Don’t “save” the humanities — restore them:
There was a time when “save the humanities” would have been an appropriate cry, but that was years ago, when they were being dismantled in one department after another and replaced with the intellectual triviality and sheer boredom of endlessly repetitive Marxist identity politics, as cowardly administrators looked on and did nothing. The poverty of intellectual content was masked by an elaborate jargon, but that only made things worse: the remade programs became the laughing stock of their campuses. But now the day of reckoning has arrived. Enrollments have collapsed, to the point where the smaller departments face extinction. Those enrollments are sinking not because students don’t value the humanities, but because they do.
It is important to grasp the fact that the cry we are now hearing (“save the humanities”) is not about saving the humanities. It is rather about saving the faculty, who long since destroyed them, from the devastating consequences of their own foolish actions. It asks for a bailout, so that those same people can continue enjoying the fiefdoms they created to replace what once were departments of the humanities. And to respond favorably to that appeal would be folly.
Of course, they’ll have to do something for which they’re entirely ill-suited and untrained — making an honest living in the real world.
Great article. Of course that recommendation could just as easily apply to just about every product and service in both the commercial world and the public sector. Governments, generally with the best of intentions, interfere in a process to determine a different outcome and end up screwing up the feedback loop that generally would have led to continuous improvement. These ‘interventions’ rarely include appropriate oversight to ensure results, and you wind up with unintended consequences and a cry to preserve the bureaucracy that screwed things up to begin with.
Let the markets do their job.
The lost of culture and history simply dooms you to relearning the lessons they teach over again the hard way.
A good example is the current Great Recession. The root cause of the recent economic collapse was a generation of business and financial leaders that never learned the lessons of the 20’s boom and 30’s Great Depression so they made the same core mistakes again of massive speculation (i.e. mortgage derivatives) based on a belief that markets only go up.
BTW a good book, published in 1999, was written on this theme using price records from the last 1,000 years to show that major economic collapses comes every 80 years or so, just the time it takes for the last one to fade into “mythic” history and for folks to convince themselves it will never happen again. The author, David Fischer, basically warned another collapse was coming in the next few years. For those interested the cite is.
“The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History” by David Hackett Fischer
And remember, it helps Rand if you link through him to Amazon 🙂
Thomas,
I won’t argue that those who fail to learn from the past are not condemned to repeat it (they certainly are), what goes on in most modern universities is not learning, but rather indoctrination, and not terribly useful indoctrination at that. It is entirely possible, for instance, to get an advanced degree in history (or economics, for that matter) without ever having studied the era of the Great Depression, or an English degree without ever having read Chaucer. The notion that a study of the humanities is vital because it broadens and deepens our knowlege and leaves us more capable as free men and women is a noble one, but modern universities pay little more than lip service to it.
Most modern universities are a bizarre conflation of trade schools/credential factories (pre-law, pre-med, education, etc.) and ideological salons for a self-selected elite. There are a great many reasons for this, but ultimately the role of the university as a source of education and enlightenment has long since been discarded. The hothouse flowers created by tenured radicals are capable of neither serious thought nor teaching, but merely going through the motions as they generate reams of unreadable tripe while pursuing the brass ring of tenure.
To ‘save’ the humanities (as well as a number of other academic pursuits) perhaps the real answer is to junk most of academe. A permanent academic class (and lets not fool ourselves, that is what we have created here) exists not to learn or to teach, but to sustain itself and its perogatives. Education should be both the right and the responsibility of every member of our society, and we can encourage this by moving it outside of the academy and into the world we all live in.
Thomas – I owe you a plate of barbecue for the cite and will be ordering that book immediately; I’m a big fan of Fischer to begin with thanks to “Albion’s Seed,” and it sounds like his thesis dovetails nicely with Strauss & Howe’s “Generations.”
Obligatory link.
The “great waves” happen a lot more often than once every 80 years. Just in the last thirty years, I could three US recessions (the first timed with the notorious Japanese real estate bubble collapse) and a significant foreign currency crisis in 1997-98.
I suspect too that many of the same suspects, the people who lead the insanity, reappear in these bubbles. Anyone who wanted to pay attention to the past thirty years of bubble markets (including a sterling example of a real estate bubble!), need only look. Odds are good that many of them were caught in one of these previous recessions too.
So why didn’t the leaders learn their lesson despite what probably was repeated pummeling by reality? Because the mistakes were in their favor. To be blunt, it can be hugely profitable to be on the forefront of a bubble even if you lose most of your assets in the bubble (you just need to gain more than you lose). And if you’re not the sort of person who can save money? Well, you get a few years of fun and parties that you would otherwise not see with a real job.
Instead I figure the “learning” came from the rubes and changes in government control systems (particularly the allotting of leverage). I gather the generation that endured the Great Depression had very different saving and spending habits than anyone who came afterward.
Second, government clamped down on anything resembling leveraged speculation. I think it was overreaction, but it does remain that a lot of modern investment simply couldn’t have been done for many decades after the Great Depression. That blocked some degree of economic opportunity as well as closed off avenues for the crazy, highly leveraged (and sometimes highly fraudulent) stuff that we now associate with bubble-induced recessions.
Third, we now have government control systems that can ameliorate significant problems such as a recession or currency panic. And markets are pretty resilient on their own. I think it takes a lot to overwhelm such systems.
Scott,
What you say does have merit in regard to the “Elite” research institutions in the country which everyone focuses on when discussing academe but remember only a small percentage of students attend such schools. And I would agree such schools tend to be in a world of their own. But its important to recognize there are two worlds of academe, although the second one is almost completely ignored
One consists of the elite universities you are talking about. The other consists of the teaching schools (Community, State and For-Profit colleges) that the majority of students attend. Its these teaching schools that are really the bulk of academe and they are anything but tools of indoctrination for the left. This I know from experience having spent a good portion of the last twenty years teaching business at “teaching” colleges when I have not been running my own business. I was also fortunate enough to receive my education entirely from teaching schools (New Mexico Tech and New Mexico State University).
In my experience the faculty at these schools were not left leaning as is the common belief and most had careers outside of Academe. For example, the chair of the Marketing Department (my Doctoral major) was a retired Bank President. My Dissertation topic, building public support for commercial spaceports, was anything but ivory tower, and well supported by the faculty. (And yes, I also worked closely with the Southwest Regional Spaceport Task Force, now Spaceport America, on gathering data for it).
Unfortunately by painting with such a broad brush you tend to group the few bad institutions with the many good ones.
Karl,
[[[So why didn’t the leaders learn their lesson despite what probably was repeated pummeling by reality?]]]
Because they were viewed as “specialize cases” that didn’t apply to them and they dismissed them with a “That is not how our industry works” Or “that would never happen in the U.S.”. Such denials are signals you are approaching a peak in the wave.
[[[Second, government clamped down on anything resembling leveraged speculation. I think it was overreaction, but it does remain that a lot of modern investment simply couldn’t have been done for many decades after the Great Depression.]]]
Yes, and it was the relaxing of such controls in the 1990’s, combined with a refusal to regulate tools of speculation like derivatives, that laid the foundation for the crash of the Great Recession.
BTW a great Frontline Documentary on it was shown last month. Here is the link for it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/
“The Warning”
Basically Frontline documents well how a faith based belief in the market always regulating itself, and a belief that a crash like the Great Depression could never happen again, resulted in the Great Recession.
Now markets do tend to self-regulate IF they meet the requirement of Perfect Information, which includes Prefect Information on risk and if the feedback loop is short. The key problem was the derivatives market violated this condition while the relaxing of regulations on investments by financial institutions allowed banks to be overly exposed to the risks posed by derivatives. And because of their complexity you had a long feedback loop.
Now I should note there is a place in the economy for speculation, its what drive progress, but systematic speculation should not be with home ownership and banks which should be refuges of stability in an economy. And I should also note that anytime you break the link between self-interest and consequences of poor decision making you create the environment for a crash.
And BTW the worst is not over. The Foreclosure crisis is only in pause at the movement with the second shoe about to drop.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/16/AR2010111600022.html?hpid=topnews
Jay,
Thanks. Yes, I have both Generations books and David Fischer’s work fits in well with them.
There’s nothing wrong with derivatives or any type of investment if we JUST DO NOT BAIL THEM OUT. Bailing them out takes out the natural corrective.
Balloons are natural. You can not and should not even try to prevent them. The reason they keep happening is that a minority are able to get rich. It’s the majority (if the govt. doesn’t thwart it) that provide the corrective.
Demanding that the govt. protect people from themselves is to force people that did not take the same risk (and potential reward) to allow those risk takers to take even bigger risks while punishing those that don’t. Taken to the extreme this is destructive to an entire society rather than a minority (who chose the risk.)
“This created a mismatch of temperaments: humanistic scholars are naturally animated by a profound respect for the legacy of our past, but all the instincts of political radicals go in the opposite direction.”
Political radicals in this country go in the opposite direction as long as they don’t have to endure any kind of hardship…like temporary loss of income. Unlike the rest of the world, they are “radicals” only because it’s chic, not because they truly believe their lives and those of their descendants depend on it.
As much as I despise Nelson Mandela for some of the things he did, he was a radical in a sense that none of the penthouse proletariat in this country ever could or would be…
Thomas,
I have spent most of my academic life in the so-called ‘Elite’ institutions (a testimony more to their bad judgement than any virtue on my part, I assure you), but I have taught at several non-elite schools, including two online universities. You are correct that they are less overtly ideological in terms of the faculty, but the administration, if anything, is worse than at the elites. The dregs of the educrats have drunk deeply indeed at the fountain of political correctness (in fairness, this ugly process is abetted by the various legal advisors that terrify the admin with nightmare scenarios regarding lawsuits for various forms of discrimination), and most (surely not all….but is ANYTHING ever universal?) of these institutions are as vacant intellectually as the Elites as a result.
More to the point, however, if we look at the community colleges and public non-elites as credential factories, why are they there at all? The overcredentialization of our economy (surely a topic for another thread) is toxic enough, that we debase any real sense of intellectual inquiry by associating it with this Babbit-esque nonsense is perhaps even worse.
I repeat, shut them all down, and lets encourage intellectual inquiry and learning on a small-group and individual level. If certifications and credentials are necessary, there is no need to fund vast factory schools to provide them…
Bubbles and crashes are caused by irrational exuberance and an ego-based inability by enough of the players to recognize when the supply of needed “greater fools” has dried up, respectively. The existence of derivative securities is irrelevant to this process; there were no derivatives in 1929 and the financiers of the day managed to screw the pooch anyway, Lord love ’em.
Derivatives – specifically, mortgage-backed securities – are implicated in the current mess mainly as contributors to its overall severity because so much of the underlying lending was gilded lead brick that government regulators and ideological redistributionists in Congress insisted be treated as 24K specie. To apply a 1929 analogy, the financial speakeasies of 2008 had a much larger selection of booze brands on their shelves, but Barney Frank and Chris Dodd had poured huge quantities of wood alcohol into nearly all of it and then professed to be shocked!, shocked! that people were going blind.
As to the ideological coloration of “teaching school” faculty, I suggest that a Marketing department in, I presume, a school of Business is not exactly representative of the “humanities.” Believe me, the “humanities” faculties of state and community colleges all model themselves to the maximum possible degree after the “cool kid” departments at Harvard, Yale, etc. that they all aspire to be. Pick almost any such plebian institution, walk through the halls where the faculty offices for English, Poly Sci, Sociology, History, Literature or Fine Arts are located and read what is taped to the office doors.
I found out over 25 years ago that while medieval history was totally and utterly fascinating, it didn’t pay the bills as did mechanical drafting. I am close to a BA in History, and have taken some graduate level classes in Medieval History. I have a large personal library of books on medieval history that is better than some college collections.
And yet, I continue to work as a mechanical designer, which can bring in a good income well upwards of $50k per year, with just a 2 year AAS degree and lots of experience.
I would love to be able to take the time and go for my history degrees, but not at the price of putting myself in debt for the rest of my life.
The job market for history BA grads is dismal; many of them go onto law school in order to make a living by doing something other than asking “paper or plastic”.
So I’m self taught in the historical field. I study the topics that I find interesting, and ignore the PC dreck that most programs spew. And I don’t have a $100k student loan doing the Damocles thing.
I read a variety of blogs. Some right, some left, some hard to pin down. The Nielsen Haydens of SF fame also have an interesting blog. They lean to the left. You may be interested in their posting and subsequently long discussion Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege. It echoes to some extent what people are saying here.
ken anthony,
[[[Demanding that the govt. protect people from themselves is to force people that did not take the same risk (and potential reward) to allow those risk takers to take even bigger risks while punishing those that don’t.]]]
That philosophy may work in a substance level tribal society with a few hundred folks and lots and lots of mammoths to hunt, but its simply not suitable in an interconnected global economy. Few if any of those speculating with OTHER PEOPLES MONEY would have gotten hurt without the bail-out. Indeed, firms like Goldman-Sach were even betting on a crash as a way to make money.
And that is the point, it was other people’s money they were using to speculate with. Its like me taking money you trusted me to hold for you and going to a casino to gamble with it. Or the money you expected me to pay you for your labor.
The ones who got hurt, and would have gotten hurt more without the bail-out, were those lured into low interest financing on homes, those believing mortgage brokers they could afford to own a home when they couldn’t, those who put their live savings into banks which bet it on derivatives without knowing it.
Whole countries like Iceland and Ireland had their economies destroyed by the gamblers in New York while its unlikely those gamblers that caused it would have even missed a meal without a bail-out. Really, their only consequences would have been not becoming the millionaire they dreamed of.
This is the point libertarians miss when they speak their rhetoric of “freedom”, that their “freedom” is usually paid for by someone else. Libertarianism might work if humans were the utility maximizing robots used for human behavior in classical economics and if each was truly independent as in the myth of the noble savage. Or we were actually still living in the hunter-gather society of 10,000 B.C. But it doesn’t work that well in a complex society where everyone is interdependent on each other. Its just too simple minded a philosophy.
BTW that is why Ayn Rand not only never considered herself a Libertarian but despised the Libertarians more then she despised Marxists, because she felt their philosophy only existed in a fantasy world. Friedrich Hayek also took pains to separate himself from the libertarian movement. Doubtless both are spinning in their graves hearing their quotes being misused to support it.
Scott,
[[[The overcredentialization of our economy]]]
I am not sure what you mean by that, but if you mean certifying that folks have the training they need for a career I would disagree. Employers have to have some measure to determine if a individual is qualified to do the job. Its not like in the old days when you were hiring one of the local kids who you knew was qualified because you saw them working on cars with your kids. Or saw how they did yards…
In my current position I work closely with major mining firms to ensure they have a workforce. Last year we graduates over a 100 millwrights and mechanics who went straight to high paying jobs in the mines. And we could have placed twice that many if we had the students. Indeed, just a couple weeks ago I was meeting with local high school faculty to encourage more students to enter our program so the mining firms could meet their workforce requirements. Building workforce is the key role of community and teaching colleges and a necessary one.
[[[The dregs of the educrats have drunk deeply indeed at the fountain of political correctness (in fairness, this ugly process is abetted by the various legal advisors that terrify the admin with nightmare scenarios regarding lawsuits for various forms of discrimination),]]]
If you mean by that rant that schools have to comply with the various equal employment laws, that is a given, just as with any other organization. But that is not something particular to education. And schools, just like other organizations, have indeed been sued and lost over violations of federal laws on equal employment and disability so I suspect its not political correctness as much as simply obeying the law of the land.
Dick Eagleson,
[[[Pick almost any such plebian institution, walk through the halls where the faculty offices for English, Poly Sci, Sociology, History, Literature or Fine Arts are located and read what is taped to the office doors.]]]
You must live in one of the coastal states. You are welcome to come to my college here in Nevada where you will see the humanities folks at faculty meetings with their NRA hats talking about hunting for Big Horn Sheep in the Ruby Mountains. But of course we do have our poetry festival here every January, Cowboy poetry that is, which is not exactly left lending either. 🙂
Thomas,
I don’t at all disagree that some credentials can be useful to employers (though the notion of a ‘paper CNE’ should be a useful counterweight to keep in mind), but we (as a society) are more and more using a college degree as a proxy for some sort of relevant credential. An example of this is seen in the growth of many online schools, where a huge chunk of their student body consists of ‘ticket punchers’ (i.e. students who have signed up to get their degree for no reason other than to satisfy some HR requirement for a promotion) who are there solely to get the piece of paper (the diploma) so they can move up the career ladder. They know damn well that their degree has absolutely nothing at all to do with their actual work, and they treat the classwork with the contempt that they believe it deserves.
This would be bad enough if it just created a market distortion, but it also tends to lock-out those individuals who cannot afford (or achieve) a college degree, thus creating a barrier to entry for many jobs where it really doesn’t matter. I have seen this often enough in IT, but it happens in almost every branch of the economy. We have created an environment where worthless degrees are barriers to entry, without providing any real relevant information regarding a candidate’s qualifications. I am ont referring to training or qualification/certification programs that prepare a candidate for real work, I am talking about students graduating with ‘general studies’ degrees so they can get jobs as clerks. The former is useful, often valuable, the latter is simply credentialization for its own sake. A college degree is supposed to be about education, not simply a ticket to the middle class.
As to anti-discrimination law, lets drop the crap. These days universities dont’ dare evaluate members of ‘protected’ groups (particularly during faculty evaluations) on anything near an honest basis, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit. I have been on enough comittees where precisely this sort of discussion takes place, and the administrators (and their legal enablers) make it clear that short of outright malfeasence (and not always then), there is no basis for rejecting these candidates or (when I was in that world) denying them tenure. Antidiscrimination law assumes guilt until innocence is proven, and the cost of defense (even if successful) is far too high for any academic administrator to risk. This particular poison has seeped into the world of teacher/student relations as well, where one must be careful of who one gives what grades to. If you claim not to see this, you will forgive me if I assume that you are either monumentally obtuse, or simply lying…
The bottom line is that the system is broken and corrupt (there is no other word for it) and the students have become cynical as they discover just how badly rigged the game is. If we returned to a better era when only about 2-3% of the population attended universities (and note, this is VERY different from not getting an education), we might actually see real education (much of it self-directed) occur…
As a humorous aside, the Onion has done it again:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/department-of-education-study-finds-teaching-these,18461/
Scott,
[[[This particular poison has seeped into the world of teacher/student relations as well, where one must be careful of who one gives what grades to. If you claim not to see this, you will forgive me if I assume that you are either monumentally obtuse, or simply lying…]]]
The funny thing is that online you often have no idea of the ethnic background of the student, other then what is perhaps hinted at in a name which may be misleading. And today 80% of the classes I teach are online for simple reasons of economics as lower and middle income students are too busy working to go to physical classes on a set schedule. And the service area GBC has (62,000 square miles) makes it too expensive to offer on-ground classes at all the locations or have instructors travel to them. For example its over 400 miles by road from the main campus in Elko to the teaching center in Pahrump NV.
[[[These days universities dont’ dare evaluate members of ‘protected’ groups (particularly during faculty evaluations) on anything near an honest basis, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit.]]]
I am not sure how is works in your area, since I have no idea of what it is, but in the business schools at the colleges I have been its been pretty transparent and hard to game. For example a double-blind reviewed article in a specific journal will earn a specific number of points, one in a Proceedings a different number, with the ranking and points on a list for all to see. Similarly teaching is based on a combination of student evaluations and feedback, with standardized assessments of learning in each class that are also used for accreditation. So its fairly objective and you know exactly where you stand. More importantly its also very defensible in court. But then, given the shortage of business faculty (salaries are much higher in industry) you don’t exactly have the choice of candidates you would have in other fields.