In Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel, the humanities take a lot of heat for being a sinkhole of fetid nonsense.
There’s a good reason for this.
In the last fifty years, the humanities have gone from being the great repository of the wisdom of the west to being the aforementioned sinkhole of fetid nonsense.
Humanities professors are not so thrilled that this inconvenient truth has gotten noticed.
Why are they so unhappy about the notice?
Well, it can’t be because they’re afraid that students will stop taking their useless courses. Think about it. Students are so often concerned about their GPAs. It’s easier to get an A in a course chronicling the growth and shrinkage of Kim Kardashian’s hind parts than it is to get an A in a course in which Augustine’s City of God is just one of the required texts. Shakespeare doesn’t have a prayer when going head to head in a course about Lady Gaga.
It couldn’t be because the professors are afraid that parents will find out about the garbage they’re teaching the kids. Professors don’t seem to care very much about the opinions of the lumpenproletariat who raised their students. Besides, a college degree is (or used to be at any rate) the ticket to the middle class. What are you going to do? Not send your kids to college?
Nope.
The professors are upset that people have noticed their little racked because it endangers their sweet, sweet government funding. Now that times have gotten tougher and state budgets are shrinking, a few responsible politicians are looking to tighten the budgets in these useless programs.
The Associated Press recently detailed the desperation of our public universities as they strive to protect the humanities from budget-cutting state governors and legislatures. The story focuses on comments made last month by Florida governor Rick Scott. Citing the miserable economy, Scott argued that precious state tax dollars should go to support science and tech studies, not “educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology.”
This has sent shock waves through faculty lounges across the country. The story quotes University of Connecticut president Susan Herbst, who worries that an overemphasis on job training will rob students of what is truly higher in higher education. Not only do the humanities teach “critical thinking,” says Herbst, they also “teach us how we’re supposed to live.”
As someone with a Ph.D. in the humanities myself, I’d share Herbst’s sadness if I thought there was much left of the genuine humanities still being taught that needed saving. Instead, Herbst is right for the wrong reason: The humanities are indeed in mortal peril, if not dead already. But neither our governors nor our state legislators are the assassins. Our humanities professors are.
If students were actually learning anything in these programs, there might be something to be upset about. But they’re not.
No wonder, then, that while Herbst claims that the humanities teach “critical thinking,” the facts reveal a less-sunny reality. A recent study of college achievement, titled, Academically Adrift, found that 45 percent of the students it surveyed showed little improvement in their critical-thinking capacities after two years of college. After four years, 36 percent continued to show little improvement. Having been pummeled to near-death by our universities, today’s humanities lack the wherewithal to sharpen effectively students’ critical-reasoning capacities.
As a Florida resident, I applaud my governor for refusing to fund this racket anymore. Read the rest here.
