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What’s Wrong With the Humanities?
The supply of people with PhDs in the humanities vastly exceeds the demand for them. Why?
The explanations for trouble in the humanities I see the most are:
1. People care too much about making money, not enough about the search for truth and beauty.
2. The Humanities disciplines caused their own problems by wandering off into fashionable theories of the liberal, relativistic, or goofily postmodern persuasion.
The first explanation sometimes involves criticisms of capitalism, and sometimes of Republican governors. The second explanation often appears in places like National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog. A third explanation of this particular problem is pretty simple, and may not make it as easy for the left or right to toss blame at each other:
3. Too many universities have produced way too many humanities PhDs because universities look more prestigious when they have more PhD programs.
My own working theory is that all of these explanations are correct. Please note: I don’t think much of the first theory as a criticism of capitalism, though it might be a nice criticism of the reduction of the good life to capitalism alone (also criticized here, for example).
I might add that, even if the third theory carries the most weight as an explanation, I am a fan of the second theory, and I think it’s an important commentary on the humanities these days.
I might also ask, given the truth of the second theory, how much you can blame people if they pursue financial stability and a strong economy instead of studying these theories?
What say the Ricochetti?
Theory 1?
Theory 2?
Theory 3?
Theory 4? (Please provide in comments.)
Published in General
I have always thought of PhD programs in the humanities as sheltered workshops for the terminally unproductive.
I’m not disagreeing. The argument is that PhD pay is low relative to welders. A full time A&S professor is paid better than a welder. You are discussing people who are technically working part time jobs as adjuncts or lecturers, have no formal research requirements, and no service requirements. We then compare them to full-time welders and say “oh, they aren’t paid well.”
I agree with the issue -why are there so many philosophers for so few full time positions? But AIG is still correct when he says that they are paid better than welders. And I’d imagine still would be if we did a true apples-to-apples comparison and also included part-time and effectively unemployed welders in the calculation.
No objections to that! (And if you factor in the Easter Break, Christmas Break, and Summer sabbaticals [note well: these are not exactly vacations for teachers], the professional philosopher’s lot looks better still.)
However, . . .
I am not talking about adjuncts. Their lot is worse! I am talking about the Lecturers and the Visiting Assistant Professors who do indeed lack formal service and research requirements (although the informal requirements can still be brutal). And they are not part-time.
What’s wrong with the humanities is that they are a Tribal Moral Community, as described by Jonathan Haidt in The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology. If diversity standards that apply to race, class, and gender were also applied to ideology then academia would qualify as a hostile environment for non-liberals. In the name of diversity the most important kind of diversity of all – intellectual diversity – has essentially been driven out of the very place that is supposed to be its champion. Haidt’s presentation was summarized in the New York Times by John Tierney in Social Scientist Sees Bias Within (quote below). Haidt restricted his discussion to calling out only his own field, but as Steven F. Hayward describes in Grievance School, the problem applies to pretty much all of academia that’s not hard science. Also see Politicized Science by Richard Redding, and Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science by Duarte, Crawford, et al.
Here’s a quote from Tierney’s summary:
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, [2011] involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Strongly disagree, because the classical model of education was not merely a survey of ideas about the seven arts. The emphasis was on the art; that is, you were presented with the core principles, usually by a one-way lecture, but then the bulk of your time was spent on practice. You were educated, not because you had simply heard the ideas, but that you were trained in them, and could put them into practice.
The modern world may have the ideas, but not the training and the practice.
Which only shows an allegiance to modernity and its values, not to the advance of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
The Independent Whig, doesn’t this sort of analysis suggest that problem #2 is not limited to the Humanities?
(I have a memory of problem #2 being discussed by some conservatives in relation to global warming theory and the natural sciences, not the humanities. It was probably some Ricochet podcast a year or two ago, or a Peter Robinson Uncommon Knowledge conversation.)
KC Mulville,
Yay! Long live the Trivium!
Right. Much of the humanities operates as a secular cathedral, insisting that they are the only way to truth.
And all too often it’s the only way to truth, and we must always be on the way. No chance of actually getting there.
Not a single word of that is true.
No one ever learned a skill at university. Nope. Who needs book learnin!
Whaaa!! $16/hour median wage? You’d think every time “welder” came up in these “college is useless” discussion, one would expect something like $100/hour or the sort.
But $16/hour is what this is all based on?
People confuse “median wages” with “maximum wages”. And then they say “welders can make $100k a year!!”. Yeah, 1 welder guy, somewhere, in one year, made $100k.
Meanwhile, that’s a median starting salary for most PhDs in “hard topics”. Which is, 3 times the median salary of welders.
Sure.
Most PhD though, have a pretty good life. “Average” salaries for all PhDs are about $90k. But that of course includes lot of humanities, as well as a lot of those “online school PhD” programs which don’t count for much (Capella produces… what…1,000 “PhDs” a year :) Obviously those aren’t “real PhDs”.
Discounting those, the averages are north of $100k.
And since our welder friends always like to talk maximums (or 95% upper limit), the 95% upper limit for PhDs is probably north of $600k (I think the highest paid professor is some business professor at Thunderbird who makes north of $1 million a year…but Thunderbird got bought by ASU now, so who knows).
So, everything in perspective.
Well, lecturers and “visiting assistant professors” are academia’s version of “part time”.
That’s like saying “postdoc” in the sciences.
Yeah, well. Sucks to be us. I guess we’ll have to live without ;)
You’ll have to forgive me, but I was trained as an engineer. I’m not sure what “practice and training” in, Shakespeare or whatever, would have added to my life. But, as I said…engineer. That’s how our brain works.
Absolutely. I don’t see value in the advancement of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. But, I’m biased. But so are you. So we’re even.
Or, let me rephrase that: knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a “hobby”. If that’s what you want to do, great. But, don’t expect to get paid for it, because part of your “reward” will be the ability to do your hobby as a profession. I.e. you get paid through a non-monetary benefit.
So one of the reasons humanities PhDs get paid less than other PhDs, is because they get to do their hobby.
For folks signing on late, Mark Boone = Augustine.
Now that everyone’s ‘entitled’ to a college education (by the end of which, as well as incurring ruinous debt, if they’re lucky they may have had as much exposure to what is called the ‘humanities’ as children used to get by about the eighth grade, in many a one-room schoolhouse), someone’s got to teach all those required undergraduate, 101, courses.
And at most large institutions of higher learning, it’s not the senior humanities professors who regularly do so.
It’s an underpaid, overworked, gaggle of teaching assistants, and the occasional adjunct or visiting instructor who’s paid a pittance per course. Or perhaps it’s an actual faculty member lecturing, either actually, or virtually, to hundreds, or perhaps a thousand, students at once, a few times a semester, and then breakout sessions handled multiple times a week, by teaching assistants.
These programs perpetuate themselves in order to keep up a steady supply of not-quite-slave labor on board at the bottom, so that those at the top of the professorial heap can teach their ever-increasingly weird ‘specialty’ courses to the same crew of teaching assistants and some paying students each semester, without ever having to taint themselves by contact with what they see as ignorant and disinterested underclassmen who are there only to get their business or engineering degrees.
When professors are rewarded with lifetime job security and high salaries, not for excellence in teaching, but for writing books and articles about their often arcane areas of interest (often based on research compiled by their afore-mentioned, badly-paid assistants), then those who go along with the program deserve what they get.
Things will not change until, as a professor friend of mine, who insisted on teaching freshmen comp every semester until he died, so delightfully put it, the goal of every humanities professor is to “publish students.”
Interesting that you cite welding, because if one is willing to travel and has numerous certifications in techniques and materials, $180 per hour jobs are not being filled in welding in Montana. Then there is all of that oil/gas processing infrastructure in North Dakota left incomplete which causes 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (and natural gas liquids) to be flared at the wellhead. Now we have all of those bright shiny new petrochemical plants being built along the Gulf Coast.
Maybe you should have cited baristas.
I’m going to vote No. 2, since historically multinational trading companies do hire humanities grads then train them on the job, that is unless something has changed in the last few decades.
Additionally, I selected No. 4 which is lots of memorization as opposed to using logic. This is something that I see at home everyday in my spouse.
I’ll tell you what is wrong with the humanities. The humanities are run by liberals which ironically makes them anti-human. That is all.
That’ what I said:
Ill just put this here:
Welders Make $150,000? Bring Back Shop Class
My issue is not with humanities, which I love. But with the whole confining experience of liberal arts majors.
I would bet that an individual sufficiently interested could come away learning far more about the humanities through reading on his own than through a formal education in an average university humanities program.
The information being passed down by humanities professors in college was not secretive knowledge. It was stuff attainable with a couple Barnes and Noble gift cards at a fraction of the price.
This isn’t to single out humanities. This is just the case with history or most other soft majors. Never have so many people paid so much money for information that’s free.
The answer is theory #3, too many PhDs produced for the market.
As to theory # 1; I love truth and beauty, but how many people doing the same search does it need? I’ll tell you what. If anyone wants to pay me to conduct the search further, please drop me a check and I’ll be glad to accomodate. ;)
I’ll just pin this one here:
PhDs at MD Anderson make $600k a year. See what I did there?
Strange how they’re not being filled then. Strange indeed…
1) Average student loan debt: $29,000
2) Average lifetime earning of the…average…undergrad degree holder over the average HS degree holder: an extra $800,000 (95% upper limit is, on average, an extra $3.64 million)
3) Average lifetime earnings of the…average…economics major over the average HS degree holder: an extra $1.3 million (95% upper limit is, on average, an extra $7 million)
Ruinous debt? Sounds like the best investment in the world to me.
AIG,
I think what people are worried about is that a college degree won’t be as valuable in the future.
The over production of Ph.D.’s is not just a problem in the humanities it is a problem in every discipline. However, in engineering and business disciplines there are jobs with specific educational and credential requirements at attractive wages that are available to B.A. and B.S. graduates and/or Master’s degrees. This slows the source of PhD students.
This isn’t the case in other disciplines including the natural sciences which leads to a high supply of cheap graduate student labor.
Having brought up the ‘welder’ rain of derision, I have observed the posturing about it with amusement. Typical humanities majors, take a field you know nothing about, do inadequate research, take stereotypes long out of date and produce a “So there !”.
Sorry folks. Like undergrads to PhDs, welders have a career path. To compare a journeyman welder to a PhD is not appropriate, the appropriate comparison would be to an undergrad humanities major. I had assumed PhDs were the elite of their field, not the bottom rung.
Graduate school for a welder, like any skilled trades, is entrepreneurship. Starting your own company is a far more difficult task than any doctoral thesis. Compare humanities PhDs to successful owners of a trade skill company and lets match incomes.
It is indeed but it’s a fine thing if one can afford to do both.
A PhD’s entry level position is the PhD itself. And that’s if we’re feeling generous. Getting a PhD might be more like an apprenticeship with the first job being the 5-year probationary period of the Assistant Professor. It is, emphatically, not the humanities undergrad. A lot of PhD programs don’t even care what your undergrad is, so long as you have one.
Making ever more rarified levels does not change the comparison logic.
Which is why people are going fro graduate degrees to a higher extent. Everything becomes less valuable, as more people have it.
That goes for welders too ;)
But the solution isn’t to stop people from having it. The world got a lot better when everyone could read, even if the value of reading was then lost.
Of course the value of “college degree” will be lower, as more people get one in a particular field.
That’s how you know to go get a degree in something more valuable. That’s how…a market works.
There’s one thing that I suspect even an undergraduate in the humanities understands:
The meaning of the word “median”.