Bonfire of the humanities

August 19, 2020. This is a rant about the self-serving nature of university faculty, when it comes to creating a curriculum that best serves their purposes, not those of the students, public, parents or society in general. This includes the current call for more humanities courses and requirements, in the face of a decline in interest in and in evidence of the value humanities majors, as well as the attempts to narrowly focus a 'liberal arts education' as being the completion of a humanities major at a 'liberal arts' college.

More than twenty years ago, when I was serving as business dean at Loyola, I was encouraged to encourage our best students to apply for the 'honors' program at Loyola. I had imported the idea of a form of honors for business majors, having to use the term 'scholars' instead of the already apparently 'owned' term of 'honors' held by the existing liberal arts Honors program. Part of my initial motivation was to provide a route of interest to the very best business students and to find a free way to attract the very best incoming Loyola students to the business program by offering those with an inclination for business and very high SAT scores to join a new program, the Selling Scholars. This had upset the Honors program director in several ways. First, he did not want a competing honors program. Second, he did not want students to consider Selling Scholars over admissions to the honors program. Third, he clearly did not like the fact that the business school or its majors even existed, and he certainly believed that 'honors' and 'business' were intellectually incompatible. The Scholars program went ahead anyway and I learned that some of the Scholars had applied and even joined the Honors program, only to learn of a transparent antipathy for their presence and their choice of majors. Worse, it became clear that what was termed a 'Loyola' honors program was basically a humanities program, geared almost exclusively for humanities majors.

As a business student, professor and dean, I had long experienced clear contempt for my chosen discipline from supposed colleagues across campus in the 'liberal arts.' This schism manifested itself eventually in a paper I wrote, whereupon I examined the evolving nature of the 'liberal arts' to lay claim to business as the 'new' liberal art. The primary problem was that while the 'liberal arts' were meant to be a 'liberating' intellectual experience, they were nothing of the sort. And while the faculty in the 'liberal arts' would make rhetorical claims as to the lifetime advantage of a liberal arts education, there was little evidence as to what actually constituted a liberal arts education, and less evidence that some or any liberal arts 'majors' had that positive lifetime impact. Liberal arts education seemed to be 'owned' by the liberal arts faculty, whose percentage of the college faculty greatly exceeded the percentage of majors that they produced each year. And the growing numbers of 'studies' majors in the liberal arts -- American studies, film studies, gender studies, hate studies, sustainability studies -- eroded if not eliminated the integrity of the concept of a liberal arts major.

One of the most irritating claims from the 'liberal arts' proponents was that their courses taught students 'critical thinking.' While this might be true on the way Karl Marx though of critical thinking, it had little if anything to do with real, critical thinking, i.e., using data, evidence, logic and rigorous, often statistical analyses and comparisons. Instead, feelings and opinions substituted for 'critical thinking' and rhetoric substituted for critical writing or speaking skills.

Today we see the worse manifestations of this attempt to increase employment opportunities for humanities faculty (at the expense of a rigorous education, especially at the expense of STEM or business majors) in the claims for more courses to be added to the curriculum that must be taught by humanities professors. This is a typical, traditional way of creating employment for your fellow travelers, by insisting -- no, demanding -- that students complete courses in your discipline to earn a degree from the university.

The effect will not likely be what these 'liberal arts' advocates expect. Instead, I expect more students to realize the value of a major that has a traditional liberal arts basis coupled with a rigorous applied knowledge and skill set that comes from majoring in STEM or business. The $300,000 cost of a private liberal arts college education for a major that earn a student $35,000 a year and often starts with $50,000 in debt creates an impossible argument to make to the parent of that student.

There was a time when college was about the 'life of the mind,' back when a much smaller percentage of high school graduates attended college, when a college degree was not imposed as a job requirement for well-paying union factory jobs, when professors made $10,000 a year, and a summer job and part-time work could pay college tuition. This days have left us. College is about preparing you for a better life than you'd have were it not for college. It is about personal fulfillment yet it is even more about fulfilling your potential and increasing your ability to contribute to the social and economic development of the world. A career without a meaningful life might be empty, but not as empty as a life without a meaningful career.

That career might be teaching. It could be in health sciences. It could be engineering. It could be as a musician or actor. The primary change has been in the types of work that must be done so that society can continue to grow and -- people often ignore this -- so that there are taxpayer and charitable funds available for the majority of the population who are not working in the traditional sense, where basically one-third of the people in America create the products, services and wealth the other two-thirds consume.