Higher Education Cannot Train a New Generation Without the Humanities

A sea-change is taking place in colleges and universities today, one that will reshape the roles that they and their students can play in the larger society. What if the colleges of today are factories for producing adults who will not criticize autocracy and even fascism if it should arise?

There is much concern among ‘intellectuals’ that the decline in the support of the humanities in institutions of higher learning is evidence that we are becoming a more technocratic society. That concern is well-founded but it does not go far enough.

In very simple terms, the assault on the humanities is part of the larger effort to make America more and more hospitable to corporations and their allies.

In a world without Socrates and Shakespeare, without Rembrandt and Bach, without history and analyses of social institutions, there is little to guide citizens-of-the-future toward considering the ethical implications of societal imperatives. It is the arts and the humanities that create, in us, the possibilities that the initiatives of corporate America, and an authoritarian state, might be profoundly destructive of our humane-ness.

We have before us, always, the horrible examples of concentration camp commandants who loved listening to Mozart. These examples seem to indicate that studying the arts—indeed, loving the arts—does not automatically make us better human beings. And this is, alas, true.

But the converse is not true. Forgoing the arts and humanities does not automatically create good human beings. For humans always depend on a repository of narratives and deep-seated values to balance off against the needs of the state or massive corporations. Whether Shakespeare or folk tales, whether Bach or the songs sung by grandmothers, people have a repository of encoded values that argue against those centralized controls that ignore humane values. Understanding history and human diversity means concluding that no single solution is likely to be final.

While English and social science and history have lost 26,000 majors over the past ten years, computer science, engineering, and business majors have increased by over 140,000. Health professions, biological sciences, and psychology have increased by almost 200,000. Technical education is supplanting the humanities and the arts. Universities are both listening to that shift, and creating it. Overall, there has been a 17% decline in those majoring in the humanities.

Let’s for a moment imagine the university that is coming into being. Awash with courses in programming computers and health sciences, it has eliminated some departments such as classics, German, and art history and vastly diminished others such as literature, philosophy, and history. Students graduating from this future university have no university-derived ‘values’ other than coding, accounting principles, engineering solutions to practical and physical problems, and providing health care to those who can pay for it. They will work within the parameters of the ‘known,’ and will not even pause to consider what a Platonist, or Kant, might have made of a societal problem. Uninformed by anthropology or the example of Goya, they will not know what to make of war. Is it just? Do not ask: Only ask how we can most efficiently make weapons to prosecute war and treat those who are its victims.

Seen from a very broad historical perspective, the shrinking of the arts and the humanities is part of the effort by dominant interests to train a populace to adhere to a narrow and unquestioned set of values.

Seen from a very broad historical perspective, the shrinking of the arts and the humanities is part of the effort by dominant interests to train a populace to adhere to a narrow and unquestioned set of values. Numbers and efficiency, not a sense of social ‘good,’ are what count in this sort of university. Students are trained to supply answers to practical problems, not raise questions about what choices are ethical.

While some academics try, often heroically, to challenge the dominant values and discourse in society, more and more academics are being hired to train students how to program computers, invent technological solutions to problems, improve machines that meet human corporal needs. (That, for those not used to considering such things, is known as STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics.)

The ground is shifting in the modern university, more than anyone knows. Colleges increasingly offer circumscribed knowledge, not inchoate wisdom; answers, not questions, are glorified and taught. By changing university structures, budgets, course offerings, the schools of the future are assuring that meaningful resistance to the structures of power never arises.

This is a long-term game. In the short run, students and faculty see little change except for budgetary cuts in certain areas. But as time passes, universities will become training grounds for those who must function in a technological society.

Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson do not help one become a more adept engineer or a better designer of computer programs. In time—and that time may already be upon us—students will no longer know who Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson were or what they wrote. The Vietnam War, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and their causes and outcomes, will be become musty memories.