I see we’re back into tiresome public debates about the value of “Liberal Arts” and the “Humanities” (not synonyms, even though most people use the terms interchangeably). The most recent example is this past weekend’s piece in the New York Times by historian Bret C. Devereaux entitled “Colleges Should be More than Just Vocational Schools” (where “college” is being used in the American sense of “undergraduate education”).
Let’s ignore the headline, which the author doesn’t necessarily choose, and get to the crux of the argument. “Is a University a University without the Liberal Arts” asks Devereaux, referring to a recent shuttering of nine programs in mathematics, history, art, English and philosophy at Marymount University in Virginia. He then goes on to recite statistics about hundreds of program closures in the humanities right across the United States over the past decade.
Then comes this startling pivot: “The steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training. Increasingly, they have robust programs in subjects like business, nursing and computer science but less and less funding for and focus on departments of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and theology.”
We need to stop here and take stock for a moment and consider the flaws of this argument.
- First of all, around the world, there are some quite good universities which do not offer programs in the humanities. Last I heard, Imperial College London was quite a good school and I’m pretty sure most faculty there would be stunned by the notion that anyone would think they were not a university.
- A program closure does not necessarily mean the ending of course offerings in a particular area. It’s not a good thing for that discipline, obviously, but saying you’re not offering a philosophy degree doesn’t mean you’re not offering and courses in philosophy: it just means you’re not offering much in terms of upper-division courses.
- A program closure is almost always – so close it makes no odds, really – because of low enrolments. So, for instance, the shuttering of nine degree offerings at Marymount turns out on closer inspection to affect about 75 students, or about 2% of the institution. One of the programs had no students enrolled (in a degree-track at any rate: presumably this division still was attracting students to individually offered courses).
- So, when Devereaux talks about “disinvestment” in the humanities, what he really means is “lack of student interest in degree programs”. Note how he chooses not to bring enrolments into the argument at this stage.
- HOLY SWEET CRAP that casual equation of “fewer liberal arts students” = universities becoming vocational schools. And make no mistake about it, this is a slur in multiple senses, with vocational schools clearly being positioned as inferior to universities and humanities/liberal arts being the only disciplines which prevent universities sliding into inferiority.
Devereaux turns to acknowledge that enrolments might have something to do with funding, but then goes on to claim that “politicians in both parties (emphasis mine) have mounted a strident campaign against funding for the liberal arts” or expressed “a growing disdain for any courses not linked to the job market”. To an Ontario resident, this all sounds conspiratorial: up here, humanities enrolments cratered while the Liberal Party under Kathleen Wynne was in power, and I am pretty sure you will not find any evidence of anyone in her government trashing humanities. But that was before I understood what Devereaux considers “evidence”. His proof point for both parties “campaigning” against liberal arts is that state governments from both parties cut funding to higher education as a whole in the wake of the financial crisis (which is not in any way proof of bias against Liberal Arts/humanities). And his proof points for Democrats being anti-Liberal Arts/Humanities are i) that a Republican governor of Kentucky said mean things about humanities majors and ii) that the current federal Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, recently said that “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global work force”.
Got that? Cardona didn’t say anything about forcing students into an education that aligns with industry demands. He just said students should have access. Yet apparently, to Devereaux, this too is evidence of barbarism. Forget that students themselves – including humanities students – consistently put better employment prospects as the top reason for attending post-secondary education. That’s not important, apparently. According to this interpretation, unless you are militantly anti-student preference, you are no different than Ron DeSantis.
I mean, I could go on. But what’s the point? This is a terrible set of arguments. It combines genuine and understandable frustration with the inability of humanities to stem (heh) a decline in enrolments with terrible arguments about how to run universities (fund departments regardless of enrolments! Ignore student preferences!) and obnoxious arguments about the relative moral worth of various disciplines (only the humanities separate universities from barbarism). And unfortunately, Devereaux is hardly the only person to make this kind of argument.
(To be clear: I’m sympathetic to the argument that on university management can sometimes undervalue humanities subjects because they pay too much attention to gross revenue and not enough to net revenue. Generally speaking, English courses – if not degrees – are usually a big net revenue centre because the courses are so cheap to stage. But that’s not really the argument being made here).
The grief and hard feelings about hard times in humanities, I get. The retreat to a position which mixes disciplinary arrogance with giving a middle finger to students’ interests, I don’t. The humanities deserve better arguments than this.
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I wonder whether this is really about the plight of the humanities or the plight of small universities.
Are the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, just the canary in the coal mine for small universities?
Tighter public budgets mean that large public research universities have only one way to go – getting bigger, and this sucks the air out of the room for the small places. Large universities can offer more disciplines, and they can also offer better selection of specializations within disciplines. They also dominate the rankings and the public discourse about academic achievements, and they weigh into the public discourse about everything that requires input from academics, be that a pandemic or climate change or space travel.
Example: Mathematics graduates definitely have highly employable skills, involving both numerical literacy and expertise in coding (every STEM graduate and many social sciences graduates get a lot of experience in coding nowadays). However, in my experience, most of those high school graduates that already know right after graduation what they are interested in (e.g. Math) do their research and look for universities with a good reputation and a good selection of offerings to match their interests. Those students attend a local small university only if they cannot move.
The second point that I would like to raise, concerns the link between degree program and employment. A lot of the current frustration in the liberal arts comes from the perception of being considered “less useful” (“useless”?) in recent discussions about university funding. It may be true that different degree programs lead to different prospects for employment. However, attempts by provincial governments to tie university funding to the question “Is your current employment related to your degree program?” are off target, because most university graduates, including graduates from large professional programs, would have to answer “no”. The meaningful question is: “Is what you learned at university useful for your job?”, and I am quite confident that most university graduates could answer “yes” with confidence.
Just imagine: Will we close down supersized psychology programs simply because the vast majority of graduates from those programs will not work in the field of psychology? Clearly not happening. On the other hand, psychology graduates will find their training useful in every kind of work environment.
Also imagine: Let’s be serious about this and go the whole nine yards and run our university in such a way that every graduate gets a job related to their degree program. That means that we have a business school, a college of nursing, a very expensive medical school, a college of agriculture, and a (eventually somewhat reduced) college of engineering. And by the way, we also cut everybody’s salary by at least 20% to deal with the loss in tuition revenue.
That’s all good and well, except that the province next door (which happens to have a really smart government) was cranking up their liberal arts offering just a tiny bit to set themselves apart from all the provinces that revel in the university degree-job connection. Suddenly, those 3,000 high school graduates out of, say 30,000 graduates in our province next year, that want to start their university programs in the liberal arts, leave our province for the greener pastures next door. They set up tent there, finish their degrees there, get a job, and pay taxes. What a boon for our neighbour. As the saying goes: sharing is caring.
It’s worth noting that Imperial College was separated from the University of London only in 2008. Prior to that, it wasn’t a university on its own, but part of one. It still does not have the word “university” as part of its legal name. This would seem to represent a recent — and regrettable — tendency to create technical institutes and allow them to call themselves universities. It seems, in fact, a symptom of what Devereaux describes.
Your claim of snobbishness is misplaced: in the section you quote, Devereaux calls the vocational programs he describes “robust.” The examples he gives of such programs are widely respected. Many of us rather admire French Grand École, German Empire Realschulen, stand-alone law schools, teaching hospitals, musical conservatories, military academies, and so forth. But there’s no reason that they should be integrated into universities, never mind that universities should become collections of such institutes.
Furthermore, Devereaux notes in his article that “Students do not select majors and courses in a vacuum. Their choices are downstream of a cultural and political discourse that actively discourages engagement with the humanities.” It might not be the fault of the university, though a university administration that rants on endlessly about innovation like the villain in Knives Out 2 isn’t likely to encourage anyone to go into the humanities or liberal arts. It might, rather, indicate a general societal decline in the prestige of what we call the arts.
Unless Devereaux’s quotation is misleadingly abridged, Cardona seems to miss the point of a university education by actually *reducing it* to training for the economy. Does he call for all students to also be given the opportunity to learn the skills of citizenship and be exposed to higher culture, philosophical thought and further languages, regardless of their backgrounds, should they so choose? Why not? Because he does not value these things so highly as training, which he treats as the raison d’être of the university.
The strength of Devereaux’s argument, in my mind, is in denying that central, ontological claim. Other arguments for the humanities/liberal arts/let’s-just-call-them-Bob just end up endorsing the instrumental thinking in accordance with which they’re labelled as useless.
“HOLY SWEET CRAP that casual equation of “fewer liberal arts students” = universities becoming vocational schools.”
My reaction exactly. Students picking [the thing that they can understand the pathway of] instead of [the thing that gets them to the same place but is less clear] is not an attack on the humanities, it’s an example of the terrible communication by the disciplines about their worth to potential students.
Arguments about the importance of the humanities as a way of understanding the human condition are true, but most students would also like to afford food and shelter after graduation and are unlikely to pursue a career in academia, so connecting the things students do and learn with the ways they can do those things to make a living does not harm the discipline.
Of course this is the same argument over why we continue to call PhD grads who work outside of academia “alt-ac” even though it makes up 60% of grads (~40% of humanities PhDs) in Canada.
“[I]t’s an example of the terrible communication by the disciplines about their worth to potential students.”
It’s actually an example of the hopelessness of efforts to communicate the worth of disciplines to potential students. At my own campus, Human Kinetics and Psychology keep growing by leaps and bounds in spite of frankly bad job prospects, at least within the disciplines themselves. As a matter of marketing, it doesn’t matter what the job prospects *actually* are: it only matters that the name of the discipline offer an obvious answer to the question “What you gonna do with that?” which students have been asked their entire lives by guidance counsellors, parents, friends, uncles at Thanksgiving, and increasingly by agents of the university itself. As long as that’s the major concern, predatory degree mills will always be able to market themselves more effectively than even the most respected Comp Lit program on Earth (which was probably U of T’s, until it was shut down).
Let’s face it: if the goal of education is getting a job, then reading old books is, at best, an extremely obtuse means of attaining this goal and probably just a waste of time (not to mention debt-financed tuition dollars). Only if we remember the importance of studying the human condition, do humanities have a reason to be. Only if universities remember that their role is to promote the life of the mind, will humanities enjoy a central position within them.
By extension, the same applies to many of the sciences, and to everything offered by universities which is anything other than vocational. This is why our struggle is existential, for the soul of the university.