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. The junior faculty can’t afford to be that way.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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?
(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 it.
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 for society 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
Departmental politics has always been bad. That is nothing new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmographia_Academica
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. The junior faculty can’t afford to be that way.
What was it like in the 70s that we are now missing?
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.
Funding.
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.
What a stupid fucking idea that was!
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
(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 it.
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 for society 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.
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.
+1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly good at programming.
How much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-taught?
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.
U Chicago is far more than Booth and the economics department.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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.