studying is just something done at university, and stop studying anything difficult after they graduate.
Adams may be correct, but isn't the lesson that we need people to study political science right now? The lesson surely isn't to drop all studies that aren't capitalistically profitable. I don't think the current situation requires even more ruthless profit-seeking.
isn't the lesson that we need people to study political science right now?
That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend. John Adams studied political science because his business was the business of government. Studying political science today -- as an otherwise directionless middle-class student relying on loans and scholarships for tuition -- is not really hearing the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended.
Assuming you are in the USA and given the state of your country, I would think that you shouldn't reject that proposal over eagerly.
I'm actually not an American and I don't reject the proposal outright. I think the pragmatic approach is still best though: study polisci if you are actually serious about going into politics (or at least policy). But if you don't know what you want to do with your life then it's not a great idea to go into the humanities and hope for the best (while racking up a lot of debt).
Yeah going all in into political science is a bit risky, but just including some course is free and might help understanding society issues and political manipulation.
Oh yeah. I studied mathematics but I took a minor in philosophy. I studied philosophy of economics and philosophy of law, in addition to the usual metaphysics and epistemology stuff.
> That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend.
Yes, but considering the contemporary assault on democracy and the rule of law, it seems apt.
> the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended
It depends on what you mean by pragmatism. I'd call it public pragmatism, not mere private pragmatism. Adams calls it his "duty" to study, and goes on to talk about the "liberty" and "right" to student other subjects. The obvious interpretation, I think, especially given who Adams is and his role in the founding of the US, is that he has the obligation to fight for democracy and liberty. Otherwise, he could probably just accumulate person wealth and allow his literal descendants, and those only, to study whatever they want.
Only shows the slow road to turning colleges and universities into Trade Schools is proceeding as planed by the US oligarchs.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.
Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors.
The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
As a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.
That just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact from my experience in school the humanities classes were much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.
There's a correlation that smart people study things they find interesting. As soon as it became clear that computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of students taking doing CS majors who weren't really interested in anything except making money.
Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.
But that doesn't put any value on those degrees, just the smart people.
How much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-taught?
+1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly good at programming.
Wouldn't there very definition of independant thought be understanding an idiology but not limiting yourself to it?
It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks.
The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
You can't have half your population attempting academic degrees. When too many people attend university they become trade schools.
I associate the University of Chicago with a kind of religious exercise in economic theory, a movement dedicated to justifying a political stance in pseudo-intellectualism at the direct expense of empiricism.
The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
They were also the university of Michelson, Fermi and Gell-Mann, and many winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.
Chicago is a heavy hitter.
Indeed.
The U of C is affiliated 101 Nobel Laureates (amongst the highest in the world) -- not to mention 10 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award winners, 58 MacArthur Fellows, 30 Marshall Scholars, & 55 Rhodes Scholars.
U Chicago is far more than Booth and the economics department.