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Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

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Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#81

Post by groby_b »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #44
matthewmacleod wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just a less obviously-hostile environment would be a good start.

What exactly is obviously hostile about our universities? Is it the safe spaces? Is it the lower standards applied to minorities and women to make it easier to get in? Is it all of the scholarships open only to minorities and women? Universities are quite obviously the most inclusive and least hostile place in the world for minorities and women.

Assuming you even have a degree: People like you. People who parrot the same sound bites you do. That's what is making our universities hostile.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#82

Post by sonnyblarney »

University used to be for the elite, or roughly.

Now, regular folk, who don't come from wealthy families, have to do that as part of their education, and cost is a big deal.

It's natural that people tend towards practical educations and it's not all that bad.

As an Engineer, I was overwhelmed with technical bits and in retrospect I wish we could all have taken a full year of liberal arts type stuff.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#83

Post by cirgue »

dwaltrip wrote: post #71
donbright wrote: post #57

You know what's funny is how many topics on 'hacker news' are basically questions of sociology or anthropology or economics or psychology. If you could make some kind of AI that would color the comments here based on what academic discipline they were most closely linked to, I think it would just be a sea of colors that fall under the 'humanities' or 'liberal arts' umbrella. It's not that people aren't deeply interes…

Those topics are intrinsically harder and more intractable. They deal with far more complex and chaotic systems. This is the fundamental issue. Looking at it this way, it isn't surprising that humanity has a much less productive grasp of such subjects. The topics are of great interest, but it is difficult to make substantial, concrete progress. This doesn't mean we should give up. It just means we should expect to st…

It's also important to remember that fundamentally, humanities are a part of cultural production and reproduction. Anything that can be rigorously proven migrates to the realm of science. Humanities are by definition supposed to construct knowledge that guides our decision-making about issues where no certainty is possible.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#84

Post by anoncoward111 »

seibelj wrote: post #20
anoncoward111 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

Hard to live and work around Boston on $18,000 salary

My rent and food in NYC are less than $14,000 with roommates. I have a savings if something goes wrong.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#86

Post by randcraw »

A quarter of a million dollars for a degree in spanish; no job prospects; followed by 20+ years of loan repayment...

Is there any wonder that such degrees are unpopular?

None of the humanities majors improves your employment prospects, while all could be reproduced for free by reading maybe 20 books at your leisure. That makes the humanities more like a form of entertainment than a preparation for life, which is what most of us expect from college.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#87

Post by InTheArena »

seibelj wrote: post #8

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people wo…

I wise likewise told by my advisor that any sort of post-degree work in History would be futile. My chance of getting hired as "a white male" in a history department was not good, and frankly "there is not a lot of future in history" (which we laughed at).

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#88

Post by realitygrill »

arthurjj wrote: post #16
mxwsn wrote: post #9

I was curious what sort of relationship there might be between recent trends in international students (who I expected would more frequently major in STEM than humanities than the typical American population) and the article's noted decrease in humanities majors. In [0], the share of college students that is international rose from ~3% in 2010 to ~5.5% in 2017. And from the table in [1], in 2017, about 2% of internat…

I think the Harvard trend is probably too little to late on their part. Having worked on both coasts in a variety of companies I didn't even know Harvard had an engineering dept.

Harvard didn't have an engineering department until a few years ago (might be year 5 or 6 now).

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#89

Post by jhbadger »

thesagan wrote: post #70
Moodles wrote: post #50

80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Social "science" is even more terrifying in my view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a crisis. I nearly took history at undergrad…

A lot of them are Marxists because they’ve studied it. I’m not exactly Marxist but I’m more terrified by those who judge his works without having legitimately studied it critically and in depth under supervision. He’s a lightning rig for prejudice and too many people equate Marx with Stalin, or believe him to have caused Stalin.

He's not the same as Stalin, but he certainly caused him. Marx was basically the founder of a secular religion and like the theistic kind, religions attract scoundrels because they see it as a way to power. Stalin himself studied to be a priest before he changed religions.

Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

#90

Post by InTheArena »

I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law. I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus. Not because you may need to do a differential or integral, but rather because it teaches you to think differently.

The thing that scares me more then anything else is that my view is that The anti-intellectual authoritarianism has spread even to college campuses, where liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.

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