How can the Humanities evolve to remain relevant?

[roycroftmom]

Thoughtful article. Interesting point about students more in the present and less interested in history, and the difficulty even elite students now have in understanding texts such as Scarlet Letter

[simba9]

@Alqbamine32

Why does a thread that is supposed to be about the humanities attract so much attention from posters who want to discuss STEM fields? Is it possible to have a conversation about the humanities without discussing science, engineering and math? If not, I wonder why. This is not meant to be a snarky question. I am genuinely curious because as I glance through the posts, it seems like at least half of them are focused on STEM fields, particularly some of the most recent posts that do not mention the humanities at all.

Because one way to look at something is by comparing it with other things. When discussing why humanities is losing students, a comparison with STEM, which is where the students seem to be going, is naturally going to occur.

[simba9]

@roycroftmom

the difficulty even elite students now have in understanding texts such as Scarlet Letter

I find this amazing. We read “The Scarlet Letter” as a class back in high school.

[beebee3]

But, are more students going into STEM (once we account for International students)? Or are they going into new area studies and programs that didn’t exist 30 years ago?

Or is the drop due to the general drop in enrollment, which is also a thing?

Not sure STEM actually has anything at all to do with drop in humanities. Not sure the average student who wanted to study English, History or a Foreign Language suddenly decides engineering, chemistry, biology or maths is the what they actually want to study.

[Hippobirdy]

This is a fair point. Social sciences like psychology and political science are not STEM or Humanities.

[roycroftmom]

At one of my kid’s colleges the foreign languages faculty became much more adept at finding internships in Europe and holding summer courses abroad to spur interest for students. That worked.

Matching a humanities subject with a social science seems more popular-PPE, rather than straight philosophy.

[Hanna]

A lot of the growth has been in business majors, not STEM.

[roycroftmom]

Fair enough. More women, in particular, are choosing other fields rather than English majors:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-female-shares-of-ba-degrees-by-major-1971-to-2017/

[neela1]

Fascinating data. Makes a lot of sense about migration of the female workforce allowing them to be more financially independent.

[Data10]

@simba9

@roycroftmom

the difficulty even elite students now have in understanding texts such as Scarlet Letter

I find this amazing. We read “The Scarlet Letter” as a class back in high school.

I also read The Scarlet Letter in HS. It’s a standard HS text. One source mentions that it is among the top 3 most common texts taught in 11th grade, which makes it a surprising choice for a college class. Of course Harvard didn’t say that students can’t understand the Scarlet Letter and many Harvard English classes use texts that are more advanced than the Scarlet Letter and are not commonly taught in HS. As an example, the texts used in the most similar course to the prior one that included The Scarlet Letter is quoted below. I also quoted the description of goals for the class, which emphasizes other areas than sentence structure definitions.

English 178x. The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present

English 178x is meant to provide, above all, training in the reading and analysis of texts. Three goals will guide the lectures, worksheets, reading assignments, short papers and take home final exam within this course. First: to give a detailed critical reading of a representative set of classic American novels written between 1900 and 2009. Second: to define a basic set of narrative terms such as motif, character, plot, narrator, time, setting and objects. Third: to connect the novels and short stories into the wider questions of 20th century American culture. A starting list of such concerns would include:

1. Personality, character and role within a mobile, economic society of immigration and temporary location-- aculture of creative destruction.
2. Male Culture-Female Culture: their opposition and negotiation in American Experience.
3. The Regional, National and International cultures of Modernism.
4. The discarding of the 19th century social (marriage) novel. What replaced this stable form?
5. American urban culture and its relation to novel forms based on small town life.
6. The narrative impact of the new psychological models of experience, personal history,trauma, memory and the disorder of personal stories: war and its representation.
7. Newspaper and Film techniques of narration, visualization and symbol creation:the growth of popular, often visual, media and the effect of this rivalry on the novel.
8. The short story form and modern experience.
9. Aestheticism, the cult of beauty, impermanence and death as a modern version of the heroic…
10. Literary Naturalism and the end of the “moral tradition” in literature.
11. Experiments with time, duration, and juxtaposition within the novel.

January 24 - Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908)
January 26- Willa Cather, My Antonia Dover Thrift Edition
January 31- Willa Cather, My Antonia Dover Thrift Edition and story by Jhumpa Lahiri 2008
February 2- Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) and stories by Edith Wharton and Jonathan Franzen
February 7- Wharton, The Age of Innocence Jamesian consciousness; inwardness; the edge of society
February 9- Wharton, The Age of Innocence and Mary Gaitskill, “Orchid.” Updating the novel of behavior; crossing the line; exclusion. Class and society as environments. Anthropology of behavior in society.
February 14 —Nabokov, Lolita
February 16 —Nabokov, Lolita
February 21 no class Presidents’ Day (Lincoln)First paper due in section Thursday (7 pages)
February 23-- Selected Stories from Winesburg Ohio —“Mother,” “Adventure” “The Untold Lie” “Death” “Hands” “Paper Pills”. And Alice Munro, “Five Points”
February 28-- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner, “That Evening Sun”
March 2—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
March 7–Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and the stories collected in In Our Time.
March 9–Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and the stories collected in In Our Time
March 12 to March 20 Spring recess
March 21 - Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night The great alibi literature
March 23-- Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night and Ann Beattie, “Greenwich” Time"
March 28—Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
March 30-- Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
March 31. 7 page paper due in Section
April 4—Bellow, Herzog
April 6— Bellow, Herzog and David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person”
April 11—Ellison, Invisible Man
April 13—Ellison, Invisible Man
April 18-- Ha Jin, Waiting The new America. Immigration and what a novelist knows.
April 20-- Ha Jin, Waiting and stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
April 25—Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen
April 27-- Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen

[roycroftmom]

A lot of those were read in high school too-London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger.
If students can’t understand the basic sentence structure, their analysis isn’t of much value either.

[simba9]

@Hippobirdy

This is a fair point. Social sciences like psychology and political science are not STEM or Humanities.

I did a google search on “are psychology and sociology part of the humanities” and the first page that came up had the following:

"Humanities is an academic subject that deals with the study of the ‘Human Condition,’ ‌using analytical, critical, or speculative techniques.

History, languages, literature, law, philosophy, religion, performing arts, anthropology, communication, sociology, psychology, and many more areas fall under the umbrella of humanities subjects."

I can understand how people might argue about which classes are part of the humanities, though. My sister has degrees in psychology and sociology, and she’d taken enough statistics in both of those that she was a TA for statistics when she was going for her PhD in sociology.

[Data10]

@roycroftmom

A lot of those were read in high school too-London, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger.
If students can’t understand the basic sentence structure, their analysis isn’t of much value either.

There is nothing to suggest that Harvard students as whole do not have quality analyses in this course. You can read what students who took the course last year had to say about the class at https://harvard.bluera.com/harvard/rpv.aspx?lang=eng&redi=1&SelectedIDforPrint=57c26eef376d882768770e0b8c6189205253da45887008c704f649e269fbc8d7c71632f44be853ae9815125265abf065&ReportType=2&regl=en-US . There is nothing in the ratings or comments to suggest students are struggling in the course, beyond some students thinking completing one book per week was a lot of reading. Similarly there is nothing in the grading distribution or comments from the professor who taught the class to suggest students are struggling in this class.

[roycroftmom]

I never suggested those students in that course did not. It was the Harvard dean of undergraduate education ( an English professor) who said the last time she taught Scarlet Letter, the students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences, that some could not identify the noun and verb therein, that students’ capacities were "different " and that the 19th century was a long time ago. Just as one must know the alphabet to read fluently, one should know the noun and verb to analyze a text. YMMV.

Perhaps she was just more candid. I would expect her comments to be both accurate and reflective of a larger issue, given her position. It is unlikely that she misspoke.

I did look her up. As expected, she holds an endowed chair in English. Chaired the History aand Literature program for 4 years. Many years of teaching at Columbia and Harvard. A specialist in 19th century fiction, she wrote that she is committed to meeting students where they are.

[Data10]

Or perhaps a 2 sentence quote taken out of a larger conversation about a particular passage, in a single book, in a class offered 13+ years ago should not be assumed good representative of a Harvard students as whole in all English courses, particularly considering the author of the article has a specific idea he is trying to convey, and is more likely to earn more money by selecting extreme sounding quotes.

If this is a big problem, I’d expect someone else to have taken note of the problem. Has anyone ever suggested that Harvard students struggle understanding common HS English texts as you claim?

[roycroftmom]

In other words, you do not believe her, which is fine but I value her judgment on the topic more highly-she has far more, and more recent, exposure than you or I, to teens deciphering 19th century texts.
The author of the article would have confirmed the quote with her. The editors at the New Yorker also confirm direct quotes. She knew what she was saying. You may disagree, but her opinion is weighty.

[Data10]

@roycroftmom

In other words, you do not believe her, which is fine but I value her judgment on the topic more highly.

My previous posts have said the opposite. Taking a 2 sentence quote out of the context from a longer conversation is different from not believing the quote was accurate in the context of the full conversation. Extending the limited scope of that 2 sentence quote (sentence structure evaluation of a passage in one book in one course offered 13 years ago) to Harvard students as whole not being able to understand standard HS texts is also different from not believing. Asking if there is any supporting evidence for such an extreme claim besides this 2 sentence quote is also different from not believing.

[roycroftmom]

The author has been on the staff of New Yorker for a decade. He probably doesnt take things out of context too much, or we would see a string of corrections on his articles and he may not last at that publication.

I expect that Harvard students have no problem with most standard high school texts. There is evidence that at least some have a problem with 19th century text. We can agree to disagree on that, and move back to the question of reforming the humanities to remain relevant.

[Hippobirdy]

Ty, I agree depends how broadly one defined humanities.
I mean, in recent years, UMD, psych & govt majors were limiteddue to popularity, but history majors were not.

[Data10]

As I noted in my first post on this thread, some of the specific numbers the author lists in the article are at best misleading and at worst intentionally false. For example, continuing with the Harvard theme, the author states “a survey” found the number of Harvard students planning to study humanities dropped from 20% in 2012 to 7% in 2022. The Harvard freshman survey matches 2022, but indicates a lower number for 2012. Maybe he meant class of 2012 compared to entering freshmen in fall 2022? Or a different survey that I am not aware of? It’s also cherry picking years and methodology to make the decline seem larger. For example, in one instead looks at the actual number of humanities graduates over the past ten years, it paints a different picture. Some example numbers are below. Yes 29% to 21% is a significant decline, but it’s not cut in to 1/3 of previous levels, as the article text suggests. 21% humanities also doesn’t sound like as much of a catastrophe as the article implies.

2011 CDS – 29% humanities majors (counting 10% history as humanities)
2021 CDS – 21% humanities majors (counting 9% history as humanities)

It’s a similar idea for the other stats. They point a picture of a larger decline than one would expect by looking at NCES or other sources. The article instead cherry picks specific schools and majors with the largest declines. The article also doesn’t mention that humanities majors rapidly increased during the late 1980s, currently levels are similar to early 1980s, and there is some evidence of the declining flattening out since COVID. Instead it paints a more dire picture, including choose to catastrophic/emergency title – “The End of The English Major”.

Is it really impossible to think the author would favor printing a more extreme sounding 2 sentence quote, rather than the most representative quote from the full conversation? Look at what happened in this thread. The quote caught our attention and let to discussion and increased discussion + links to the article. The same thing happened on Reddit and elsewhere. People focus on the quote because it sounds shocking, generating revenue for both the author and the New Yorker. I don’t mean to single out the New Yorker as an outlier. Many news sources do this. If a news source makes things sound more extreme and more dire, it generates more views and ultimately more revenue for the news source. That’s why it’s important to independently read the underlying reasoning and support rather than focus on short, isolated extreme quotes.

In this case, there appears to be no supporting information for more extreme conclusions about Harvard students in general. Without any supporting evidence besides a 2 sentence quote about identifying sentence structure in a passage of a particular book from a particular class 13 years ago, I wouldn’t make grand assumptions about inadequate abilities of Harvard students in general.