The Crisis Crisis

The humanities are in crisis. (From the New York Times.) No, they aren't. (From the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Ben Schmidt. His original blog post is here.) The US has a critical shortage of STEM workers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). (From the National Science and Math Initiative.) No it doesn't. (From the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Michael Anft.) In the twitterverse, the world of simple punch lines and thumbs-up-thumbs-down binary choices, you can no longer have a problem that isn't a crisis. We have a crisis of nuance in our rhetoric about our problems. A meta-crisis. A crisis crisis. But when everything is a crisis, we don't recognize a real crisis when we see one. Describing something as a crisis serves a purpose in academia. If you are an academic and tell your dean or president you have a problem, the response is likely to be, "Yeah, well I have lots of problems to solve. I'll put yours on my list." Same with Congress. But if you can draw a graph showing you have a crisis, you stand a better chance of catching the eye of the media and getting some leverage. Except that if your graph turns out to be a distortion or a manipulation, your crisis is deflated. You are discredited. You no longer have even a problem, much less a crisis. So it was when the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released this image of the "Decline and fall" of interest in the humanities.   Off a cliff! Looks like my class of 1968 was the end of the golden era. Not exactly. Put the zero point of the x-axis back a few years and the graph looks very different: That is numbers of humanities degrees as a percentage of total degrees. But some of those non-humanities degrees in recent years might be going to people who wouldn't even have gone to college fifty or sixty years ago. If you plot the humanities degrees as a percentage of the college age population, you find that the density of humanities degree holders is actually higher now than it was in the 1950s. It was the 1970s that were anomalous, not the past couple of decades. (All graphs from the second source linked to above, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but you can read pretty much the same argument on Schmidt's blog, also linked above.) Now it's an interesting argument which is the right basis for comparison. Should the number of humanists represent a fixed proportion of the population or of college students? Either way, the data make the humanities crisis look a lot more like an identity crisis of my fellow students of the late '60s and early '70s than a crisis of student careerism in the early 21st century. In Excellence Without a Soul, I offered a couple of comments on the humanities. In the preface, commenting on the then-nascent new General Education curriculum, I wrote:

From the beginning, science and globalization drove the review. These would be the engines of human progress in the coming decades, and Harvard College needed to make these themes central to undergraduate education. The new curriculum would marginalize the humanities. At the same time, the academic disciplines themselves provided the raw materials from which an undergraduate curriculum should be composed, as though students going to college en route to careers in business, law, or medicine were doing something slightly out of place at Harvard. This superimposition of economic motivations on ivory-tower themes has exposed a university without a larger sense of educational purpose or a connection to its principal constituents. We have forgotten that we teach the humanities to help students understand what it means to be human. We have forgotten that students from families with little money may not share the assumptions that well-to-do families have about the purpose of education. And we have forgotten that universities could not teach students about our interconnectedness in a global society were it not for the freedoms that American society provides to citizens.