The latest national report on the humanities reads like a pep talk. It doesn’t quantify what it calls a critical lack of attention to the humanities, nor does it plot out many data points to support its assertion that the national focus has faded from those fields and needs to be renewed.
But the report, issued last month by a commission appointed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has stirred up a long-simmering debate, as well as lingering resentments, over whether the study of the humanities in American higher education is indeed dying and, if so, who is to blame.
Commentaries on academic and news-media blogs and in the opinion sections of major newspapers question the continued centrality of the humanities in American life. Many of the writers support their arguments with figures showing a steep decline in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded to undergraduates who major in English, history, and other humanities subjects.
One commonly cited statistic is the drop since the late 1960s, when nearly 18 percent of all bachelor’s degrees were earned in the humanities. The proportion had fallen to less than 8 percent by 2010.
Some commentators blame the decline on short attention spans among students who can’t read anything longer than a text message. Others pointed a finger at English professors who, the writers argue, have turned their field from a study of the classics into a theoretical examination of race, class, and gender.
The critiques have prompted defensive reactions from prominent humanities professors, who call reports of decline old news. While undergraduates’ interest in the humanities did fall during the 1970s and early 80s, they note, it has remained stable ever since, even in the midst of attacks on the disciplines.
“Students are not ‘now making the jump’ to other fields, and it is not ‘getting worse,’” Michael Bérubé, director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in The Chronicle this month. “There is no ‘steady downward spiral.’ It is more like the sales of Beatles records—huge in the 60s, then dropping off sharply in the 70s.”
At the same time, many humanities professors do concede that they and their disciplines are struggling, if in different ways. They have come to feel like second-class citizens compared with their counterparts in the sciences, who typically have higher salaries and large research-start-up packages in gleaming new facilities.
Indeed, say humanities scholars, those factors define the problem more clearly than does any decline in the number of undergraduate majors.
“There are all sorts of crises that do leave professors to feel the humanities are under siege,” says Benjamin M. Schmidt, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University who has written about the controversy over the health of the humanities on his blog, Sapping Attention. “But it doesn’t mean students don’t want to be taking humanities classes anymore.”
The crucial issues, say Mr. Schmidt and other scholars, are the collapse of the academic job market in the humanities, also threatening the state of graduate education in the fields; the greater-than-average influx of contingent faculty members in those disciplines; and shrinking support for the humanities among some politicians and in university budgets.
“There is a conflation here of different problems that have hit the humanities hard,” says James F. English, director of the Penn Humanities Forum and an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “They have nothing to do with enrollment, but with resources.”
Collapse Is Decades Old
The study of the humanities among undergraduates has indeed declined. But the largest part happened decades ago. In 1967, 17.7 percent of all bachelor’s degrees were awarded in the humanities, a share that has been more than halved since then. However, the proportion had never been that high before 1967—the data go back to 1945—or since, notes Mr. Schmidt, who will start work as an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University this fall.
After the peak, in the late 1960s, the proportion of humanities degrees tumbled over the following decade, bottoming out at 6.7 percent of all undergraduate degrees in 1983. Since then the proportion of students earning degrees in the humanities has fluctuated by only a couple of percentage points, settling at 7.6 percent in 2010, the latest year for which national figures are available.
“The chart never quite reinforces the point that something terrible is going on in the humanities right now,” Mr. Schmidt writes on his blog. Anyone looking at the numbers closely will notice, he adds, that the real collapse of humanities enrollments happened in the 1970s. (And Mr. Schmidt believes that the largest factor affecting the decline is the changing interests of women, who in the 1970s had begun gravitating away from the humanities and toward other fields.)
So, are critics seizing on a crisis that is three decades old?
As it happens, just before the arts-and-sciences academy issued its report last month, Harvard University issued one of its own, which did show a recent decline there in the proportion of students majoring in the humanities. The report also included evidence of a decline at other prominent institutions, including Princeton and Yale Universities. But at those elite institutions, the proportion of students earning degrees in the humanities is still much higher than the national average.
At Harvard, for example, the humanities, including history, dropped from 36 percent of majors in 1954 to 20 percent in 2012. And compared with the nation as a whole, more of the decline at Harvard has happened in the past decade.
The Harvard report, “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future,” caught the attention of commentators, who declared it evidence that the humanities were in crisis nationwide.
But Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, says it isn’t even considered a crisis there. “You don’t walk to work thinking, My area is in decline. We still have students and are teaching the same courses.” His department, he says, is considering adding a large survey course and expanding enrollment in popular offerings to encourage more freshman interest in an English major early on.
David Brooks is a cultural commentator for The New York Times who sat on the commission that issued the national humanities report. In an opinion piece last month for the Times, he said professors had soured students on the humanities by shifting scholarship and teaching away from central topics that matter most.
“The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus,” he wrote. “They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty, and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class, and gender.”
In an essay called “The Decline and Fall of the English Major,” Verlyn Klinkenborg, a Times columnist who has taught writing on several campuses, pegged problems in the humanities to the tight economy, which, he said, had forced students to major in fields they think will find them jobs.
“There is a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college,” wrote Mr. Klinkenborg. “Too often, that means skipping the humanities.”
Mark Bauerlein teaches English at Emory University. While he understands that the proportion of those studying the humanities nationally has been steady at around 8 percent, he doesn’t necessarily count that as a good sign.
“I’m saying, Of course this is a crisis,” says Mr. Bauerlein, who believes the proportion of those majors should be higher. “I think the humanities should be a central part of the liberal-arts education.”
More than the number of majors, though, Mr. Bauerlein, who is a contributor to The Chronicle, points to a lack of intellectual and financial horsepower. “What are the humanities bringing in?” he asks. Just as important, he asks, what is the value of what humanities professors are putting out?
No one buys most humanities books anymore, he says, and many scholarly articles are lucky to get just one citation a year over a decade. It is science researchers, he says, who are attracting federal research money and doing work that resonates with the public.
“Can you find me a dean who is going to come into the office and say, ‘I am really, really proud of what our English professors are doing with their research, and I want to send them to talk to alumni groups about their latest books’?” Mr. Bauerlein asks. “There is no audience for humanities research, no consumption, no measure of impact anymore.”
Colleges are cutting language departments and replacing tenure-track humanities professors with adjuncts in greater numbers than in the sciences, he says. The proportion of humanities classes taught by contingent faculty members at public research universities in 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, was 44.6 percent, versus 38.5 percent in the social sciences, 29.6 percent in engineering, and 28.2 percent in the life sciences, according to the American Federation of Teachers.
And salaries in the humanities have risen more slowly than in most other fields, including the sciences. According to data from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, full professors of English earned 8 percent more in 2013, and history professors just 7 percent more, compared with what they earned in 2008. During the same period, full professors of business saw a pay increase of 15 percent, and those in both engineering and in biological sciences saw 12 percent.
Shift of Power
Many of the prominent humanities professors who answered the critics with opinion pieces of their own in recent weeks acknowledge that the factors Mr. Bauerlein presents have worn down scholars in the field.
“The power has shifted now, not only to the sciences but to health-and-medical centers on campuses,” says Scott Saul, an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of California at Berkeley. “The humanities are now a smaller part of a much bigger entity.”
David A. Hollinger, a professor of history at Berkeley and a past president of the Organization of American Historians, says the loss of money, power, and prestige within the humanities is not due to any shift in what scholars study. “It isn’t just a matter of, Oh, the humanities started doing deconstruction and reading too much Foucault, and look what happened to them.”
Rather, he says, scholars whose careers are the least defined by the university’s original academic mission—those in, say, economics, business, and the sciences—have become more valued than those in humanities disciplines like philosophy and English.
“It is part of the gradual loss of nerve on the part of American higher-education leadership that the value that increasingly defines what goes on inside the university are those things that are valued outside the university,” says Mr. Hollinger.
Mr. Bérubé, at Penn State, has been at the center of the debate over the health of the humanities. When a major report comes out on the topic, he says, it’s likely to be “plugged into the ready-made narrative of decline.”
In his article in The Chronicle this month, Mr. Bérubé doesn’t deny a crisis in the humanities. “It is a crisis in graduate education, in prestige, in funds, and most broadly, in legitimation,” he wrote. “But it is not a crisis of undergraduate enrollment.”
