It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John Adams:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
-- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)
In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire to devote years of their lives to studying the arts.
Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of study.
That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend. John Adams studied political science because his business was the business of government. Studying political science today -- as an otherwise directionless middle-class student relying on loans and scholarships for tuition -- is not really hearing the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended.
This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out:
that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.
https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0...
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public.
A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there to fill.
P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate.
greesil•1h ago
https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
stockresearcher•1h ago
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acqui...
The significance to the University financial picture cannot be understated.