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…
That's what I've been doing for the last half a decade, Digital Humanities (DH). DH is what you get when you ask yourself, “What happens when you add computational methods to the scholar's toolkit? What kind of questions can you ask? What does it imply for scholarship in the Humanities?”
That's one thing that's happening. And it's a good thing. At my uni (a second-tier uni in Western Europe) we have an undergrad program four years old which combines elements of CS (mainly the non-theoretical stuff) with subjects of the students own choosing from the Arts. I believe that within a decade all higher-level institutions will offers programs like this. The Arts & Humanities is undergoing a paradigm shift the likes of which it hasn't experienced in decades, perhaps even centuries. Only those with backgrounds in the humanities are going to be able to write this new chapter in the story of human learning and understanding.
Another thing that's happening. The economy. That's maybe not an unrelated issue. Are there going to be jobs that people will be rewarded for if they get degrees in the humanities? Not in this economic climate. I don't know if people recognise my handle here (probably not) but my area is philosophy. I can see that people are crying out for philosophical instruction. I just attended a Jordan B. Peterson / Sam Harris live event where 8,500 eager souls turned up. You know what a tenured philosopher of a decent institution said when I enquired of a table of philosophers about Peterson, “Oh, that idiot from Toronto.” Academic philosophy is failing philosophy. Could the same be true of other arts and humanities subjects?
Academic institutions are as politically biased if not more so as the rest of society. And these are the people we are looking to for direction in our lives? I've been saying this for the last while but it is my conjecture that the humanities is broken to exactly the same extent and the same degree that philosophy has lost its way in the last century.
What I'm trying to say is, the crisis in the humanities is deep problem. It is related to the current economic situation, to the current political situation, it's an institutional problem, it's an epistemological problem, it's related to the current cultural climate – ultimately it's a philosophical problem.
Final note (though I could write a lot more) – the culture war between the arts and the sciences goes back nearly 150 years (I've researched this) so this has been brewing for an extremely long time. There have been multiple times in the past when the humanities were in the dominant position and the sciences the reverse so make of that what you will.