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.
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 would love to participate in this experiment, especially as I totally agree with the premise: the humanities do not ONLY belong to or in the academy.
I’m a 73-year-old retiree who avidly studied humanities as an undergrad and then made a career in business and information technology. Throughout my career I encountered moments that only literature, philosophy, and social science could have prepared me for. Now, in retirement, I’ve returned to my original passion. Among other things, I’m now joyfully working my way through Proust.
The curriculum you propose looks both challenging and enriching. Great art and thought should not only be the inheritance of the young. Count me in!
It seems more likely to me that studying the humanities is in fact better for learning how to think but that employers don't want that and would rather just have people who do what they're told without asking too many questions.
Well i was thinking about the "elite" ruling class, but you bring up another interesting facet. Ive often wondered how many of the sheeple are inherently that way vs being made that way.
You've helped explain why I never read a book that was assigned in a class with as much enthusiasm and focus and depth of engagement as one I decided to read on my own. 40 years after graduating from college (UCSC) with a degree in humanities, I continue to read more books on a wider range of subjects (lots of biographies and US history these days) at a deeper level with more genuine curiosity than ever. This increasingly includes books I download from the local library to listen to with the Libby app while walking, with or without the dog.
One small but difficult step forward would be for colleges and universities to require that graduates are able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs with acceptable, if not perfect, punctuation. If students use AI to do so, they may still learn the concepts.
Agree, but I’m going to add something from a vy different direction. Want to save the humanities? Have children. I think there’s a backdrop to this that obviously involves technology, but also involves several social problems, including declining numbers of children & young ppl. For one thing, this means that many small liberal arts colleges, which often have been bastions of humanities teaching, will close (has already started to happen). They’re in no position to require students to write complete sentences; they can’t even fill their classrooms. Other institutions from large state universities down to elementary schools will compete harder to fill seats, which means they will be less likely to mk unpopular demands like “read the Symposium & write a paper abt it, using complete sentences and paragraph structure, preferably w/o using AI,” and more likely to pander to student demands, like “give me a degree that gets me a job asap, and I just want to get my papers out of the way as fast as possible.” They also will be under pressure to cut their humanities departments. With fewer young people, we have less support for schools and universities, less ability to mk learning demands on students, and a narrower base for exchanging and inventing new ideas. I 100% agree with suggestions in this article and also with your suggestion, but I also think a society that increasingly becomes aging people reading books will be less likely to support the humanities in schools by any approach at all.
Effectively ceding the humanities (and the liberal arts) to universities seems to me the proximate cause of their decline. These institutions have not been good stewards of these disciplines, and I don’t think they can recover so long as the universities survive in their current form.
Because I’m a dork and enjoy seeing opinion data and cross-tabs on controversial takes like this (eg, “Nothing of value would be lost if the four-year residential university model disappeared tomorrow”) I built an interactive survey app to measure how groups compare on these debates across a variety of dimensions at https://votto.app
Answer questions and explore if you enjoy interesting cross tabs and cool charts like I do!
The claims that the humanities are a link to how other people think is just as dubious as any of the others dismissed here - humanities people don't ever seem to understand people who don't come from their literary perspective. Whether that's us science and tech people, or people who don't spend much time on written text.
Anyways, when i see something of this sort and you include something by Neal Stephenson or Vernor Vinge, them maybe the downward spiral will be nearing its end.
In the meantime I'll enjoy reading the old literary books that involve genuinely uncommon prospectives by modern standards, and mostly ignore whatever contemporary crap that will likely be forgotten in a decade.
Maybe students are rejecting the humanities programs because of the decline in diversity of political thought among the professoriate? Studies show that conservative professors are almost extinct at many top universities. Who would voluntarily sign up for a re-education camp?
It's because our cultural priorities are whack. We prioritize profit and endless optimization. We don't prioritize humans. Humans need connection with people, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter. There isn't a single politician who ever talks about prioritizing the people of the country. This is why the humanities are shrinking - we don't give a shit about humans. (Or the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants for that matter.)
I wrote about this. The humanities are not in crisis. It’s actually a golden age. There have never been more people reading novels, analyzing poetry (in the form of song lyrics), arguing about political philosophy, etc. The problem is twofold: First, that most of what people are reading is garbage, and second, because of that, none of it is translating to academic humanities departments.
The Humanities have evolved a great deal over the centuries and will continue to evolve and even thrive, because they are the oldest and deepest expressions of what make us human, from the first cave paintings and primitive flutes to the latest digital graphics, installations and sonic experiments. I'm not crazy about the rather harsh name "Intellectual Bootcamp" for this new enterprise, but I applaud it's goals. If it succeeds it could bring about a needed cultural change in the U.S. that might trigger a demand for more humanities courses in the universities and a restoring of the balance between science and the humanities.
I actually fundamentally disagree with your assertion about the value of the humanities. You say,
"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."
I argue that the value of the humanities is to stave off the very kind of cultural amnesia that we're currently experiencing. To study the humanities is to study the way that people have previously thought throughout history to have a base understanding of how we got to where we are, and to use that to move forward. I don't think it's a coincidence that younger generations are abandoning liberal democracy and Enightenment ideals at the same time as interest in the humanities has plummeted.
Nor is it a coincidence that this is happening at a time when the humanities teachers have shifted away from teaching our common intellectual inheritance and instead teach an odd mixture of radical ideologies mixed with squishy social justice virtue signaling.
The humanities aren't just something interesting to study, they're vital to maintaining our society.
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.
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 would love to participate in this experiment, especially as I totally agree with the premise: the humanities do not ONLY belong to or in the academy.
I’m a 73-year-old retiree who avidly studied humanities as an undergrad and then made a career in business and information technology. Throughout my career I encountered moments that only literature, philosophy, and social science could have prepared me for. Now, in retirement, I’ve returned to my original passion. Among other things, I’m now joyfully working my way through Proust.
The curriculum you propose looks both challenging and enriching. Great art and thought should not only be the inheritance of the young. Count me in!
It seems more likely to me that studying the humanities is in fact better for learning how to think but that employers don't want that and would rather just have people who do what they're told without asking too many questions.
Bingo! But its not just employers that dont want that
That is true ... most people just want to be told what to think, hence the popularity of LLMs.
Well i was thinking about the "elite" ruling class, but you bring up another interesting facet. Ive often wondered how many of the sheeple are inherently that way vs being made that way.
Ha, you were thinking of the elite ruling class and I was thinking of the vulgar masses ... Truly the desire to be ignorant is universal!
You've helped explain why I never read a book that was assigned in a class with as much enthusiasm and focus and depth of engagement as one I decided to read on my own. 40 years after graduating from college (UCSC) with a degree in humanities, I continue to read more books on a wider range of subjects (lots of biographies and US history these days) at a deeper level with more genuine curiosity than ever. This increasingly includes books I download from the local library to listen to with the Libby app while walking, with or without the dog.
Fortunately for us all, the existence of literature is in no way dependent on the existence of professors of literature.
One small but difficult step forward would be for colleges and universities to require that graduates are able to write complete sentences and coherent paragraphs with acceptable, if not perfect, punctuation. If students use AI to do so, they may still learn the concepts.
Agree, but I’m going to add something from a vy different direction. Want to save the humanities? Have children. I think there’s a backdrop to this that obviously involves technology, but also involves several social problems, including declining numbers of children & young ppl. For one thing, this means that many small liberal arts colleges, which often have been bastions of humanities teaching, will close (has already started to happen). They’re in no position to require students to write complete sentences; they can’t even fill their classrooms. Other institutions from large state universities down to elementary schools will compete harder to fill seats, which means they will be less likely to mk unpopular demands like “read the Symposium & write a paper abt it, using complete sentences and paragraph structure, preferably w/o using AI,” and more likely to pander to student demands, like “give me a degree that gets me a job asap, and I just want to get my papers out of the way as fast as possible.” They also will be under pressure to cut their humanities departments. With fewer young people, we have less support for schools and universities, less ability to mk learning demands on students, and a narrower base for exchanging and inventing new ideas. I 100% agree with suggestions in this article and also with your suggestion, but I also think a society that increasingly becomes aging people reading books will be less likely to support the humanities in schools by any approach at all.
Effectively ceding the humanities (and the liberal arts) to universities seems to me the proximate cause of their decline. These institutions have not been good stewards of these disciplines, and I don’t think they can recover so long as the universities survive in their current form.
Because I’m a dork and enjoy seeing opinion data and cross-tabs on controversial takes like this (eg, “Nothing of value would be lost if the four-year residential university model disappeared tomorrow”) I built an interactive survey app to measure how groups compare on these debates across a variety of dimensions at https://votto.app
Answer questions and explore if you enjoy interesting cross tabs and cool charts like I do!
I very much agree with your first paragraph. The humanities have long been paywalled and gatekept, with serious consequences for our society.
And now the gatekeepers are sweating bc they see the writing on the wall, and the gravy train is coming to an end.
Went to thrift shop recently, here was my haul:
The complete Plato
Foxfire Volume 6
The poetry of Lorca.
I’m trying!
The claims that the humanities are a link to how other people think is just as dubious as any of the others dismissed here - humanities people don't ever seem to understand people who don't come from their literary perspective. Whether that's us science and tech people, or people who don't spend much time on written text.
Anyways, when i see something of this sort and you include something by Neal Stephenson or Vernor Vinge, them maybe the downward spiral will be nearing its end.
In the meantime I'll enjoy reading the old literary books that involve genuinely uncommon prospectives by modern standards, and mostly ignore whatever contemporary crap that will likely be forgotten in a decade.
Maybe students are rejecting the humanities programs because of the decline in diversity of political thought among the professoriate? Studies show that conservative professors are almost extinct at many top universities. Who would voluntarily sign up for a re-education camp?
It's because our cultural priorities are whack. We prioritize profit and endless optimization. We don't prioritize humans. Humans need connection with people, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter. There isn't a single politician who ever talks about prioritizing the people of the country. This is why the humanities are shrinking - we don't give a shit about humans. (Or the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants for that matter.)
https://kevinbelt.substack.com/p/are-the-humanities-actually-in-crisis
I wrote about this. The humanities are not in crisis. It’s actually a golden age. There have never been more people reading novels, analyzing poetry (in the form of song lyrics), arguing about political philosophy, etc. The problem is twofold: First, that most of what people are reading is garbage, and second, because of that, none of it is translating to academic humanities departments.
The Humanities have evolved a great deal over the centuries and will continue to evolve and even thrive, because they are the oldest and deepest expressions of what make us human, from the first cave paintings and primitive flutes to the latest digital graphics, installations and sonic experiments. I'm not crazy about the rather harsh name "Intellectual Bootcamp" for this new enterprise, but I applaud it's goals. If it succeeds it could bring about a needed cultural change in the U.S. that might trigger a demand for more humanities courses in the universities and a restoring of the balance between science and the humanities.
I actually fundamentally disagree with your assertion about the value of the humanities. You say,
"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."
I argue that the value of the humanities is to stave off the very kind of cultural amnesia that we're currently experiencing. To study the humanities is to study the way that people have previously thought throughout history to have a base understanding of how we got to where we are, and to use that to move forward. I don't think it's a coincidence that younger generations are abandoning liberal democracy and Enightenment ideals at the same time as interest in the humanities has plummeted.
Nor is it a coincidence that this is happening at a time when the humanities teachers have shifted away from teaching our common intellectual inheritance and instead teach an odd mixture of radical ideologies mixed with squishy social justice virtue signaling.
The humanities aren't just something interesting to study, they're vital to maintaining our society.
Can you please make the reading list for Intellectual Bootcamp available? I attended the first session but cannot locate the list. Than oh s