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Why Everyone Should Support (Some) Humanities Majors (Despite the Problems)

Why Everyone Should Support (Some) Humanities Majors (Despite the Problems)

Last updated on: May 2, 2018 at 7:52 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Why Everyone Should Support (Some) Humanities Majors (Despite the Problems) 2018-05-02T19:52:15-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Let’s begin any defense of Humanities departments by admitting that many Humanities programs at many colleges have gone quite mad.

Forget political agendas, a graduate of a college should read, write, think, and be more numerate at the end of school.

If one judges the content only by the notion of rigor, the intellectual chops required to master what is taught, more than a few programs have become intellectually simple-minded. Anyone fit to go to college who does not get an “A” in such departments did not bother to attend class, missed the final, or handed in nothing. Humanities (outside of philosophy) have become like sociology or communications: gut majors.

I know former students at Ivy undergrad programs who worked harder in high school and were more mentally challenged in IB high school classes than in their majors at these universities. Master the jargon and the politics and you can pass. This can be equally true at “conservative” Christian colleges.

Let’s also concede that if you are a Burkean conservative or religious traditionalist (Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or just about anything else) that most Humanities programs don’t so much dislike you as think you are obviously wrong. Recently, I was reading an article generated from a graduate of this sort of program that described a belief that humans are sexually binary as obviously intellectually incoherent. The department that produced this thinking is a bad department. First, it had to be culturally insular. Most of the non-white world would think the sexual binary obviously true! Are they “obviously” wrong? Second, the belief that what is the scientific and the medical norm (still!) about sex is “obviously” incoherent seems dubious to anyone with a broad multidisciplinary education. Finally, the idea of a sexual binary may be wrong, but it isn’t incoherent. Surely one can imagine another species that is sexually binary! I fear the writer confused “incoherent” with “wrong.”

They went to a college that pretended to have a dialectic!

That sums up the level of discourse in many Humanities programs. However, even if things are very bad, the destruction of Humanities departments is fearful to any conservative Christian. You do not save the plague ridden by killing them.

Yet the situation in many departments has become so political, so politically driven, that many administrators are tempted to close down these departments and emphasize more “job-skill” areas. Let’s leave aside whether Humanities departments produce job skills (research says they do) and whether bloated administrative structure is the real problem (it is).

I would like to defend keeping even the worst departments (from my perspective). We need to work for a cure, not euthanasia. To narrow the focus of the defense, let me assume that nobody is philistine enough to think Humanities are not necessary. Nobody would wish well trained workers for the state that could not think deeply, had passions shaped by the best of human art, or lacked a sense of history!

When I linked to an article concerned about cutting Humanities departments, a brilliant (really) former student who is very successful, wrote:

I agree that the humanities are vital to real education and that departmental structures can be somewhat helpful. This article did not firmly articulate the need for Majors in humanities subjects, nor did it draw a good distinction between erasing humanities majors and erasing humanities education.

Can you more fully explain the need for 19-year-olds to specialize in a particular branch of the humanities? I cannot, but I am willing to be persuaded. Again, education for the mind and soul requires humanities. I do not deny this. Yet I cannot connect it with a requirement that every good undergraduate institution offer Majors in humanities subjects.

It seems to me that a college offering a strong Torrey/St. Constantine-like general education in the liberal arts would be a great benefit even without specialized humanities majors

Further, if they offer only one single “Major” for the purpose of practical job training (electrical engineering for example), they may be a virtuous institution. They may churn out good lay churchmen working hard in their parishes and communities and responsibly providing for their families.

Tell me where I am wrong. Please help.

For the purpose of my defense of Humanities departments, let me assume the worst such department (from my perspective). It is full of people who do not wish to teach general education classes, but only small seminars. It is political and lacks diversity of viewpoint. (Everyone is “conservative” or “liberal.”)

First, in most schools departments are needed to allow sufficient conversations between experts. As our own college grows, we will need historians (not just one) so that the historians can teach us how to do history (the craft) and have conversations with each other. Is there anything more dangerous (in the long term) than to have one of everything? Community between disciplines is too rare (a bad thing about departments), but experts need other experts in house to check their hubris, work, and methods.

Nothing is better than sitting with an Al Geier, Gary Hartenburg, or some other Plato expert and having that person give it to me over coffee.

Second, allowing students exposure to basic methods is good, but that is the general education portion of the curriculum. By twenty-one, a student should begin to narrow his or her areas of concentration, because even the narrowness of an undergraduate major is hopelessly general!

Let’s take an education at a very good general education program like Torrey Honors or the first two years of The Saint Constantine college program. The readings at Constantine are hoplessly broad. Let’s just pick Plato, the thinker I know best. We do not read enough Plato and we only read Republic once. This is sad. The nature and outcome of one character in Plato has kept me thinking for thirty years! Yet the major criticism I get is that the reading is not broad enough. Where are the Ethiopian Orthodox readings? What of China? What of India? Why isn’t there more twenty-first century writers?

We tried to form a curriculum around the mother tongue of our host country and on the portion of Christendom that speaks that language. We know there is endless wealth in addition to what we are reading. This is joy to anybody! There is no end to the awesome and education (of course) never ends. Much of my reading has been outside my culture after college, because I can and should.

Learn enough to love your home, then love your neighbor, but never appropriate your neighbor’s stuff!

So the balance in a mere four years is between “broad” (which is never broad enough) and “narrow” (which is never narrow enough). A college has to teach something and so we keep trying to get the focus right. We all fail a bit, but our failure is closer than if a man or woman just read randomly.

A department in Humanities or any other subject area allows the “narrow” to balance the “broad.” To cut the department is to risk producing a person who is a “generalist,” not good enough at anything to do it very well.

Of course, the American model also gave us the job of getting people ready for jobs! Humanities departments do this well, but so do more “practical” majors. In fact, I have learned much about being human from these practical majors! A good dose of mathematics is good for the soul. We teach all our students to garden!

Small schools will have to focus, but when larger schools cuts Humanities majors first, it suggests a problem. They have not recognized that the central problem in higher education is the administrative Kraken that is twisting everything and consuming the resources needed by teachers. Kill the administrative college. Second, it suggests that “job training” has replaced education as a goal. Nobody knows what the jobs of fifty years from now will be. I graduated in 1986 and nobody’s guess of what I would need to know was very good except in classic Humanities majors.

Elim (see Fount Shults) and Roberts (David Bassinger) teachers gave me a grounding in theology, philosophy, and history that serves me well now!

In any case, Noble Former Student (!), we probably do not disagree much. Small schools need multiple people in basic majors (departments) to facilitate excellence and avoid gurism (the greatest danger of small schools). Since we do job training, some immediately useful skills are good.

As for departments that are very wicked (from my perspective):

Let’s outhink them, not cut them. If we are right, then let’s make our case! Meanwhile, schools are struggling. Some are falling for the lure of “big time” sports. Folly! Others decide massive online will work. This is a delusion. Online is costly and the market is saturated. Early adopters made money, but at the cost of McEducation. I have yet to meet a small school that could not solve her problems by:

1. Eliminating professors who hate teaching and the mission. Increase the load or have professors assume roles (recruiting, administration) that they have given up to specialists.

2. Radically cutting adminstrative bloat.

Maybe there is a school without any administrative waste and faculty who long to innovate . . . It is a big world.

I will be more sympathetic to change if we start by cutting the President’s salary and not the History department!

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