[HN Gopher] If the University of Chicago won't defend the humani...
___________________________________________________________________
If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will?
Author : atmosx
Score : 142 points
Date : 2025-10-05 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| greesil wrote:
| Maybe a university that is better run?
|
| https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
| stockresearcher wrote:
| All of that (and all of the title article) was written before
| this was made public:
|
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acqui...
|
| The significance to the University financial picture cannot be
| understated.
| pklausler wrote:
| It's insignificant. There, I understated it.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I have humanities academics on both sides of my family tree (dad
| and maternal grandfather, both tenured with long careers at good
| schools) and classics as an omnipresent topic in my growing
| years. Out of my undergrad program, I got accepted to the
| University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. I opted
| instead to get a history degree at a smaller school and dropped
| out after my MA.
|
| It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young
| humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn't
| exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish,
| shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant
| the gravy train was over.
|
| It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most
| miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
| alexander2002 wrote:
| STEM has eaten the world (in a good way!)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I hate to inform you "Departmental politics, publish or
| perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the
| fields" has applied to STEM just the same as the humanities.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I've noticed that, but I think it hit the humanities in the
| 1980s and arrived at STEM more recently. It's just the MBA-
| driven financialization and enshittification of everything.
|
| But it's ultimately down to the fact that a college degree
| is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a
| lot what degree and from which school.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect.
| People noted that the college educated earned more, so
| assumed that expanding college will confer that same
| status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated
| its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high
| school and look the other way even if they don't match
| the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high
| school diploma instead of giving the previous high school
| graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened
| with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then
| surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage
| premium for having studied English literature or
| psychology or communication at some low tier college.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Some people just don't seem to understand that the value
| of a credential rests entirely on the fact that other
| people don't have it.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| In part, but that wouldn't be enough. The value is that
| only/mostly people with certain skills and talents have
| it.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| STEM has the same issues as humanities when it comes to
| academia, but the difference is that for graduate students,
| there's often (although not always) a straighter path into
| industry.
| rightbyte wrote:
| In a bad way. If we didn't have such hubris maybe we wouldn't
| have fed the capital with our souls?
| rayiner wrote:
| It's not hubris that caused that, but the quite reasonable
| desire not to live in mud huts.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think you know I didn't mean it like that. The esprit
| de corps of STEM and the humanities, the view of society.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| It's worth noting since the STEM explosion the world has
| gotten more violent and inequality has gotten much worse.
| They might not relate but perhaps they do.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's just economics burying obvious problems under the
| rug.
|
| Economics has become a clown science to me personally,
| because you can even tell them that you have a method to
| accomplish everything they claim happens automatically
| through a handful of policies and they will laugh you out
| of the room, while they keep juggling (and sometimes
| dropping) chainsaws and telling you that you just need to
| hold them right.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| I'm not sure that I get your point but I dig your style.
| I too am skeptical of economists especially after reading
| the Nassim Taleb books. Elaborate friend.
| nradov wrote:
| The mistake you're making is confusing confidence for
| intelligence and insight. Taleb has a few good ideas but
| most of his writing consists of arguing against strawmen
| and making invalid assumptions about fields where he
| lacks any practical experience. It's mainly suckers who
| admire his writing.
| nradov wrote:
| Citation needed. The rate of violent deaths per capita
| worldwide is at a historically low level.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Has it, or has the Internet just made problems much more
| visible?
|
| Now, whenever there's conflict, disaster, or crime, there's
| a smartphone camera pointing at it within seconds.
|
| Are we facing a rapid rise in extreme weather events? or in
| violent crime? In both cases, we're certainly seeing far
| more footage of them in recent years - but that doesn't
| necessarily say anything about overall trends.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It seems like violence likely has not gotten worse
| globally, although it has increased in some specific ways
| that scare first-world dwellers. I think inequality
| though has indeed increased.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Where do you date that "STEM explosion"? The Scientific
| Revolution (Newton's time), or more the quantum and atomic
| age or the computer tech age or what?
|
| There were plenty of wars in the middle ages and the nobles
| and peasants weren't exactly equal either.
| alexander2002 wrote:
| Keep down voting stem haters.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| People here don't hate STEM, they just understand that STEM
| is not the only thing that matters.
| tom_ wrote:
| If you want the reader to do something, it's polite to say
| please.
| thisoneisreal wrote:
| I had the same experience and also dropped out after my MA.
| It's pretty sad. One of my professors told me, "You should have
| been here in the 70s, you would have loved it."
| cobertos wrote:
| What was it like in the 70s that we are now missing?
| stackskipton wrote:
| Funding.
| etempleton wrote:
| Colleges and Universities have, out of necessity, started
| thinking more like a company. Part of that is often new
| accounting models. One such way of modeling costs anscribes
| indirect costs to programs (utilities, building maintenance
| etc). Low enrollment graduate and doctoral programs look
| really bad on a balance sheet when you factor in these
| indirect costs and they will never look good. In fact they
| will always lose millions per year under this model. It is
| frankly an inappropriate budgeting model for colleges to
| adopt because academic programs are not product lines, but
| here we are.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| It seems like it's just poor management. I understand
| they are not product lines, but a university has bills to
| pay. They have to pay people salaries, benefits, maintain
| those builds, labs, libraries, etc. The money to do that
| has to come from somewhere and in the hard times, the
| fields with the least likely chance of generating revenue
| to keep the university afloat will see hits. It seems
| like the university though has put itself in the hard
| times by taking on a large amount of debt:
| https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-
| the-u.... It seems like its less malicious and just risk
| taking gone wrong.
|
| It's not that different in the corporate world. Lots of
| companies make bad bets that then lead to layoffs, but
| not always in the orgs that actually were part of the bad
| bet. I've seen many startups take on too much risk, then
| have to perform layoffs in orgs like marketing,
| recruiting, sales, HR, etc. even if those orgs weren't
| responsible for the issues that the company is facing.
| nradov wrote:
| In the 70s, academia in general was still growing so there
| were opportunities for many of the people who wanted a
| career in that field. Now that the field is shrinking due
| to demographic changes the competition has become much more
| vicious.
| cafard wrote:
| The baby boomers were going to college, ergo colleges and
| universities were expanding.The Ph.D. from a Tier-N school
| who didn't catch on there could find a tenure-track
| position in a Tier-N+M school.
|
| Back in those years, at I suppose a Tier-3 school, I went
| to some academic ceremony where the professors wore their
| robes. I was impressed at how spiffy the crimson Harvard
| robes looked. Somebody more sociologically aware would have
| thought, Hmmm, there sure are a lot of Harvard Ph.D.s on
| the faculty here, and considered why.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| How was it before then? Surely you can't expect that N
| PhDs minted by one doctoral advisor will each be able to
| take an equivalent spot at the same institution as the
| doctoral advisor. Or did people expect that? Unless the
| population is growing, the steady state is that one prof
| can only mint one prof-descendant in their lifetime on
| average. That means, maybe some can create more, but then
| some will not have any mentees that ever become
| professors. It is very basic math, but the emotions and
| egos seem to make this discussion "complex".
| cafard wrote:
| I think that the American college and university system
| had previously been expanding slowly. The GI Bill and the
| then the baby boom greatly increased the rate of
| expansion. Expansion still goes on, but maybe at quite a
| low rate.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Unless the population is growing, the steady state is
| that one prof can only mint one prof-descendant in their
| lifetime on average. That means, maybe some can create
| more, but then some will not have any mentees that ever
| become professors. It is very basic math
|
| Yes, and the US population went from about 130 million in
| 1940 to 330 million in 2020, while the percent of adults
| with a college degree went from about 5% to about 40%.
| There were a few decades of particularly rapid growth.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| An older CS professor (whose book, I'm guessing, about half
| of HN posters have read) told me essentially the same thing.
|
| He's one of the best people to talk to in the department.
| Kind, passionate and compassionate, interested first and
| foremost in ideas and people. No ego, doesn't care about
| telling anyone he's smarter than them (he is though), just
| wants to figure things out together.
|
| The junior faculty can't afford to be that way.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I agree that this is very important. The flip side of that
| you will also have entrenched lazies who refuse to keep up
| with new knowledge, get comfy in their chair, plus grow a
| big ego etc. It's a tradeoff.
|
| You have to give breathing room for creativity to unfold,
| but the breathing room can also be taken advantage of.
|
| Also, it used to be more accepted to play elite inside
| baseball, hiring based on prestige, gut feel and
| recommendation. Today it's not too different in reality,
| but today we expect more egalitarianism and objectivity,
| and do literature metrics become emphasized. And therefore
| those must be chased.
|
| Similar to test prep grind more broadly. More
| egalitarianism and accountability lead to tougher
| competition but more justice but less breathing room and
| more grind and less time for creative freedom.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| Similar but less prolific experience. I had this idea that I
| could make a career out of loving books and ideas and sharing
| those things with other people in a spirited way.
|
| What a stupid fucking idea that was!
| lukan wrote:
| "What a stupid fucking idea that was!"
|
| It is a great idea.
|
| We just don't live in a great society where your naive
| thinking would have been fitting.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Find a patron who finances it, as it always was. There
| never was a society that would fund everyone full time just
| for having neat fun chats.
|
| Alternatively take up a day job like everyone else and join
| a philosophy / arts / book club as a hobby.
|
| We have more access than ever to the materials.
| lukan wrote:
| "There never was a society that would fund everyone full
| time just for having neat fun chats."
|
| That was not the request, nor claim.
| nradov wrote:
| It's totally possible to make a career out of loving books
| and ideas, and sharing those things with other people in a
| spirited way: create a YouTube channel. Here are a couple I
| found at random but there are many more.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@EllieDashwood
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@QuinnsIdeas
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Lol that's like saying you can make a career out of your
| love of playing and releasing music. Sure, get to the end
| of the line. Or playing games and streaming it. Yes, a few
| make money that way. But theres a vast vast oversupply of
| people who would want to do that. You have to be very good,
| work hard, and be very lucky in addition.
| nradov wrote:
| Right so if you're not very good at then pick a different
| career and quit whining.
| tokai wrote:
| Departmental politics has always been bad. That is nothing new.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmographia_Academica
| jmclnx wrote:
| Only shows the slow road to turning colleges and universities
| into Trade Schools is proceeding as planed by the US oligarchs.
|
| In the past people would be expected to take and pass many
| humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training
| only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons,
| unable to think for themselves.
| Levitz wrote:
| Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking
| for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people
| plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology
| in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.
| behringer wrote:
| Wouldn't there very definition of independant thought be
| understanding an idiology but not limiting yourself to it?
| lapcat wrote:
| It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught
| sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is
| whether people can think about anything other than work and
| making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a
| society we should value much more than just going to work and
| cashing paychecks.
|
| The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely
| their point.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the
| tech industry have been people who quit their history or
| philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics
| majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors.
|
| The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries
| do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do
| benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a
| willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge
| mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
| manco wrote:
| How much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-
| taught?
| pklausler wrote:
| +1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly
| good at programming.
| terminalshort wrote:
| That just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation
| to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact
| from my experience in school the humanities classes were
| much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| There's a correlation that smart people study things they
| find interesting. As soon as it became clear that
| computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of
| students taking doing CS majors who weren't really
| interested in anything except making money.
|
| Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance,
| business, or biology (premed) is a signal for
| intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of
| students with real curiosity in those majors too, but
| there's also many incurious mercenaries.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| As a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed
| is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really
| well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we
| are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You can't have half your population attempting academic
| degrees. When too many people attend university they become
| trade schools.
| lapcat wrote:
| > But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success
| of a program by how many professors it creates--after all, most
| humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive
| stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn
| and read is not the worst fate.
|
| I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students
| are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay
| modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no
| current or future financial benefit to the student _unless_ they
| get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their
| lives, years they can never get back.
|
| Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is
| to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be
| accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field
| and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad
| school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
|
| In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem
| specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first
| straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded
| across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the
| training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to
| Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university,
| no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face
| the stark reality.
| chongli wrote:
| _PhD students are devoting years of their life to this
| endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school
| but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit
| to the student unless they get a job in their field_
|
| I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John
| Adams:
|
| _The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than
| all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration
| and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a
| manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my
| sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My
| sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography,
| natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and
| Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study
| Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and
| Porcelaine.
|
| -- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)_
|
| In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects
| we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our
| interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and
| political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an
| implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire
| to devote years of their lives to studying the arts.
|
| Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then
| it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose
| pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of
| study.
| logicchains wrote:
| Studying in that context didn't mean spending years and years
| in an institution, it meant regularly taking the time to read
| up and immerse yourself in those things. One of the greatest
| tragedies of modernity is that we've created a society where
| the majority of people believe studying is just something
| done at university, and stop studying anything difficult
| after they graduate.
| lapcat wrote:
| Adams may be correct, but isn't the lesson that we need
| people to study political science right now? The lesson
| surely isn't to drop all studies that aren't capitalistically
| profitable. I don't think the current situation requires even
| _more_ ruthless profit-seeking.
| chongli wrote:
| _isn 't the lesson that we need people to study political
| science right now?_
|
| That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I
| did not intend. John Adams studied political science
| because his business was the business of government.
| Studying political science today -- as an otherwise
| directionless middle-class student relying on loans and
| scholarships for tuition -- is not really hearing the call
| to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended.
| lapcat wrote:
| > That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote,
| which I did not intend.
|
| Yes, but considering the contemporary assault on
| democracy and the rule of law, it seems apt.
|
| > the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had
| intended
|
| It depends on what you mean by pragmatism. I'd call it
| public pragmatism, not mere private pragmatism. Adams
| calls it his "duty" to study, and goes on to talk about
| the "liberty" and "right" to student other subjects. The
| obvious interpretation, I think, especially given who
| Adams is and his role in the founding of the US, is that
| he has the obligation to fight for democracy and liberty.
| Otherwise, he could probably just accumulate person
| wealth and allow his literal descendants, and those only,
| to study whatever they want.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Assuming you are in the USA and given the state of your
| country, I would think that you shouldn't reject that
| proposal over eagerly.
| chongli wrote:
| I'm actually not an American and I don't reject the
| proposal outright. I think the pragmatic approach is
| still best though: study polisci if you are actually
| serious about going into politics (or at least policy).
| But if you don't know what you want to do with your life
| then it's not a great idea to go into the humanities and
| hope for the best (while racking up a lot of debt).
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah going all in into political science is a bit risky,
| but just including some course is free and might help
| understanding society issues and political manipulation.
| chongli wrote:
| Oh yeah. I studied mathematics but I took a minor in
| philosophy. I studied philosophy of economics and
| philosophy of law, in addition to the usual metaphysics
| and epistemology stuff.
| kenjackson wrote:
| In Adams letter it seems that studying poetry, tapestry, and
| porcelain are leisurely and enjoyable. For most kids I know
| today, this would be torture. Are there modern equivalents to
| this? Film and comics?
| whatshisface wrote:
| By their children they mean their children when they grow
| up.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I'm not that shocked honestly, I did a humanities degree and when
| I checked UChicago's departments they were large and pretty good
| but not really cutting edge or doing anything radical or
| interesting. Seems like they were coasting on their reputation
| for a while.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Honest question. What is considered radical or cutting edge in
| the humanities? I confess my ignorance upfront.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| I know for Classical literature it's largely the theoretical
| approach to interpreting texts. Lit theory is always evolving
| and tenured faculty don't always keep up with the changes.
| There are also new interdisciplinary departments that pop up.
| I imagine it's more varied in fields that study things
| created in the last 2000 years though.
| terminalshort wrote:
| By what metrics are literary theories judged against each
| other? What makes the new "cutting edge" ones better than
| the old? It seems like there is no actual advancement going
| on, but rather just ever changing fads, which is why I
| question the value of the entire enterprise.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but
| you could ask the same about pure math too. Of course the
| correctness of proofs is a checksum, but that doesn't
| answer which direction one should develop it or whether
| the thing you developed is found to be useful and
| interesting and elegant to other pure math people (often
| like a dozen worldwide).
|
| There's not further justification needed than the fact
| that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-
| blowing.
|
| Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a
| good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But
| merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By
| all means go write great novels that express the human
| condition. But better go live a real life with adventure
| and real non-academics around you and write about that.
| Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful
| paintings. But simply writing about that is the
| equivalent of a reaction YouTuber.
|
| Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary
| work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating
| it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence
| etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Well yes but its not what you think. Philosophy as a
| field in the US has become too narrow. I remember taking
| a class in the German department on German Romanticism,
| which was actually very important for understanding later
| developments in German philosophy and some of the authors
| involved are even referenced directly by Hegel in his
| Lectures on Aesthetics. But when I was doing my
| Philosophy MA one of the faculty members was complaining
| once, in a class on Aesthetics, that they couldn't teach
| German Romanticism as a class because the school had
| deemed it "too literary" and we just had one seminar on
| it.
|
| Its also the case that you wouldn't have a great
| understanding of, say, Plato or maybe even Aristotle if
| you studied them in philosophy vs Classics, since in the
| latter you actually read and analyze the text at the
| level of the grammar and open up the complexity of the
| potential intepretations, whereas in Philosophy there is
| often a somewhat rote or dumbed down version of Plato and
| Aristotle taught to undergrads because the teachers don't
| actually know any Greek. But that depends on the faculty
| and the course obviously, I just wouldn't trust most
| philosophy departments to teach Plato well these days.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, this is the curse of specialization due to ever more
| intellectual works in existence but the same amount of
| time per person.
|
| I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way,
| so history, art, science, politics, philosophy,
| technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal,
| cross-cutting way.
|
| For example to understand the political relevance of some
| art movement, you need to know the history of the period,
| understand the art, the political climate, the
| philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of
| Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical
| context, and I'd argue you should actually understand
| evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but
| quantitatively including our modern understanding and
| what he couldn't know then), also his religious
| background, you should understand what is Unitarianism
| and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted,
| and how their general situation was at that time, etc.
| etc.
|
| But in my experience academics really dislike interacting
| with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each
| other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any
| benefit in an exchange because their publications are
| aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a
| "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course
| sometimes it works, but in my experience
| "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like
| to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in
| reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well
| known bubble and be left alone.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > I don't want to defend humanities academia too much,
| but you could ask the same about pure math too.
|
| That's true to some extent. I think math has built up
| enough credibility though because such a huge amount of
| mathematical investigation has turned out to have
| relevance in science which eventually trickles down to
| applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric
| math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed
| for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential
| tool for other things that are more practical. It's
| interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math
| could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more
| and more remote from practicality.
|
| > Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary
| work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating
| it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence
| etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
|
| Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important
| thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it
| means what is important is not the specific content of
| the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating,
| analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about
| that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though
| in the end no one is really going to "find the right
| answer".
|
| > But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a
| reaction YouTuber.
|
| I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high
| end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks
| down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a
| good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels
| in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet,
| and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such
| an experience. But if the book is good, you can still
| gain something from it, and it can potentially include
| things you _wouldn 't_ have gained by going there
| yourself, because the author can articulate insights you
| might not have been able to formulate yourself.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this
| as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight
| out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD
| and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same
| way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature,
| without any real world experience.
|
| I value it much higher to read critiques by different
| authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse
| gossip culture way.
|
| It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the
| philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a
| real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the
| plug on someone's medical support or advising about
| authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing
| may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought
| experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines.
|
| So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's
| a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and
| helping the new generation process the message therein is
| good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed,
| the idea that a humanities teacher at university should
| have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new
| idea, from the 19th century, originating in the
| Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that,
| teachers would read the classics to students and comment
| on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of
| commentary that they received in their education, of
| course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't
| really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it
| easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of
| literature.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I
| think academia in general (not just the humanities) would
| benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on
| "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new
| knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed
| has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of
| papers without necessarily creating a lot of new
| knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and
| people optimizing for publications. In part though it's
| due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job
| system.
|
| Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for
| instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught
| calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be
| taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new
| knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot
| more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching
| calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus
| with gusto.
|
| Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves
| open the possibility that there could be new knowledge
| produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect
| everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or
| whatever to be producing such knowledge.
|
| In my view a good step would just be to significantly
| reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security,
| etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are
| many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and
| could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling
| any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem
| themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a
| steady job doing that.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist,
| but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this
| is the reality already, we just don't admit it.
|
| The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone
| who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more
| flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge
| are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They
| work with the math even outside class, and have a real
| grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having
| also defined new concepts and written new theorems and
| proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it
| to be most elegant and compact and logical etc.
|
| Now, of course today the research and the teaching are
| often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic
| computer science stuff like basic data structures and
| algorithms while you actually research computer graphics
| or speech recognition.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I agree that this is a problem with how humanities is
| often (or at least sometimes) done in colleges, and I
| suspect it's a significant contributor to the animus
| directed at the humanities. There has been a blurring of
| the line between fact and opinion such that some
| professors think it is worthwhile to teach students about
| their or other people's opinions, as if those opinions
| had value in themselves in the way that facts do.
|
| This isn't to say that opinions don't or can't have
| value, but just having someone say "I think X" or
| "Professor Blah thinks X" isn't in itself important by
| virtue of the content of X. This is especially true if
| the subject of the opinion (what it is about) is
| something that is rather far removed from the realm of
| fact. There is not really any meaningful sense in which a
| given text, for instance, "really does" instantiate a
| Jungian archetype or a Freudian urge or whatever. But I
| get the impression some humanities scholars think there
| is, that when they debate among themselves about such
| things, there is a "fact of the matter".
|
| Not all humanities scholarship is like this, but I think
| the proportion has increased over time. To my mind what
| it misses is that the important thing about such
| humanistic opinions is not their content in and of itself
| but the ways such opinions are formed and what kinds of
| "evidence" can be found to support them. An alternative
| goal would be for students to read things, engage with
| them from their own perspective, and learn how to
| solidify and articulate their response, as well as
| (importantly) to elucidate its sources both in themselves
| and in the text (i.e., "my reaction to this story is X,
| and I think that because the story says Y but also I have
| had experiences A, B and C that led me to think about
| things in such-and-such way"). This is likely more
| valuable than simply being taught someone else's opinion.
|
| I think this approach is sometimes shunned because it is
| perceived as navel-gazing or having students "just learn
| about themselves". But this perception may partly be due
| to a fear of acknowledging that what I said above is
| true, namely that opinions on such matters have little
| intrinsic value, and therefore the students' opinions are
| almost as valuable as those of more senior scholars.
|
| All this is basically to say that I think the humanities
| could be perceived as much more "valuable" and positive
| if they shifted more towards the idea of "these are some
| ways to have a rich life, gain an awareness of other
| people's opinions and how to infer their sources, and
| learn how to extract a meaningful experience by careful
| attention to what you're confronted with in life".
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Its not really helpful though, since to understand a
| thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study
| and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be
| demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride
| and Prejudice or Baudelaire's poetry. The entire content
| of literary study is not "general rules for life" but
| careful attention to aspects of the empirical world
| through things that appear in its history and conditions,
| which are ever changing and thus require constant re-
| evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these
| empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any
| absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is
| prone to violent convulsions.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Probably a good thing considering the decline of science and tech
| in the US and Western world in general. A casual visit to any
| major labs and observing their demographics makes it clear where
| all the talent in STEM is being created. It's better to redirect
| that funding towards building the next generation of scientists
| and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
| AIorNot wrote:
| The death of intellectualism in public discourse aside
|
| This administration's systemic attacks on universities, science
| funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA
| (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing
| views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of
| this country
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next
| generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple
| haired lib arts baristas.
|
| This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago
| represented, as the article points out:
|
| _that humanities professors are "woke" activists whose primary
| concern is the political indoctrination of "the youth." Most of
| the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw--and defended--their
| disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative.
| Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the
| role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning
| from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off
| coarse appeals to economic utility._
|
| A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago,
| Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the
| Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The
| assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science,
| which is under attack by the exact same people for the same
| reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is
| coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the
| same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing
| the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with
| engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind
| of oligarchic Third Worldism.
| gdulli wrote:
| I don't think culture war catchphrases are intended to be
| accurately projected back onto real-life institutions. It's
| better for you to explain than to insult, but ignoring is
| probably the move.
| pvankessel wrote:
| Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding
| jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors:
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-
| market#--:....
|
| For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in
| data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM
| courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees.
| Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar
| backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to
| think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a
| highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it
| provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more
| logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's
| also essential for an informed citizenry and functional
| democracy.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It's sad that many people need to spend years on liberal arts
| education to learn to learn independently. Where has our
| society failed that 11 years of schooling and upbringing
| can't provide that?
| pvankessel wrote:
| Oh I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. I think our
| society would be substantially healthier if we required
| civics, philosophy, economics, etc in high school. But if
| we're already struggling to have evolution taught in
| schools and we have state boards of education removing
| references to the slave trade and founding fathers from
| history curriculum
| (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-
| schools-...), expanding liberal arts in public education is
| a non-starter. Hell, half the country would love to see it
| wiped from post-secondary education. Best I figure we can
| do at this point is defend the idea itself to the extent we
| can - for instance, in Hacker News threads where the
| liberal arts are being dismissed as an unnecessary lesser-
| than academic pursuit.
| Roscius wrote:
| I entirely agree - I have a 30 year career in STEM and am now
| a senior software architect at a $5b company. I also read,
| write and speak classical Latin at an advanced (almost
| fluent) level.
|
| My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.
|
| I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and
| liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top
| of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to
| me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is
| theirs...
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding
| jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors:
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-
| market#--:....
|
| Is that in both respective fields of study, though?
|
| It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more
| willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues
| more strictly pursue relevant titles.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-p.
| ..
| pvankessel wrote:
| Well that's kind of my point - liberal arts and humanities
| set you up with a very versatile baseline. With a proper
| education in those disciplines you learn how to think, and
| that's applicable to a wide range of fields. The woman I
| dated in grad school at UChicago studied war history and
| wound up being an analyst for a prominent wine
| auctioneering firm as a key researcher. My master's thesis
| was on the meaning of life, and now I'm running data
| science at a non-profit. So many of my fellow liberal arts
| grads have gone on to do incredible things entirely
| unrelated to their chosen subject of study.
| _hark wrote:
| https://archive.ph/GWBEl
| tarr11 wrote:
| Chicago had lower annualized endowment returns than similar
| universities, and so it couldn't support it's aggressive
| expansion.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0...
|
| _UChicago's strains came after its $10bn endowment -- a critical
| source of revenue -- delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per
| cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of
| any major US university.
|
| The private university has taken a more conservative investment
| approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income
| and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
|
| "If you look at our audits and rating reports, they've
| consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than
| our peers," said Ivan Samstein, UChicago's chief financial
| officer. "That led to less aggregate returns over a period of
| time."
|
| An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity
| also weighed on the university's financial health. UChicago's
| outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by
| about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it
| poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering
| and quantum science._
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| A combination of bad bets and mismanagement. Ah! Well I have a
| friend who is currently going their for law school, so I
| shouldn't be celebrating this, it harms them and their career
| prospects.
| carbonguy wrote:
| For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities,
| consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical;
| there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! -
| ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're
| there to be understood all the same.
|
| If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How
| I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example,
| particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No
| idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are
| important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a
| technical one.
|
| [1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
| api wrote:
| I place some blame on the humanities themselves.
|
| Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one
| example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people
| because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not
| just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-
| focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in
| the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with
| subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
|
| A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit
| because it's there so something's going to fill it.
|
| P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read
| Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to
| name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say
| "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he
| says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors
| he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling
| (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an
| attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely
| dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-
| help quack, which he also is.
| murderfs wrote:
| > most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not
| just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-
| focused jargon.
|
| The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon,
| it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that
| hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
| api wrote:
| That too, but I was being generous. Honestly it kind of
| doesn't matter if it's meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit
| or if it's meaningful but impenetrable jargon-laden
| discourse aimed only at other members of the field. In
| either case, it has no effect on the world outside the
| field.
|
| Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with
| itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for
| escapist fun, like a fandom).
|
| You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly
| focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space
| is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use
| cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That
| field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of
| obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because
| same disease, different patient.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not
| just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-
| focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people
| in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with
| subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
|
| You just described a lot of research in mathematics
| fn-mote wrote:
| > You just described a lot of research in mathematics
|
| You mean every research article in any subject that I have
| ever read.
|
| But that's the audience for research.
|
| Read the survey articles if you're looking for a more
| palatable exposition. Research is written for researchers.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my
| feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world
| history and the history of thought, and that applies some
| kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to
| the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the
| general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing
| that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what
| Humanities is supposed to be.
|
| Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their
| mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or
| ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave
| Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just
| revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do
| Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn
| anything from before the days of Critical Theory?
| Gabriel54 wrote:
| At a pre-protest meeting of a cause I wanted to support, I
| noticed that the organizer had on their desktop background
| a kind of propagandistic poster of Mao leading the cultural
| revolution. Keep in mind, this is in the USA. I'm no expert
| in world history by any means, but the level of ignorance
| is astounding.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one
| example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people
| because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind
| not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of
| inward-focused jargon.
|
| A real question for you. How have you attempted to interact
| with modern humanities research? I'm married to a historian.
| A _ton_ of books are published open-access (literally free)
| and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a
| target readership. Presses ask "how will this be of interest
| to the general public" when engaging with scholars to decide
| what books to publish.
|
| I have a CS PhD. In comparison to my experience doing CS
| research, history research is _vastly_ more likely to
| consider a non-expert audience. I cannot speak to other
| fields within the humanities, but this data point makes me
| rather skeptical of your claim.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > A ton of books are published open-access (literally free)
| and a growing number of them consider public audiences as a
| target readership.
|
| There's a ton of interest in history. Always has been in
| pop culture (with WW2 producing _a looooooot_ of material
| based off of it, ranging from truly authentic such as
| Schindler 's List to loosely affiliated such as the MCU),
| to be honest. And it's not just pop culture. No matter
| what, history tends to be a staple subject in schools,
| every town worth its name has some sort of local museum
| telling the story of said town. It's a self-reinforcing
| loop.
|
| In contrast, there isn't much money to be made discussing
| gender identities so no one cares about it outside of the
| humanities and non-cisgender people, so where's the
| incentive for researchers to write "in layman's terms"?
| Cornelius267 wrote:
| I do not understand what you would expect from research work.
| Do you expect that research work in mathematics be written in
| such a way that any lay person could understand it? Or
| computer science? Physics? Biology? I would assume that the
| answer is no. Why then do you place this expectation on
| research in the humanities?
|
| I am now going to speculate, though if this isn't your
| reason, I apologize. Perhaps it is because you, or others,
| think that the humanities are not complex enough to require
| such rigor, and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake
| rigor, not real rigor. Is that correct?
|
| You also say: "It also tends to deal with subjects that are
| not of interest to 90%+ of the public." Is any research? In
| any field? Looking at the remaining unsolved Millennium
| Problems in mathematics, do you think that the general public
| has any interest in the "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
| conjecture?" Whatever that is? I don't. I don't know what
| that means. I'm sure it's quite interesting if you do.
|
| I do not believe that your point is correct.
| Paracompact wrote:
| > Perhaps it is because you, or others, think that the
| humanities are not complex enough to require such rigor,
| and that the presence of jargon is a mark of fake rigor,
| not real rigor. Is that correct?
|
| I promise I don't have an axe to grind in this discussion
| (I'm a math PhD by training but have every sort of artistic
| interest including a lifelong desire to become a writer),
| but I kind of _do_ carry the opinion that the literary
| humanities, while not devoid of complexity or rigor, are
| completely incomparable to STEM in this regard. But
| honestly, I would like to see this opinion dispelled.
|
| It is not the argument of the mathematician that the Birch
| and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is important just because
| their colleagues have agreed it is. Rather, it is because,
| if you actually talked to a mathematician about it, you
| would be taken on an ever-ascending journey of definitions,
| statements, and proofs, each one staking new ground in ways
| that (unless you are a true prodigy) you would never have
| arrived at but can objectively verify to be correct.
|
| I could compare this to my average experience attempting to
| approach a darling in the humanities such as Derrida's
| concept of differance. Here I find myself reading
| explanations that seem to recursively invoke other
| neologisms and French puns, gesturing at instabilities and
| absences, but never, and I mean never, arriving at
| something I can verify, or hold to be a truly novel thought
| or insight into a well-defined problem. The argument seems
| to be "this is important because Derrida said it is, and
| because a cascade of subsequent scholars have built careers
| interpreting what he meant." If you ask "but what is the
| result?", you get told that you're asking the wrong
| question, that you're trapped in logocentric thinking, or
| that the point is precisely the undecidability. And sure,
| maybe! But it leaves me unable to distinguish between a
| profound insight and an emperor's new clothes.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Peterson was firmly within academia and he got famous by
| putting his academic lectures filmed at university online.
| It's not some other thing. He taught in prestigious
| institutions like Harvard and U of Toronto.
|
| To me it seems like you're trying to paint the picture of
| misguided goodguy academics VS outsider grifter meddlers. But
| JP is just not a good example of that.
| terminalshort wrote:
| What is the relation of this to studying humanities? It just
| seems like another common example of people taking things they
| consider good and relating them to humanities.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > What is the relation of this to studying humanities?
|
| A fair question! Put briefly, I would say that studying the
| humanities would make one more aware of/able to comprehend
| situations involving others and their motivations (which
| is... most of them), with the example I gave being one
| situation that I figured would be more familiar to the crowd
| here at Hackernews.
|
| > It just seems like another common example of people taking
| things they consider good and relating them to humanities.
|
| It seems like that because it is like that :) In other words,
| I DO consider it good to have a broader view of situations
| that otherwise might be considered narrowly "technical"
| because I believe that understanding the human element as
| part of the situation helps me understand the situation
| (whatever it may be) way better. I relate it to "the
| humanities" because it IS related to the humanities.
| terminalshort wrote:
| This argument, which I find very typical of arguments in
| favor of humanities education, kind of drives me nuts. It's
| very nebulous in terms of how these benefits are actually
| related to humanities classes. I place very little value on
| degrees in general, but at least I can sometimes see very
| clearly how other engineers I work with sometimes know
| useful things that I don't know from CS classes because
| they are directly related to the subject matter at hand.
| But nothing you are mentioning here is at all like that.
|
| Yes, of course it is beneficial to be "more aware of/able
| to comprehend situations involving others and their
| motivations," but there isn't a class on that and I see no
| relation between social skills and education (at any level
| or field of study). I would take a HS dropout sales guy
| over a phd in humanities any day in terms of this
| particular skill.
| cowpig wrote:
| I associate the University of Chicago with a kind of religious
| exercise in economic theory, a movement dedicated to justifying a
| political stance in pseudo-intellectualism at the direct expense
| of empiricism.
|
| The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
|
| I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige
| American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the
| conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-
| intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about
| presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual
| practice.
| wl wrote:
| U Chicago is far more than Booth and the economics department.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| They were also the university of Michelson, Fermi and Gell-
| Mann, and many winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and
| Chemistry.
|
| Chicago is a heavy hitter.
| agentcoops wrote:
| (Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job.
| It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there
| still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and
| that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they
| pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the
| "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best
| apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities
| dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued
| STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal
| experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received
| their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life
| satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all
| realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic
| programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards.
| It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these
| past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering
| job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a
| humanities PhD than retirement at 35.
|
| There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the
| university system following World War II during which the need
| for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of
| uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate
| of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure
| that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a
| matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were
| considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and
| not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for
| example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which
| was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program.
| Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of
| the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be
| scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial
| positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work,
| struggling to make their research of interest enough to be
| published. This system did not at all negatively impact research
| outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this
| period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved
| them.
|
| TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent
| changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be
| a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less
| sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who
| might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide
| to teach in high schools.
| macleginn wrote:
| They can keep acceping PhD students to these programmes every
| other year (or even once every three years). This will keep the
| esoteric fields alive, even if we assume that only UChicago can
| support them, and cut costs.
| leoh wrote:
| Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many
| undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia
| ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most
| downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met.
|
| Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong
| anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The
| attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions
| that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't
| think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such
| programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities"
| than ones before.
| Roscius wrote:
| Strikes me as victim blaming and misses the point.
|
| Humanities are critical to society and have been for many
| thousands of years.
|
| Getting rid of the department because of "glum" people, is
| downright silly.
| leoh wrote:
| I think you are confounding "The Humanities" and the
| humanities practiced by contemporary faculty.
| Roscius wrote:
| As the above comment indicates, I guess I may be arguing
| with ChatGPT, but if it's broke, fix it, don't get rid of
| it.
| leoh wrote:
| You aren't talking to ChatGPT. I agree with you that the
| humanities would be "fixed" ideally. I don't know how you
| do that, though. I never said you should get rid of them.
| Just that I can't really blame UChicago et al. for not
| supporting what's going on. There are so many other
| issues with contemporary humanities departments I am not
| even touching on. Also, no one is "getting rid of the
| humanities" writ large -- in this case, we're talking
| about a particular program at a particular institution.
| Seen another way, retracting support from a broken branch
| is a good way to redirect resources to better-functioning
| departments at UChicago and elsewhere.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| What?
|
| Curmudgeonly professors are part and parcel of universities.
| These are intellectuals, by default they don't fit into normal
| society. Universities are where they thrive.
|
| Don't worry be happy, is that what you're saying?
|
| What's hilarious about this is how short sighted and stupid
| universities are. Their cash cow programs are the ones DIRECTLY
| TARGETED by AI. What's going to distinguish some grade seeker
| that walks through Uni looking for 4.0 atop a pile of AI
| generated crud, and a real thinker?
|
| It's going to be humanities. It's going to be the "liberal
| arts".
|
| Not that I'm saying humanities won't need to adapt. The take
| home term paper will probably need to be replaced by verbal
| argument and defense, so they can prove they actually
| understand without an AI.
|
| Humanities and actual intellectualism, as opposed to degree
| rubberstamping, is how universities will survive AI.
|
| It's also amazing to me that as college costs have skyrocketed
| 10x higher than they used to be, humanities require almost none
| of that increase. Nor does it need the administration.
|
| You can't afford humanities? I know "where is the money going"
| has reached comically Kafkaesque levels in modern "education",
| but this takes the cake.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why would someone learn humanities from a university instead
| of AI + the internet?
| leoh wrote:
| I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-
| write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really
| nails it:
|
| Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of
| Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years
| ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of
| joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even
| Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with
| difficult texts--they were the living embodiment of
| institutional melancholia.
|
| The faculty--and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri
| Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring
| even Enigma would envy--presided over this misery with what can
| only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing
| orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a
| peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while
| drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western
| institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was
| not to be remarked upon.
|
| Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely
| demoralize students--they actively corrode the very
| institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry
| possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the
| branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants
| too much awareness of cause and effect.
|
| Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find
| themselves unable to justify continued investment in these
| programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The
| Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having
| replaced them with something else entirely--a cargo cult
| version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the
| content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to
| fund its own negation indefinitely.
| mathattack wrote:
| Chicago has a $220 million annual deficit before the Trump
| issues. You can't blame this fiscal mismanagement on the ebbs and
| flows of politics.
|
| Everything has an opportunity cost. Can you defend funding full
| scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no
| jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something
| else)
| pjfin123 wrote:
| U.S. schools are facing a huge and permanent drop in enrollment
| as the fertility decline starts hitting too.
| iberator wrote:
| Interesting trivia: there is such a thing as "Chicago school of
| economics" with one major agenda since 70": profit over people.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
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