The Humanities Are Dead, Long Live the Humanities

One of the consequences of the higher-education bubble—an enormous decades-long increase in college tuition—is the withering away of majors in the humanities, from 14% of all college majors fifty years ago to 7% today. After all, if you have to spend upwards of $100,000 for an education, you probably ought to choose a field where your degree will have some commercial value.

Given the current state of humanities education in academia, I'm inclined to view this as a positive development. The fewer people who encounter big ideas pre-packaged for them by contemporary academics, the better. So I was glad to see a similar conclusion from Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal.

The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career—the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays, and homework assignments.

The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair. In their numbing hands, the term "humanities" became code for "and you don't even have to show up to get an A."

What is more interesting is that Siegel points out that formal education in the humanities is itself something of a recent, and unnatural, phenomenon.

Literature did not even become part of the university curriculum until the end of the 19th century. Before that, what came to be called the humanities consisted of learning Greek and Latin, while the Bible was studied in church as the necessary other half of a full education. No one ever thought of teaching novels, stories, poems or plays in a formal course of study. They were part of the leisure of everyday life.

With the waning of religious authority, the humanities were born as a means of taking up the slack. Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare were now put in the service of ministering truth to souls parched for higher meaning. Anything more contemporary than Shakespeare, however, was seldom part of the curriculum....

The teaching of literature came into its own early in the 20th century, with the formation of literature departments. For years, these consisted mostly of philologists who examined etymology and the history of a text. It was only after World War II that the study of literature as a type of wisdom, relevant to actual, contemporary life, put down widespread institutional roots.

There's the basic process by which academia embalms an idea: literature went from being "part of the leisure of everyday life" to being swept out of everyday life and into the musty museum of academia.

Siegel's objection is mostly that he likes the subjectivism of literature: "the literary masterworks of Western civilization demonstrate the limitations of so-called clear-thinking. They present their meanings in patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions." My objection is that too much of what passes for formal study of the humanities is itself "patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions." Or the dogmatic repetition of politically correct twaddle about race, class, and gender.

The suctioning up of the humanities into big, established institutions generally means burying the genius of the original works under layers of pretentious mediocrity, so I wouldn't mind seeing a few of those layers stripped away in favor of something more like Siegel's proposal:

In "Moby-Dick," Melville's narrator, Ishmael, declares that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Soon, if all goes well and literature at last disappears from the undergraduate curriculum—my fingers are crossed—increasing numbers of people will be able to say that reading the literary masterworks of the past outside the college classroom, simply in the course of living, was, in fact, their college classroom.

I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's advice to his nephew. While he urged the young man to attend lectures in the sciences in order to learn from the best minds of the day, when it came to other fields, "All the aid you will want will be a catalogue of the books to be read & the order in which they are to be read." Which is a heck of a lot less expensive than the bloated tuition at today's universities.

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