Want To Save the Humanities? Start Reading
Introducing Persuasion’s “Intellectual Bootcamp.”
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Consider the following:
Syracuse University shuts down 93 of its academic programs, including Classics and Classical Civilization. It’s hard to fault the university itself for the move—no students were majoring in 55 of the shuttered programs.
Innovative Hampshire College, at one time among the most selective undergraduate programs in the United States, closes its doors, with the president citing “public discussion in this country about the value of a liberal arts education.”
Humanities majors at Harvard plummet from 30% of the student body in the 1970s to 20% in the 2010s to less than 10% and sinking—with professors describing themselves as feeling as if they are “on the Titanic,” and assessing their students as having trouble identifying the subject and verb in their course reading.
Students at Columbia report never having read a book cover to cover in high school, and students at NYU admit that they use AI for all of their assignments—with the professors usually either oblivious to or ignoring what’s going on. These are of course among the most prestigious universities in the country, with the most selective admissions.
The humanities crisis has gotten so intense, and has accelerated so quickly, that it is hard for us to wrap our minds around it. The usual fixes—either trying to modernize curricula to better integrate digital materials, which was the default of the 2010s, or else to go the other way and do all graded assignments as in-class tests with blue books—are so obviously evading the main issues that it’s difficult even to engage with them.
The point is that there has been a cognitive shift among young people. They are raised in a world in which tech is ascendant, in which their social and financial lives will be routed through tech and through digital spaces, in which longform reading is no longer of any clear utility. Asking professors to save the humanities by making classes more fun, or more rigorous, is like asking riding instructors to offer better lessons in order to save horseback riding from the advent of the automobile.
The future is here—and it’s not pointing in a good direction for people who care about the humanities.
So what to do? Well, the first thing is to try to understand the value of the humanities and to clear the discourse of a few convenient myths that have from time to time been introduced into the pedagogical discussion. The value of the humanities is not actually in “learning how to think”—that can be done in plenty of other pursuits, and in pursuits that have a more direct connection to students’ employability. It is not having a base of knowledge, and refined expression, that can ease one’s way into elite circles—the elites have changed and are pretty much only interested in how much money you make. Nor is it that the humanities will improve your life outcomes—just tell that to the writers who have died on skid row, or the adjunct professors wandering paycheck to paycheck as charter members of the “precariat.”
The value of the humanities is just that they are interesting, that they are worth pursuing entirely for their own sake. They are, in the end, wasted on people who aren’t interested in them. What has to happen, in other words, is that the humanities have to be rescued from the schools.
Within the domain of being inherently interesting and worthwhile, the humanities have a great deal to offer. They are a path to creativity and artistic excellence—it is very difficult to be good at any kind of art without being steeped in the culture that has come before. They are a means, among the sole means we have, for getting outside of oneself—a book is a kind of hard limit to the ego and the self, it requires parking one’s socially structured being at the perimeter of a book and leaping entirely into the consciousness of someone entirely different, often at a remove of continents or centuries. They offer a vehicle for thinking about ideas in the most distilled possible way—with the ideas sometimes serving as a hidden key to understanding events as they occur on the phenomenal level. And they represent continuity with the past—whatever else the digital era and AI may provide, they seem extremely unlikely to help us genuinely access minds that existed in a pre-digital world.
If we want to help the humanities survive the bleak period that is besetting them (and will continue to beset them), it’s worth grappling with those intrinsic values and being clear-eyed about them.
We are making a modest contribution to this vast problem by offering humanities-driven discussion groups through the Persuasion Institute.
Starting next Friday, May 1, I’ll lead a group called “Intellectual Bootcamp.”
We’ll meet on Zoom every other week at 12 noon EST.
For the first meeting, we’ll discuss Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”
“Intellectual bootcamp” is a chance to read, in a collaborative setting, the kinds of “big-picture” writers and thinkers who shape our discourse. Writers discussed will include, but certainly not be limited to, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Lasch, Byung-Chul Han, Simone Weil, René Girard, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, James Burnham, Walter Ong, Benedict Anderson, Joseph Henrich. The list may evolve with time but it will be drawn from work that I personally find meaningful and thought-provoking. The program is split between reading articles and reading full books so as not to make the reading volume overwhelming.
The group will provide motivation to read serious thinkers who are wrestling with deep problems of the individual and society, and to discuss them in what will hopefully be a fun and freeing atmosphere.
The reading group will only be available to paying subscribers of Persuasion, and a link will be sent a few days in advance. So if you would like to join, please take advantage of this offer to get 20% off your Persuasion subscription:
The reading group is of course a drop in the ocean in the overwhelming problem of the humanities’ decline within civic life, but it does seem important to place it in that context. The schools—the whole complicated beautiful structure of degree-conferring and pedagogical molding and shaping—will continue on in their own way, but they don’t really own the humanities, nor should they. They are, after all, businesses—or keepers of the public trust. They are answerable to the wishes of their student-clients, and if the students wish to do something more practical with their lives that might earn them back the extravagant cost of their school tuition, then the schools will have a tendency to meet the students where they are.
But the humanities are bigger than that. The internet opens up extraordinary new opportunities for learning and for intellectual collaboration—and it is my contention that those resources have barely been tapped. In theory, the internet allows people who care about this kind of material to not cease their studies at 22 or 25—which is sort of what the job market and the educational system quietly insist that they do—and to take the humanities seriously for the entirety of their lives. With the isolation that just about everybody feels, the sense that the endless scrolling and swiping don’t quite fill the void in your soul, it’s a bit of a shock that more online communities haven’t emerged by now to try to achieve in a digital setting a bit of the magic that is sometimes achievable in the liberal arts colleges.
If that system is breaking down, we owe it to ourselves to try to move what we can into the new online archipelagoes and into a more lifelong structure of intellectual exchange.
Anyway. The crisis of the humanities is an immense problem—it’s a breakdown of a carefully-constructed centuries-long project of thinking through the values and shared knowledge base of a society. As a problem, it’s likely greater than any of us can really comprehend and greater, certainly, than any one initiative. But we do what we can. I am very much looking forward to the “Bootcamp,” and look forward to seeing some of you when we start meeting on May 1.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and edits The Republic of Letters.
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Can the reading selections be announced to free subscribers? I can’t accommodate the zoom meets in my schedule anyway, but I’d like to read along on my own time.
I just finished reading Philip Roth's _I Married a Communist_. It's a novel about political ideology, its temptations and pitfalls.
But then about 2/3 of the way in, Zuckerman (narrator) encounters a college professor who disabuses him of the belief that art is political. It's a great soliloquy about the" purpose of art is art, period." I encourage people to read it and the book. It's what Sam is saying here.
But that it comes from a professor, ostensibly 75 years ago, suggests the recommendation to remove liberal arts from the colleges is ill starred. Colleges are the best institutions we have for resisting instant gratification and market pressure. They definitely need a makeover, to get in touch with what they value instead of chasing the market , rankings etc. I suggest changing demographic targets. Get older students who have already seen how pure careerism drains life of purpose. But starting from scratch, with brand new organizations, and without bringing in the teachers who've been doing this their whole lives, is a heavy lift.