Are the humanities at American universities in crisis?
In this week’s New Yorker (March 6) there is a long piece by Nathan Heller called “The End of the English Major”, which argues that “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country”. What’s happened?
The statistics are certainly alarming. “From 2012 to the start of the pandemic,” Heller writes, “the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight.” The number of language, literature and history majors who graduated “decreased by roughly half”.
At Ohio State’s main campus, the number of humanities majors who graduated between 2012-20 fell by 46%. Tufts, he writes,
‘lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates … saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.’
In 2022, writes Heller, a survey found that only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from 20% in 2012 and nearly 30% in the 1970s. In particular, the number of English majors “reportedly declined by about three-quarters”. In 2020, “there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand”.
The larger picture is not much better than these examples. “During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrolment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent.”
Heller offers a number of explanations. First, he quotes James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia. Shapiro draws a graph. It starts from 1958 when the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than $1 billion for education. “That was the beginning of the glory days for the humanities,” he says. The graph plummets in 2007, the beginning of the economic crisis. “The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level,” says Shapiro.
As federal spending fell through the floor, who was going to pick up the shortfall? Not the states. State spending fell dramatically during the same period. “In 1980, on average, state funding accounted for seventy-nine per cent of public universities’ revenue,” writes Heller. “By 2019 that figure was fifty-five per cent.”
As funding has been cut at federal and state level, universities have increasingly looked to tech, business and big science to fill the gap. Two years ago, Harvard opened a 540,000 square foot Science and Engineering Complex, which “reportedly cost a billion dollars”. Heller met students who told him, “Mark Zuckerberg just gave another half billion dollars for an A.I. and natural intelligence research institute, and they added new professorships. The money at Harvard … is disproportionately going into STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics].”
It’s not just that that’s where the money is, it’s also where the jobs are. And in the wake of a big economic crisis that matters. Choosing between good jobs in science and tech or no jobs with a humanities degree, students are voting with their feet, perhaps especially first-generation Americans. “In 2020,” Heller writes, “the Survey of Earned Doctorates found that less than half of new arts and humanities Ph.D.s graduated with a job – any job.” Even at Princeton, of fifteen people who began the English Ph.D. programme in 2012, “only two have landed on a tenure track” more than ten years later.
In the good old days of the early 1990s, David Hare famously spoke of choosing between Dylan and Keats. In America, it seems, students are choosing between Google and Keats. Nor is this phenomenon just about money and jobs. There’s also been a huge cultural shift. We are back to those old Dead White European Males (DWEMs), who don’t resonate with many younger students. “Young people,” one English professor at Harvard told Heller, “are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction.” Talking about teaching The Scarlet Letter she says, “The nineteenth century is a long time ago.” This is a curious comment. When I studied The Scarlet Letter at Columbia Graduate School, the nineteenth century didn’t seem that long ago. So what’s changed for the present generation?
This leads to a major problem with Heller’s piece: the elephant in the room. There is almost nothing in his 11-page article about the wave of woke politics and political correctness that has swept American universities in recent years. Could this be a factor? Faced with a choice between jargon, all kinds of fashionable theory and the politicising of the humanities on American campuses, from small liberal arts colleges to big city universities, what are you going to choose? Medicine, law and STEM subjects, which are your best bet for a career in marketing, AI or engineering, or young humanities professors talking about race, gender, Queer Theory and colonialism? It is revealing that Heller barely goes there. The New Yorker, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, seems to have moved with the times.
If you want a sense of this new culture in the humanities, read The Tyranny of Virtue (2021) by the American critic, Robert Boyers. At his college, Boyers saw a sign that said, “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE”. Of course. Who doesn’t want to be in a college which is safe and protected from potentially violent intruders? But this isn’t what the sign meant. It was about “ablest language”: expressions like “stand up for”, “turn a blind eye to” and “take a walk in someone’s shoes”. These are now considered offensive. A professor who talks about turning a blind eye to something is offending someone who is visually impaired. This is typical of an academic culture obsessed with harms, protections and all manner of offences. Nothing is innocent. Intention is irrelevant. As Boyers writes, “just about every conversation had become a minefield. Not just conversations, every lecture, every comment in a seminar or to a student in a casual conversation”.
A student complains to Boyers about a set text by the white anti-apartheid South African writer, Nadine Gordimer. It was “a bad idea” for a “privileged” white woman to be dealing with people about whose lives “she was bound to be clueless”. Were there particular instances in the novel, Boyers asks her, where Gordimer seemed to her “clueless” and had gotten things wrong? She couldn’t say. “I felt very uncomfortable about the direction we were heading in,” she says. She didn’t like “the usual Western prejudices”. This is not open for discussion. How she felt trumped everything.
Federal and state spending, the economic crisis of the last ten years and the pressures of the job market have made things difficult for the humanities in US colleges. But what Heller and the professors he interviews fail to tell us, and what Boyers eloquently reminds us, is that many of these problems are self-inflicted. Faced with the New Puritanism, too many universities have waved the white flag. Now it’s the humanities that are paying the price.
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