James McWilliams, Pacific Standard -You've heard the case 1,000,000 times: The humanities are dying. With Justin Stover's recent essay in American Affairs, "There Is No Case for the Humanities," you can make that 1,000,001.
But in this essay there's something different: Stover, who teaches at the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh, doesn't try to overstate the humanities. He argues that the humanities are "no more or less relevant now than they've ever been." It's just that now, as universities become corporate boot camps churning out productive science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) students, the humanities can no longer compete under the new rules. To try to do so is to engage in self-defeat. "The justification for the humanities only makes sense within a humanistic framework," Stover writes. "Outside of it, there is simply no case."
Many a scholar will have a hard time admitting this point, but, beyond the academy, there's not a single skill set that would be enhanced by reading Virgil. A mechanic or surgeon who reads Virgil will be neither a better mechanic or surgeon—nor a better human being. He'll just be a mechanic or surgeon who enjoys Virgil. When it comes to being relevant to a larger purpose beyond ourselves, there is no case to be made for reading Virgil.
Unfortunately, we persist in making our cases in response to the standard attacks. Conventional critiques of the humanities—critiques that many of us in the humanities concede—condemn over-specialization, over-production, and too little teaching. Stover demurs, insisting that such realities are the necessary outcomes when humanities scholars hunker down and do what we do: Pursue intellectual and aesthetic pleasure and, when the opportunity arises, share it with students.
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5 comments:
The majority of volunteers on programme moved out after being expected to do this, leaving 54 (now kidnapped) graduates.
Great hub.
The STEMs that the factory universities are stamping out are sub-standard and, in many ways, defective. As an example, the STEM parents of today's graduates, except for the biologicals, could write code; the STEM children graduating today are code illiterate. As a result, too many STEMs today can't make the tools they need.
They're going to have to purge the post modern nonsense and start from scratch in many places. Throw out all the advocacy departments. Anything with studies. Nobody would actually notice; they have something like an 80-90% rate for 0 citations.
And psychology, sociology, and anthropology better get their act together, too. Psychology can't reproduce studies to save itself, anthropology is exactly as bad as the biblical literalists with their insistence on the current ~10,000 year human civilization timeline, and sociology is totally in thrall to the postmodern neo-Marxists (I really hate writing that term, but it's what they call themselves). They think all societies problems can be blamed on white people and capitalism. They don't study the world and refine our knowledge of it. Just the opposite, in many cases.
Pretending they don't have a problem is insane. Sam, listen to the kids at Mizzou or Evergreen. Or any of the places with those freak show 'protesters'. Those kids got brainwashed with some abhorrent ideology and it is rotting our institutions of higher learning. The market might have a curbing effect, but as long as we're propping it up with government money it won't go away.
Kids today are code illiterate? No, they're not. But that paragraph was the regular kind of illiterate.
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