Can the Humanities Be Saved?
When I finally landed a tenure-track position at a Canadian university, I was ecstatic and full of hope — exhilarated by the opportunity to teach students about literature and ideas and to have conversations with colleagues equally in love with literature and ideas. I didn’t realize that my experience as a university teacher of English would have much less to do with these passions than with the distortion of the university’s core mission in the name of pedagogical and political orthodoxy.
To begin with, the student writing that came across my desk left me aghast. I had taught before, but I was unprepared for the level of illiteracy, the stunted vocabularies, near-complete absence of historical knowledge, and above all the extraordinary apathy of many English majors. The most basic of expression rules — the difference between it’s and its, the incorrectness of “would of” for “would have,” the role of the apostrophe or semi-colon, the fact that “a lot” was two words — were beyond the grasp of the majority, no matter how often I reviewed grammar or devised mnemonic devices. And the sheer sloppiness and muddled thinking in the essays, where the titles of poems and authors’ names were frequently misspelled and dates were wildly inaccurate, suggested a fundamental indifference to the subject matter.
Not only was my students’ writing appalling, but I soon encountered their resentment at being told about it. “Who are you to tell me I can’t write?” was the attitude — once expressed in those very words. More than one student insisted that her other teachers had always rewarded her with high marks for her “creativity.” Most believed themselves more than competent. After sitting with one young woman explaining the cause of her failing grade, I was befuddled when her only response was a sullen: “This doesn’t exactly make me feel good.” When I responded that my job was not to make her feel good, she stood haughtily, picked up her paper with an air of injury, and left my office without another word. In her mind, I later realized, I had been unforgivably cruel.
I was up against it: the attitude of entitlement rampant amongst university students and nurtured by the utopian ideology that permeates modern pedagogy, in which the imposition of rules and identification of errors are thought to limit student creativity and the fostering of a hollow self-esteem takes precedence over the building of skills on which genuine self-respect might be established. In the Humanities subjects in particular — and in English especially, the discipline I know best — such a philosophy has led to a perilous watering down of course content, with self-validation seen as more important than the mastery of specific knowledge.
With this philosophy has come a steady grade inflation. The majority of students in English courses today can expect a B grade or higher merely for warming a seat and handing in assignments on time. The result, as I soon discovered, was a generation of students so accustomed to being praised for their work that when I told them it was inadequate, they simply could not or would not believe me. They seemed very nearly unteachable: lacking not only the essential skills but also the personal gumption to respond adequately to criticism.
When I mentioned my dismay to fellow teachers, a number were sympathetic, sharing stories of student resistance and unwarranted smugness. One told me of her humiliation at being hauled before the department head by a posse of disgruntled students who alleged that the grades she had awarded were at least 5% lower than their average, and must therefore be raised to correspond with their accustomed level. Rather than laughing them out of his office, the department chair undertook to investigate the matter, informing the instructor that if the allegation was found to be correct, her marks would have to be revised. In the end, the case was not as straightforward as the students had claimed and my colleague’s marks were allowed to stand, but the damage to her sense of authority — and the outrageous notion that a professor’s marking could be determined by precedent and forcibly harmonized with previous grades, regardless of quality — had already taken effect.
Other professors with whom I spoke were not so sympathetic. They stressed the personal challenges students faced at university, the need to consider so-called alternative pedagogies to pique student interest. In other words, the problem was mine if students did not “feel good.”
One colleague suggested — when I complained that not a single student had read the assigned novel on the day we were to begin discussing it — that I should show a film on a related subject for a change of pace. At a professional teaching workshop designed to re-ignite one’s teaching passion, I was told that group discussion need not be stymied by the fact that students came to class unprepared; a student who had done the assigned reading could explain the reading to the others in the group so that all could participate and benefit. The message was clear enough: being hip and cheerful and expecting little and demanding nothing were the keys to happy classroom encounters. And student happiness — not commitment to the subject — was unquestionably the goal.
As Mark Steyn analyzed in his recent book on the decline of America, the emphasis on a vacuous therapeutic empowerment of the student body has led to a drastic lowering of expectations in North American post-secondary institutions. Students now read less than ever before for their courses, and professors are under increasing pressure to evaluate students in non-traditional ways (i.e., outside of tests and essays). The burgeoning number of students who register with a disability complicates evaluation: teachers are expected to accommodate invisible learning problems — their nature undisclosed due to privacy considerations — which mandate that they provide extra time on in-class tests, refrain from imposing late penalties, provide their lecture notes to students, or allow them to write exams on a word processor. The emphasis in hiring decisions on student evaluations of teachers — see, for example, the public website “Rate My Professor,” in which students’ often crass assessments are posted for all to see (“She’s hot!” “His voice puts you to sleep”) — makes it increasingly attractive to instructors to earn popularity, or at least to avoid attack, by giving high grades and making their courses fun rather than demanding.
As traditional content is removed from courses, it is often replaced by non-academic material, specifically a devotion to “social justice” that masquerades as critical analysis despite the fact that the impartial weighing of evidence so necessary to such analysis is largely absent from its championing of victims. In books such as The Professors, David Horowitz has shown the dominance of Leftist activists at American colleges and “the extent to which radicalism at the very edges of the American political spectrum [has] established a central place in the curriculum of American universities.” A recent report by the California Association of Scholars laments the widespread politicization of teaching, pointing out the extraordinary imbalance of liberal to conservative scholars at California universities (29:1 in the Berkeley English Department, for example), a situation that certainly applies across North America. Many professors in the Humanities and Social Sciences devote themselves less to teaching their particular disciplines than to decrying the presumed crimes of the United States, sympathizing with Islamic terrorists and other violent dissidents, calling for the overthrow of the capitalist world order, and condoning plans for the destruction of Israel.
As Horowitz explains, the radicalization of the Humanities and the decline of academic standards are closely related, with political commitment often necessitating the abandonment of scholarly integrity. Many teachers of English no longer care much about prosody or literary history or correct grammar because such subjects seem trivial beside the grand social struggles that claim their allegiance. It may well seem more urgent to combat racism than to combat the comma splice, to analyze patriarchal privilege rather than Jane Austen’s irony; and when right thinking is more important than rigorous thinking, details can be overlooked in the cause of student enlightenment. Combine this with an administrative emphasis on filling seats and a state commitment to student access, and one has the perfect academic storm, one that sweeps away scholastics and whirls in crude social engineering.
That many of my colleagues seemed sincere in their commitment to history’s underdogs cannot excuse the damage caused by their policies and by their skewed teaching practices — for their ideological convictions were often imported into the classroom, where a balanced overview of course material was sacrificed to the politics of “race, class, and gender.” Students learn quickly enough in such courses that success requires them to adopt approved positions: to be skeptical of Western nations’ claims to equality and justice, to understand their country’s history as a record of oppression, and to look with ready admiration at non-Western cultures, which they are taught to see as superior. Young white men learn early on that history’s villains are usually white men. Lesbian identities, Aboriginal culture, and Sharia law are protected from critical appraisal by charges of homophobia, genocidal racism, or cultural imperialism. Instructors often choose the texts on their syllabus not to represent the traditional scholarly consensus on the important and best literature of the period but rather to represent a range of victim groups presented in noble conflict with the forces of social prejudice. Literature is taught not because it is valuable in itself but because it teaches students to denounce inequality and to empathize with victims, and to feel appropriately empowered in grievance or guilty by association.
Indeed, some students become so immersed in Leftist ideology — a kind of secret society whose code language they have learned in fear and trembling and now exercise with pride — that they believe it the only possible view of the world and have never seriously considered alternatives except as the deplorable prejudices of the hateful unwashed. Their conviction of rightness has revealed itself in a multitude of anti-intellectual and repressive behavior on university campuses across the country.
What is to be done? De-radicalizing the Humanities will be no easy task, for the ranks of the professoriate are filled with instructors who see their primary responsibility to be that of advancing ideological goals. True believers as they are, they will not be easily dissuaded from their cause, and dissenters from Left orthodoxy often feel overwhelmed, beleaguered, and under threat. Yet saving the Humanities for genuine scholarship has never been more urgent, and it is heartening to know that articulate champions of reform such as Horowitz and others, including Richard Cravatts, Stanley Fish, and David Solway, continue to raise their voices in dismay and stalwart hope. Some day, perhaps, if the decline is not irreversible and if more courageous professors will stand against the corruption of the academic enterprise, departments of English might once again become places where professors and students pursue a love of literature.
Prof. Fiamengo speaks the unvarnished truth. I can attest to all of this from three plus decades of personal experience in the academic trenches, but her optimism for changed is regrettably misplaced. The behavior of students is a development of structural and cultural changes in the educational system. While dedicated professors like Fiamengo lament the problems of educating students, who are continually rewarded for apathy and mediocrity, the real business of universities as an integral part of the corporate structure of states (provinces), municipalities and the financial (student loan) industry persists. Universities are employers, construction sites, and businesses that help create commercial paper. They are no longer institutions of education–at least not in many of the humanities and social sciences departments. So, take it from this old war horse who luckily escaped with just a few scars, show the movie, tell them how wonderful they are, and if need be get a box of gold stars to make them feel good. Learn to flatter, to lie outright, and to be deceitful by omission. At department meetings day dream and vote with the majority. None of those proposals will make a difference anyway. Put the time and more important the energy you save into your own life of the mind. At all cost, avoid controversy. If you have a complaint from a really mediocre and insane student, tell her that sometimes the work of really gifted people is difficult to evaluate by mere mortals like yourself. I had a colleague who invented that technique. It works wonders. If you follow this advice–especially the part about being facile with the truth–you can easily become a dean and maybe a university president. Now, I did none of these things. I fought tough battles, usually alone, and lost nearly all of them. Thing of it this way: it’s indoor work (especially in Ottawa); it doesn’t require heavy lifting; and the positional freedom is wonderful. Universities will not change because of anything internal, but because eventually the costs will not sustain the fraud. Would I take my own advice? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a matter of temperament that I didn’t have. But so many people who do go into academia in the liberal arts have adopted the mantra: they pretend to learn, just as we pretend to teach them.
Do you realize what monsters your advice is releasing on civilized society? We have to endure these reprobates when you (the system) have failed to filter them properly. Now, credentialed with a degree, they are insufferable in their self righteousness. They think they know it all, when really all they do is constantly parrot that leftist ideology they were ingrained with. They infect every aspect of society, from business to journalism. The apathy you advocate is akin to sleeping at the switch. You daydream while two one mile long trains rush headlong at each other.
When you challenge their logic, they scoff at you. They mock you with their noses in the air as if you have no right to approach one as smart as they. They are incapable of explaining their positions because they don’t have too. Nobody ever made them, apparently. Whoa be unto us when the University system just gives up the fight. Though from your descriptions, it seems the battle was lost long ago.
I have been wondering when the Great Dumbing Down began, and blogged about it twice. It was the pseudo-pragmatists of the Progressive movement who should take the blame as they appropriated the German Romantics, especially Kant, to establish moral relativism. I wrote about it here: http://clarespark.com/2012/03/22/3760/. Follow the links.
No, the GREAT DUMBING DOWN, the real one, came in the 1970s when it became inarguably evident that the promise of school integration had failed and was in all likelihood based on a false premise. The premise of the social democrats, to use your phrase, of the ’50s was that getting blacks out of segregated schools and into schools with whites and with the same resources that whites had would quickly ease their deplorable economic station in the Jim Crow South. Blacks began entering white schools in the mid to late ’60s and by the mid-’70s the whole notion of black schools and white schools had been erased except to some degree in the cities which were very much segregated geograpically. It quickly became evident that the mass of black students weren’t just a few years behind, they were generations behind. It was unacceptable to academia and the social democrats that the bulk blacks be at different grade levels for their age than the bulk of whites, so rather than a program of remediation, the education system with considerable prompting from the courts trashed their disciplinary and academic standards and substituted self-esteen for learning. We’re integrated now; the bulk of white students behave just as badly and perform just as poorly as the bulk of black students. The unintended consequence is that we’re on the precipice of either being ruled by an elite that is willing to dramatically curtail democracy in this Country so that it can be safe and productive or being ruled by another elite that will pander to the non-performers and criminals to the extent that the productive elite simply goes Galt or leaves the Country altogether.
Year zero is 1992. A batty old lady fails to hold a scalding cup of coffee in a foam cup between her legs while wearing shorts.
Result: civilization falls.
The most notable other time this happened was in Alexandria in 641 A.D. Some guy shows up with a bunch of other guys talking about something called Islam.
Result: 14 centuries later, door knobs there are sold as Rubik’s Cubes.
Actually, all of the above.
As an addendum to this last link on dumbing down, see this blog dissecting Harvard Business School and its follies, escaping the real world of unnatural hierarchies. See http://clarespark.com/2012/05/20/kick-me-again/.
Uncanny. You just gave a spot-on description of my 30 year old nephew. I don’t know how many degrees he has, but he has no job and lives with his grandfather, which he is angry about. I assume he has a lot of student loan debt, which he is angry about. He constantly rails on about his leftist, socialist ideas, but can’t explain why they don’t match up with reality, which he is angry about.
His mood can change it seems at the flip of a switch, there is so much free-floating white hot anger just under the surface. It is unreasoning anger, and if you try to inject reason into a discussion, you will set off that anger.
How indeed is this person going to function in society, productively or socially?
Your “advice” has detrimental consequences for your students. When you tell a student that they’re good at something, and they know, deep down, they aren’t, you’re setting up a conflict between perceived authority and personal, real-world experience. You’re telling them, “Believe me, not your lying eyes.” Instead of building their self-confidence, you’re actually undermining it. At least, that’s what will happen to any student with even a modicum of self-awareness.
Every English teacher I’ve ever had has petted me and told me how talented I am, “You should be writing professionally!” blah blah blah…I couldn’t take them seriously, because they say the same things to people who seem (to me) to be barely literate. It’s taken two decades to realize that they weren’t all lying to me and I CAN write. Theoretically, I might have figured that out a bit earlier if all the instructors weren’t busy lying to everyone.
“Do you realize what monsters your advice is releasing on civilized society?”
It gets worse. These coddled, self-entitled twits are entering military service. I’ve heard stories from some of the faculty at Air University, where the Air Force sends its officers for follow-on professional military education. Some captains have had meltdowns after failing tests in Squadron Officer School; majors attending the Command and Staff college can’t write topics sentences in their papers, much less developing and supporting convincing arguments. At pilot school, the instructors even have an acronym for their students: SNAPs — Sensitive New Age Pilots. I have no idea what it’s like in the Army.
Yes, the system will weed some of these out over time, as the military largely selects for merit (“largely,” because there is an element of PC in the system). But as these kids filter into the enlisted and officer ranks, what happens when they encounter an enemy on some battlefield who “disrespects” them? And how are they going to deal with the after-action critiques (if they survive)? We can’t afford to lose on a future battlefield because our troops can’t handle the enemies’ lead-and-copper criticism.
Man! I did SOS by mail while going through tech. school at Keesler AFB, back in the late 1980′s.
When I got to Langley AFB, my commander emphasized the importance of doing SOS, and was floored to find I’d already completed it. The rot was well established by then, I suppose.
A friend of mine is a retired Army E-8 and former drill sergeant. He lives near Fort Leonard Wood, MO (AKA “Fort Lost in the Woods”). Back in the 1990s, he told me of how watered down basic training was becoming. He told me the trainees were issued “stress cards” to give to their DIs any time they felt too stressed by training. In effect, they were giving themselves a time out. That was during the Clinton years.
From what I’ve heard, that’s no longer the case. A decade of combat tends to get rid of most garbage like that. I have a lot of respect for anyone who’ll enlist in a time of war knowing he’ll (or she’ll) likely end up in a combat zone before too long. Learning the things they’ll need to stay alive should be a very high priority.
5 stars
Aha! Finally the pajamaclad kiddies throw up a little somethin’ that can be subjected to genuinely literary criticism.
Happy days.
I actually clicked on your link and read your “genuinely literary criticism.” You, sir or madam, are a pretentious ass who flamboyantly proves Ms. Fiamengo’s point. Just FYI.
I followed you link. I couldn’t get past the second sentence, so I skipped a few paragraphs just to find out if your writing would start to make sense. Unfortunately, the rest of your blog was written in some language other than English. You must learn to make sense before most people will read your writing. Then you can work on developing your own style. When you get to that point, please have mercy on your readers: try not to sound like Long John Silver.
Socrates never spent a single day in a classroom. Philosophy will exist as long as the human soul desires to “know thyself”. If universities become inimical to the search for truth, justice, and beauty, then they will dissolve and the search will proceed elsewhere, in other venues. Today, the internet provides a means to continue the Peripatetic tradition. Considering the degradation of spirit endemic to the university experience as it is currently constituted, it is very likely that the next generation of philosophers will not be found on a college campus. They’re just ‘Rat holes infested with atheistic Marxism anyway.
Socrates and Plato are the problem. Most of our most prestigious colleges and universities were founded by Christian men with a profound respect for Scripture. Now they are figuratively run from Plato’s Academy, a den of idolatrous thought, vain philosophy and empty seduction. Socrates contributed nothing to society. He alienated young people. That’s what we’ve got today.
Socrates and Plato have been studied in schools and colleges for several thousand years. The decline in university standards chronicled here began some 20-40 years ago.
Yet you blame Socrates and Plato for the current decline. Nonsense.
Bull.
Get thee behind me, Tertullian.
Eubulus, it is the Sophists you describe.
What “we’ve got today” is Neitzche’s post-modernist progeny like Foucault, Derrida, et al who go even beyond moral relativism or situational ethics but into the right for me, true for me that is poisoning our society.
I believe you are correct about the 1970, that’s when they stopped teaching Latin, which helps train the mind to actually think and follow language rules; also the root meaning of words.
Can a mind formed in 140 character bursts accomplish deeper thinking?
Plato & Aristotle are not the problem. Half-wits who cannot understand the difference between faith and reason make problems. It is not about returning to the past. Schools must change to respond to new media demands. That does not mean watering it down or resorting to edutainment.
Good article, and appropriate, however you must live a special type of Hades, with Allen Rock in charge of your school.
The softer disciplines are doomed in America unless the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision Griggs vs. Duke Power is reversed. As a practical matter, it compelled “everyone” to acquire a college degree. Young adults started attending college who lacked the sufficient intelligence to pass the courses. The standards inevitably dropped and grade inflation became the norm. A tacit agreement was reached with both parents and students: pay your money, ignore the increasing intellectual corruption, and Mary Sue and Billy Bob will get their so-called liberal arts degree and obtain a good paying job. This promise can no longer be kept because cynical employers now usually respect only hard science credentials.
May we please make a distinction between the humanities and the social so-called “sciences.” Nowadays the humanities are taught as if they were a social “science,” when in fact and historically the humanities is a very different beast, with a very different end.
That’s right.
There’s no ‘science’ in these new politically correct ‘social sciences’. It’s just idealistic nonsense.
In her article here Janice Fiamengo says, “Students now read less than ever before for their courses, and professors are under increasing pressure to evaluate students in non-traditional ways (i.e., outside of tests and essays).”
Doesn’t this stem from the use of hip truncated language via these battery operated hand-held electronic devices, this contrived need to be in constant “Touch” with their adolescent peers?
While those IPhones et.al. may be the source, where are the parents of these dear kiddies? Don’t they monitor their child’s high school years?
I audited a few English Lit. courses in my seventies at our local Community College, then left disappointed, coming to believe that at least half of the students enrolled had no business being in “College”.
My own BA from an academically rigorous private college (Economics, 1954) was from another world. We used to do “all nighters” before finals.
No electronic “word processors” for us….our “processing of words” was indicated by our lengthy handwritten answers to a very few broad questions on a chalked blackboard, three sweaty hours at a time for our “Comps”, …those dreaded Comprehensive Exams in our Major.
I’ll bet that the above reads “like” something quaint…..right out of Charles Dickens…..
“Doesn’t this stem from the use of hip truncated language via these battery operated hand-held electronic devices, this contrived need to be in constant “Touch” with their adolescent peers?”
No, it started before that. Remember, teachers give credit for attending a protest. Even back in my day they used to give us “credit” for going to a rock concert.
However, with the constant advances in technology teachers just find new ways to advance their students.
The analysis is fine, the detail interesting and well presented, and many will nod in agreement. But nearly all has been said before (notably by VDH, often on this site).
The elusive nettle to grasp: What is to be done?
Maybe read Prof. Fiamengo’s final paragraph first: “articulate champions of reform…voices of dismay…stalwart hope…love of literature”. That’s it? Oh dear me no, not in the face of blitzkrieg.
This is all far too important to be left to those bricked up in the ivory tower, however much they pout. Time for us groundlings to attack, to name, shame and cut off funding, the first goal being to pit disengaged faculty against their sanctimonious colleagues. Progress can be measured by the level of the temper tantrums in the faculty lounge. Starting point: No taxpayer funds for any science projects, above all in the squishy ‘social sciences’, indeed no funding for gov’t projects of any kind, including defense — until well-defined standards return to the humanities.
Academic freedom translates as unbridled license to waste taxpayer funds at will and erode the nation from within? The only yardstick is the sincerity of the assertion, self-declared at that? Dream on. Many in the English dep’t have a future flipping hamburgers. And as for the endowment and all those pension rights… well, let’s just say angry parents and short-changed students make fine litigants.
What else should we expect when students are taught they evolved by chance from worms and reptiles?
1) You don’t understand evolutionary theory. 2) Your argument is irrelevant. 3) Both of my sons were home-schooled and they read with comprehension, write very well (both have published work), and think analytically. They were also taught evolutionary theory as the well-established science that it is. I refute it thusly.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, St. John’s College… for allowing me to be one of your students. My gratitude is boundless.
And these are the folks are awash in student loans they can probably never pay off.
What will they do when the boss makes them feel bad?
Here in LA there is a requirement that everyone take college prep courses to ensure a high level of education amongst the students. In order to keep the level of graduation “high” the passing grade for said courses is a “D”.
In California there is an issue because in some instances there is a shortage of money to pay for remedial classes that students need to take in order to do college work. If these people cannot do college work why are they in college?
I work in a museum that hosts tours from local high schools. A while back a student came thru and paid using a debit card. He had to sign a receipt. The signature looked like it was from a 5 year old just learning to write. I made the comment that it seemed like schools no longer emphasized penmanship. The teacher agreed.
I find it amusing when people come up with the exact fare and are bemused when I tell them they have to add more because of taxes. It happens all too often.
Last summer we had a group of interns who were home-schooled. Fine people. So I finally asked why home schooling. She looked at me for a second and then said “you have obviously not been to a public school lately”.
And now they want me to vote to increase my taxes to help fund schools. It is for the children, don’t you know.
Hah.
The Common Core State Standards for English adopted by over 40 states does not require that cursive writing be taught. Other states make it optional.
I may be misunderstanding you but I am not talking about “Common Core” courses. I understand that. When I transferred from community college to university I took one of those myself.
I am talking about remedial courses designed to teach students to operate at a college level.
Some of us call them high school classes.
I was referring specifically to your comment on penmanship.
Ok.
Guess I am old fashioned because I think penmanship is important. Cannot always have a whatever they use these days.
There was a time when leeches were considered important.
Have a good day.
Now that everything important is typed, cursive isn’t emphasized. I don’t recall ever having to write a paper in cursive during high school, and definitely not in college.
When I took “Freshman English” in the fall of ’67 at a Southern state university, the standard for anything handed in was that it was to be written in fountain pen on unlined paper. I don’t recall that it being in cursive was even discussed because anybody over about eight wrote in cursive. Oh, and a comma fault or sentence fragment was and F and a misspelled word was a letter grade. You could strike through with a single strike, but you wouldn’t dare. It all just shattered my self-esteem.
Re: your,…..”, the standard for anything handed in was that it was to be written in fountain pen on unlined paper. I don’t recall that it being in cursive was even discussed because anybody over about eight wrote in cursive.”
Yes! I still have my Parker Pen. Still use it for writing personal checks.
At Sewanee we used “Blue Books”…..took several with us each time because there was no such thing as a short answer…”Terse” was admired, because it eliminated BS.
Many of my college students can’t read cursive because they’ve never learned to write it. I have to translate. Ugh!
I don’t teach professionally, but as a known visual artist I am frequently asked to be a guest-critic at various art schools around America. I have been doing this off and on for about thirty years, which is context for the last one:
There was simply nothing there. A prominent private art college arranged seven studio visits with graduating seniors and I spent the bulk of an hour with each. That was not a simile describing vacuous work, I mean there was nothing physically in front of me. The graduating art students had not produced anything more than a normal person could do in an afternoon. Bupkis. Some pencil sketches, an hour’s worth of clay work….one student put out four books that he was reading on carpentry and thought that should suffice. One became hostile when I asked my routine “show me what you’ve been doing” and responded with “what do you mean?!” She then pulled out her lap top and showed me web site articles she had collected about criminality being linked to lead in the brain. I asked her if she believed Bernie Madoff had stolen $50 billion because he had lead in his brain? Flustered she demanded “how do you know he didn’t?!” This was a college?
One New York critic has already labeled the current twenty somethings as “generation blank,” a generation without ideas or style.
But really really large student loans. I hope they “feel good” about paying them.
Like the above article, your comment doesn’t surprise me in the least. Via Facebook, I have reconnected with various acquaintances and friends from high school. One teaches at an art school in the northeast and often posts samples of his “work.” Most of his “work” consists of modifying digital scans of photos or artwork created by others. While there is some degree of technical knowledge involved in being able to modify the digital images, the end results are silly and childish and in no sense what I would consider art. And he’s a department chair in his art school. If that’s the kind of nonsense produced by the faculty, I can only imagine that the things the students did were even worse!
I’m not certain I even follow the comments and actions of the young lady you mention. What in the name of Jehu does saving articles on a possible link between lead and criminal activity have to do with her major or works?
A sad affair, but I still have some hope in that throughout history human nature always self corrects. In this instance a society built around incompetence cannot long survive, when other societies trounce them in the world market place of ideas. Then the incompetents either change or are absorbed. Absorbtion can be rather ugly and painful, but this is how human nature is corrected.
What was it I read today “We have created a Star Wars Civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” That’s all wonderful. Some believe that we are now at a point where we can change the Stone Age emotions of human nature through logic. I am skeptical of the thought given that students in the Humanities are now receiving A’s in Philosophy/Logic while doing D work. Somehow I don’t think that is a recipe for the big leap to reasoning our way out of this mess.
As I watch my daughter in high school navigate the oceans to a university, I find my new-found gratefulness for an education than began in California in the 60s’ and then transitioned to Scotland where I gained a strong appreciation of that history of the English-speaking. Yet, it was a teacher of the classics in high school that taught me the structure of the English language that allowed me to decipher the writing styles of Gibbon, Churchill, and that “Jame Bond guy’ Ian Fleming and those beyond. Although my focus on the engineering sciences took me away from that perspective, I must confess my hunger to learn more and make up for those lost periods has only inspired me. I am exploring those basic writings that guided our Western Civilization as well as those that inspired other cultures. I go forth with an open analytical mind. Now, if we could only convey that to our children and friends.
Relax, every once in a while, some religious doctrine takes over the universities in order to expand their control. Those excluded do great things with their lack of a “higher” educations. It really wasn’t that long ago when those of the wrong beliefs were excluded from Oxbridge and forced into other academies or the trades. These men created the steam engine, which pretty much facilitated everything you enjoy today.
We may be entering a new dark ages or we may be on the cusp of a great revolution in the welfare of mankind. The one thing we know is such a change won’t come from the Humanities. The odd thing is that the church of the Left has created all these acolytes with no useful skills but has lost the ability to provide succor in the wider institutions of the order. I guess you do eventually run out of other people’s money.
For those in the Humanities, you should simply go along in the university to ensure your stipend. But you could, using a nom de plume or nom de guerre, provide material via the internet for those students who wish to overcome the handicap of a university education (and the forced indoctrination via the English departments) to become educated in the classical sense, i.e., able to engage in freedom of thought. Although, they could just pick up a Freshman Rhetoric book published in the early 20th century from the Internet Archive.
As well as follow these factors in studying:
1. Provision for Specific Purposes
2. The Supplementing of Thought
3. The Organization of Ideas
4. Judging the Soundness and General Worth of Statements
5. Memorizing
6. The Using of Ideas
7. Provision for a Tentative rather than a Fixed Attitude toward Knowledge
8. Provision for Individuality
Sounds – or rather, reads – like a plan! Breitbart Is also Here, in what used to be the halls of learning…
I was lucky; when I earned my English degree at Cal State, Fullerton I rarely ran into leftist ideology. I only had one class with a leftist professor. The topic was postmodern novels, and I found it surprisingly difficult. The classes I usually took consisted of classics, like Milton and Shakespeare, and since those works are so deep and complex it is actually pretty easy to write a 10 or 12 page paper. Try writing just four pages on really thin and watery crap like “The English Patient” or experimental lesbian novels and you’ll understand.
I think Cal State, Fullerton is not so politicized because it is a commuter school. Most of the students work at least part time, and so they have experience with the real world, where nobody cares about feminist critical theory or other such idiocy.
To save humanities, the schools would have to eliminate whole departments. The ethnic studies and women’s studies have to go. Fire all of these bozos, and hire accounting and engineering professors.
The schools would also have to require that students have at least a part-time job so that they are forced to interact with normal non-leftist people.
These things would work but I don’t think they would ever happen.
Yes, that is what they are. But my advice neither created nor will it enhance this dysfunctional culture. It says to the good professor and people like her not to tilt at windmills. Academia can only be changed from outside. Charging a machine gun nest –especially by yourself–will only result in you own destruction. It is inappropriate to stand outside the fray and ask others to sacrifice themselves.
Organizations change only from either determination at the top or irresistible pressure from outside. They never change from the efforts of people inside on the bottom. What will reform higher education in the United States will be irresistible pressure from outside, since the current system benefits the people in charge of it too much for them to see any need to change it.
As a current public school teacher and former Dept. of State employee, I sadly concur with your opinion that it is impossible to reform entrenched institutions from the inside.
Perhaps, the first question that should be asked before you look for a solution is … ‘Should the humanities be saved?’
Does the world really need another critique of Plato?
Are there really any new approaches to the study of writers and poets of the 1700s & 1800s?
Do we want yo train another grammar nazi? Why is biological evolution to be embraced, but language change frowned upon?
Is a-rhythmic, non-rhyming speech really to considered to be equal in value to great works of the past? Is Angelou really worth studying so much that Shakespeare is to be consigned to the ash heap?
Until the promoters of humanities can provide answers to those (and similar) questions that are in greater depth then ‘As a tenured professor, I need to teach a class’ or ‘Because, ah, these are the classics’, humanities and other liberal type arts will continued to be viewed as being of questionable value.
Let’s dispell some myths: Private colleges can do and teach whatever they want, have as much oras little “academic freedom” as they want, and it really isn’t any of government or civil society’s business except we can and should chose not to hire the high-maintenance, high-self-esteem, low ability product they turn out.
Publicly funded universities and other institutions are another matter all together. Notions of tenure and academic freedom or freedom of expression are creatures of their mythological need to protect themselves from peasants with pitchforks and are established only in contract, policy, or statute; there is no fundamental right to these things. A college professor in a state school or a teacher in a public school has tenure and academic freedom because a legislature, school board, or board of regents has given them to them. In terms of fundamental rights, there is no difference between the professor or teacher and the janitor who cleans their classroom.
In the states where Republican governors can appoint boards of regents or state boards of education, we really should pay attention to who gets appointed. In the states where Republican controlled legislatures control how much money the university system gets, they can easily be brought to heel; when you have a public employee by his budget, his heart and mind follows. Teachers don’t need tenure when they have merit system protections or in over half the states union contracts. You can fire or lay off a tenured teacher, I’ve done it, but it costs more and takes longer because they have both their union grievance/arbitration process and the administrative process with direct appeal to the courts, other public employees usually have only one or the other.
If you remove the contractual or policy/statutory right to “academic freedom,” they become just like any other public employee; between the school bells they’ll say what they’re told to say or get fired, and outside work time, they can’t use color of office to supplement their personal opinion or they get fired. And, yes, I have disciplined and dismissed unionized public employees for off-duty speech.
It is really just a matter of buying the educrats’ mythology and not really understanding the rights of public management. Unfortunately, the EAs can buy school boards, so changes in K-12 will have to come from state legislatures under Republican control. I guess some states have elected regents, so people have to pay attention to who they’re voting for; if they have any support from the EA, vote for the other guy.
For at least the last couple of decade, university education has been sold NEITHER in terms of “learn this stuff because learning is interesting and good* NOR in terms of “learn this stuff because it’s practical knowledge you will need for your career” but rather “get a DEGREE because it will get you a good job!” It’s all about the piece of paper.
This kind of marketing leads more or less inevitably to the kind of climate that Janice describes.
If you are an auto manufacturer and you market your car exclusively via the meme “Buy this car and get hot babes!”, then you need not be disappointed when the people who show up in the showroom are uninterested in your descriptions of the innovative suspension system and the cunning valve motion. That’s not what they’re buying it for.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head. I took a peek at Bachelor degree stats from 1970 to 2008 and the one thing that struck me was that a huge number of these “worthless” degrees that are bandied about weren’t Women’s or Gender studies graduates. The biggest shift was to Business.
Around 20% of 2008 graduates chose a business major which somehow doesn’t jibe with Left Wing agenda. If “The Graduate” summed up the 1960s with the word “Plastics” does “Business” replace it in 2012? What does it mean when a technological innovation of a good is superseded by financial innovation?
What can be done ?
Gather talented teachers, found a true university, produce truly qualified intellectuals, let them have success and let them publicly humiliate the idiots produced by the subversives’ brainwashing machines.
It’s how it started, at the end of the Dark Ages.
There is another possible answer to the new dark age: build islands of knowledge (monasteries…) and abandon the world to its devices…
The march through totalitarianism will be very long anyway, you pick your way, your battles, your shelters…
PS The problem did not start with the recent subversion, it started when nihilism became the only accepted philosophy, the rest is just the inevitable consequence of that devilish step.
A colleague recently had a sign on his office door quoting Marx, to the effect that his goals were the death of God and the overthrow of capitalism. As long as we avoid acknowledging academia’s war against Western Civilization, there will be no improvement in the situation.
As I have previously advocated, academia must be financially boycotted – no more direct government subventions, no more alumni donations. Approval of accreditation organizations must be withdrawn from the US Dept. of Education and must be totally free-market. Employers must be urged to accept new forms of education and credentialing, to stop their implicit endorsement of the existing radical monopoly.
Oh, Lord, this brought back some memories. I graduated in 2010 with a double major in English and Creative Writing and a minor in Philosophy, so I spent pretty much all of my time in the humanities departments. Some of the teachers were wonderful, but some of them were . . . how should I put this . . . unfriendly to the conservative student? One of my professors, for example, would routinely interrupt his lecture for Sarah Palin jokes. Mentioning you had relatives in the military would make it Open Season on you.
As for what can be done about the situation? Buy some gasoline and a match, for starters.
Yep, that’s been going on for a while. Nearly 30 years ago, my American Lit professor assigned us a paper on ANY 20th century American author–our choice. So I chose Ayn Rand. Prof told me no. When I asked why, he replied, “Because she’s so selfish!”
Fast forward a couple years to graduate school, where I attempted to obtain a degree in English and history. I proposed to write a thesis on the historical and philosophical influences on Edgar Allan Poe’s works, in context–meaning no “deconstruction,” which was de rigeur at the time. NO faculty would agree to be my thesis advisor because I refused to “deconstruct” Poe into a dead white guy with an aversion to vegetables and a deep-seated hatred of women. Or something.
Needless to say, I gave up pursuing such a degree when it became clear just how politicized both fields were. But I haven’t given up climbing my personal Ph.D. mountain and have found an interesting alternative. I’ve already pissed off a couple faculty, but at 50, I could care less because I’m doing it for my own edification.
Before she gave up on teaching, a friend of mine from grad school days who taught college English used to give her students the first essay “free” – the grade didn’t count – but fully corrected for all errors of spelling, punctuation and style, as well as substance. Detailed criticisms that she estimated took her 1 to 2 hours per essay. She did this to give the kiddies fair warning what she expected, and did it before the “drop/add” date so anyone not willing to do the work could get out. She’d usually lose at least 1/2, but, interestingly, her evaluations were very high since the students who stayed knew she was really helping them. Her grades were usually fairly high, but only because the students met the expectations she set.
If the only purpose of the Humanities is to promote the political ideology of the moment then they are not worth saving.
You missed the point–that being, the humanities have been REPLACED by political orthodoxy. And that orthodoxy requires ignoring the actual greats in favor of political pretenders. Philosophy students know Derrida but not Cicero, art students know Pollak but not Raphael, literature students know Walker but not Dante. It’s nauseating and pathetic.
The REAL study of the humanities, the great thinkers and artists of history, is still 100% worthwhile.
The purpose of humanities is to anchor a student in received wisdom so they don’t blow in the wind.
Perhaps that was the purpose of the Humanities but today that anchor doesn’t hold and such nostalgia is academic.
No, study of the Humanities is to supposed to teach you how to think, not what to think. If you doubt that’s news to a generation or more of low-wattage, poorly educated ideologues, look around.
Prof. Fiamengo, your eyes must have been shut for most of your college education. When I realized just how little my graduate program had to do with the study of literature, I ran screaming from it. In 1985.
Now the question is, what will you do now that you see the light?
I don’t see how the current higher ed system can be reformed. I think it has to be scrapped. Online courses have the potential to replace the current lecture based approach.
I love talking philosophy until the cows come home. I really do. Educational, aesthetic, moral, etc. But what is being described, here, is a whole lot less lofty and much more grimey.
Put secondary education in its proper place, with the big unions, the Solyndras, the whole “green industry,” etc. No more and no less than they, higher ed. is a slush fund for leftists that hold political power. Not all of them are democrats.
Government student loans, 529 plans, Pell grants, etc. all drive up the cost of college. In return for the client base that a government guaranteed subsidy brings, “Big Ed.” promotes more government spending in every conceiveable area that isn’t military. Of course, Big Ed. also votes its pocketbook, democrat.
This is not complicated.
Educating the young depends upon adults who care enough about education to insist upon high standards (like, differentiating between “they’re”, “their”, and “there.”) I have noticed that parents become aware of teachers only when they have ‘professional days’, when the children must stay at home because the public school babysitting facility is no available. Ooohhh. The outrage!
University Education Departments are intellectual slums. Their graduates waltz out into the world, ready and able to pass on every fad and foolery now in fashion. Reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic are, to these snowflakes, so “harsh”. Also, who on earth wants to be bored, and who wants to work hard, when one can psychoanalyze students, and be ‘concerned’ as to their ability to socialize?? Teaching’s real deal is… the long vacations!
As to the huge debts owed by generations of university grads: why aren’t the Universities liable for these debts?
The quick answer is simple enough: No. In our existing 2ndy ed system, the humanities are dead. And will not be resurrected. Hoping for conservative influences will not help. Check out what is really being advocated by most on the right, you will find purely instrumental instruction as the model for education. (Russell Kirk is dead. So is Albert J Nock).
The one useful suggestion above is that which draws an analogy to the dark ages. We are there, and only a withdrawal from the surrounding society will keep the humanities alive. It’s really that simple.
NB: For all the questioning of “when did this happen”, the answer is that it’s the end point of a long process. C S Lewis, in 1944, wrote an essay on Democratic Education, which pretty much said all we are saying today. My personal answer is that it stems from the disastrous turn of progressives from Voltaire to Rousseau. The former you could at least argue with as a philosopher would; with the latter, you can only cut off his head. (Apologies to St Louis.)
The goal of the Postmodernists in the English department was to annihilate the canon (including, BTW, Stanley Fish). They succeeded, rendering themselves superfluous. Jane Austen would find that ironic.
I was lucky enough to go to Vanderbilt in the 1970s. The fact that it was an inherently conservative, upper-middle-class to wealthy school, and that it was deeply Southern (note the past tense) shielded it from the excesses of the 1960s. I was taught in the old style, by professors who never, if I recall correctly, inserted their political views into their lectures, either directly or by innuendo. They were also quite demanding of their students: an A from them was a by-God A.
This was true even of the fine arts department. An old hippy named Don Evans was the graphics teacher. He gave the impression that “anything can be art,” but when one student brought in a big sheet of white paper with some random scraps of white paper glued on it, and her shoe tracks all over it, and called it a collage, Evans turned sulphurous. It was funny, watching his inner artist struggle with his inner politico: the artist won, and she flunked the assignment! They handed out course Fs in those days, too, without the least compunction.
I went back to Vanderbilt three years ago for a visit, though, and it has become a PC bilge-factory like all the rest. You could see it in the posters for events, the curricula for classes, and the general tenor of the campus. Western Civ is no longer taught, I believe. (Anyone remember the troglodytes of the 1970s yelling “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”? What morons. They never learned that you don’t excrete where you eat.
We did read some wonderful women writers: Austen, Millay, Sand, Plath, etc. The canon did need to be opened up to allow the consideration of writers from different backgrounds, but the main criterion was, as it always should be, the quality of their work.
Re: cursive writing — I can do it, but it has always been wretched. I would love to write in a beautiful copperplate hand.
In another comments thread on this topic I suggested that colleges ditch the purely subjective humanities fields (such as anything with “race” or “gender” or “deconstruction” in the course description), and if anyone wants to try to make a buck teaching that stuff they should start a website and advertise for subscribers. I used the term “academic luxury item” to describe such courses.
While there is a lot of truth to much of the complaining here, similar issues were coming to the fore when I began teaching high school in the sixties, remember them? Over time, student effort and skill actually increased when it sank in after the sixties that the Age of Acquarius was not what it had been cracked up to be. The adoption of high stakes testing in elementary and secondary schools over the last twenty years has actually forced/permitted students in the lower to be exposed to some more challenging works and curriculum. Before that, there was a greater sense of “just do anything which will get them through.” These tests don’t particularly push the brighter students, who are judged more by their SAT’s and AP tests. Students still COMPETE to get into name schools.
The issues being discussed here were always in play throughout my 37 years of teaching, but some of us, myself included got more conservative in our insistence on skills and the canon as our careers progressed. The best teachers can not only insist on such things, but know how to defend them, even build them into the curriculum. It is always a battle, and I am sure that the current generation is going to hell in a handbasket, as generations have been so doing since Sodom and Gomorrah, but the good fight can still be fought and won, which is not to say that it is easy. Teaching is difficult and when we fail in one aspect or another, there are always societal reason out there, especially in the students and their families which we can blame. There are always shockingly ill-prepared students out there (especially when it comes to some particular element which WE think they should know. Any skill which they happen to have, which is way beyond us is pretty much irrelevant to our complaints, right?
It remains telling how few righties can or will fight the battle which it takes to be a good teacher in a public school. So what the hell, blow the schools up.
I have the deepest abiding fondness for all of the Humanities and Social Sciences. As an engineering student at Rensselaer, they represented [along with my beloved ROTC] the sole source of easy A’s [agreeing 100% with the the lefty prof] or amusing B’s [disagreeing vigorously at first - then letting him win]. Later in life, I revisited those subjects so I could better understand my favorite science fiction novels – which were written mostly by engineers.
Instead of a new Long March through the existing academic institutions, may I boldly recommend replacing them entirely with some new form of “knowledge repository”. I’m told that the Internet still has a bit of room among the porn and cute cat pictures. Or perhaps some bright young lads with no possibility of any real sex life could bend their enormous spare time to make a long, bloody video game that sneaks in classic commentary on freedom and self-reliance in between charging the Orcs for the Glory of the Emperor!
Another Rensselaer grad here! Didn’t love the humanities at RPI (I took a Women’s Studies course in the 1970s that was downright painful), but did get A’s in them!
I’ll pass on your video game idea to my son – another Rensselaer grad, with a double major in Business and Games & Simulations Sciences.
Reverse the decline in the humanties? Call me a cynic but I think that is like trying to drain lake Erie with a bucket and siphon hose!
I’m a tenured professor in the humanities. I’ll tell you the solution to all these problems. Mandate a 35% fail rate. Watch performances suddenly improve across the board, and we’ll get rid of the ones who shouldn’t have been admitted to university in the first place. PLEASE mandate a 35% fail rate … then we won’t have to explain to the little princes/princesses why they’re failing: I have to fail the bottom third, and two thirds of the class did better than you. Next!
Do NOT yearn for the good old days of grading on a curve. If there was ever a better vehicle for petty tyrrany and intellectual masturbation on the part of professors, I can’t bring it readily to mind.
Giving professors a mandated fail rate simply invites a recapitulation of King Lear, sans any guarantee of the blinding, misery, humiliation, and eventual death that would make it worthwhile. If you don’t think a professor with an agenda (or a prolapsed ego) can put students into pass and fail categories at will, you’ve somehow achieved tenure without ever meeting another teacher.
Guaranteed fail rates don’t remove bad students from the system; they cause bad students to flock together. They certainly cause bad students to flee ‘hard’ classes and those likely to be populated by truly intelligent students. Yes, some will fail, but the rest will see their sub-mediocrity vindicated. Meanwhile, the relative vacuum of idiots in the other classes will impose Fs on students who perform better than the ones who got As in a different classroom of the same subject. In the end, you’ll have kicked out a hundred promising scholars, and your valedectorian will be the surviving teacher’s pet from a series of classes that make underwater basket weaving look brutally pragmatic.
Students who truly challenge themselves don’t always get straight As. Those who never let the prospect of learning something threaten their GPA often do.
Here’s an idea: define your criteria for success and failure as clearly and objectively as possible. Explain the criteria on the first day of the class. Tell the students what level of performance will correlate to each grade. Get signed documents from the students saying they understand and accept those criteria. Remove those who don’t sign from the class. Then grade to the established criteria. If everyone performs to A level, give all As. If everyone performs to F level, flunk them all.
.. it would almost be like you could assign some sort of correlation between grades and performance.
It’s hard for today’s teachers to be told we have to fail a certain number of students, because so much of what passes for our “training” neglects to cover that whole unpleasant issue. An astonishing number of teachers entering the profession seem to think they should never have to fail any students, if they are doing their jobs correctly. It can be a rude wake-up call for such teachers to teach at a school which enforces real standards, as I did a few years ago, at a Business English college in China affiliated with an Australian university. We would get periodic memos from head office complaining that we were passing too many students. It was a bit depressing, but the fact is those unqualified students we were nonetheless passing would then go to study in Australia and be slaughtered because of their lack of English skills. Some of the less experienced teachers at the school would say things like, “I didn’t become a teacher so I could FAIL my students!” Well, welcome to the real world.
The American Experience is rapidly coming to a close. Our children are not being taught history and so, we do not know who we are. Our multicultural, political correct diversity posture forbids us to name or assess the probable actions of our enemies. A famous Chinese general said that if we do not know who we are and we do not know our enemy, then we will lose many battles. Unless America wakes up and throws off the shackles of the socialist-marxist blanket of lies and half-truths, we will not remember who we were.
Greetings:
I recently had the opportunity to spend a day evaluating a graduate level program at a small school in a quaint community along the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh. As you might imagine, I met with administrators and professors, toured the campus, spoke with students, and sat in on several classes. In spite of the catastrophe of modern education, I found an atmosphere that was nearly devoid of the influences and tendencies described in this article. The professors were passionate about the material. The students were serious and capable of informed discussion; the writing samples I had the opportunity to review were competent both in technique and the arguments they contained. The administrators were committed and supportive. Fluff was absent. Deconstruction and post modernism were conspicuously shunned. Self control and service to others, rather than self indulgence and entitlement, seemed to be the pre-eminent values on display. What kind of institution was this you ask? Make of it what you will. It was a seminary.
Best wishes,
Wallace Heller
I do not believe myself a cynic or unwarrantedly pessimistic when I say that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the only way back is forward. I think the rot is too pervasive, that the system will have to collapse before something with more integrity can rise from its ashes.
I sense that this analysis, if correct, has certain collaries concerning the fate of our nation, and perhaps even our culture, as a whole. We are a society and culture of interlocking and interdependent systems; as the public schools have gone the institutions of higher learning are going, and with them will go everything that depends on them.
How can we avoid societal collapse? The train of societal suicide is barreling down the track at 200 mph; it has a lot of inertia. How can it be stopped? In short, the conclusion seems increasingly unavoidable that a critical mass has already been reached.
Would that it were not so; but we gain nothing by wishing for that what is were not. How best to invest my time and energy is what concerns me.
Yes. I gave up trying to become an academic. At what point do we start to seriously consider that all this is intentional? Our society are preparing for us to become serfs ruled by an mindless bureaucracy manned by the very students described here. This is a DELIBERATE dumbing down. The documentation of such is copious.
I dropped out of university in my third year of a Bachelor of Arts in English. I did go and talk to the dean and told him that i felt i wasn’t getting an education, which was my goal, but merely enduring more years of indoctrination, in the pattern of my public school education. He completely understood and sympathized. It was probably the best decision i made that year. I got a job, helped my husband keep his loans to a minimum, and got pregnant with the first of our eight homeschooled children. Now my oldest is taking the provincial curriculum in a bid to get into university, but my husband (working on his third degree) and i are not encouraging this plan, unless he knows definitively what he wants to end up with. Otherwise, in our local economy, he will definitely earn more without the time and money drain of university. (We live in Alberta, Canada). And i find myself chafing at the dialectical materialism that is the high school “Socials” curriculum…