Humanities, Pretty Much Dead, Are Mostly a Hunt for Racism and Sexism
December 8, 2016 Mark Bauerlein Leave a comment
A number of prominent liberal intellectuals, such as Leon Wieseltier, acknowledge that the humanities are in trouble. There “really is a cultural crisis,” he said at a recent Aspen Ideas Festival. This is an improvement over the mass denial of a few years ago, when the standard retort to conservatives went something like this: “You just don’t like the direction the humanities have taken” or worse: “You old-fashioned types are angry that the humanities are no longer a Eurocentric dead-white-male thing—get over it.”
But when the politically-correct president of an Ivy League university recounts how far the humanities have fallen at her school, as Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust did at the same festival, it’s hard to dismiss the thesis. The numbers Faust cited for Harvard are astounding. Currently, she said, about 14 percent of Harvard undergraduates major in a humanities field. That’s higher than the national rate, but it’s down from the 25 percent rate at Harvard when Faust started her tenure as president nine years ago. Most of the withdrawal, she noted, was due to students heading toward the hard sciences (not the social sciences). When it comes to enrollment in humanities courses in general at Harvard, the trend there is downward as well, a drop of ten percent over the same period of time.
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