Nostrum Fatum: Humanities on the Downward Slope

Randall Stephens

This will be an outside scoop item for those of you who saw William M. Chace's "The Decline of the English Department," American Scholar (Autumn 2009). But for those who didn't, Chace raises some interesting questions for English and other departments now fighting it out with fewer students and less support than in decades past. His essay goes along with similar topics Chris Beneke discussed here in recent months.

Here's Chace:

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened. . . .

Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

Off-campus, the consumer’s point of view about future earnings and economic security was a mirror image of on-campus thinking in the offices of deans, provosts, and presidents. . . .

Well worth a close read.

The Last Historians, Seriously

Chris Beneke

My friend Benjamin Carp, a highly regarded historian of the American Revolution, has offered a good-natured response to “The Last Historians?”—my post from last week. It’s comforting to know that scholars as sensible as Carp and his fellow Common-Place blogger, and renowned early national U.S. historian, Jeffrey Pasley are less worried than I am. Apocalyptic warnings about the imminent, digital-driven demise of the traditional university were obviously premature a decade ago, and they are probably premature today. Yet, of all people, historians should appreciate that technological revolutions can sometimes take decades to make their full social impact. Moreover, there are some alarming trends converging on the modern university—an expensive cost structure, high levels of indebtedness among U.S. families, the globalization of college competition, unfavorable demographic patterns, and a host of distance learning innovations—that even a non-futurist might recognize as looming threats to our existence. In fact, you don’t have to hold a degree in economics to see that the tuition bubble of the last two-and-a-half decades looks remarkably similar to the housing bubble. Universities, and especially humanities scholars within universities, need to think hard about how we can develop both better and cheaper forms of higher education. Otherwise the end times (or some comparably grim tribulations) might really be quite near for those of us at institutions with endowments less than the gross domestic product of entire nations.

Now to Carp’s specific criticisms. Do I believe that an iTunes lecture series will substitute for the experience of working closely with Carp or Pasley in a seminar or as advisees? Of course not. But is a student in a typical lecture class of one hundred going to learn significantly more than she would with online course content, a great lecturer video series, and a part-time facilitator? Even if the answer to that question is “yes” and the live lecture course represents a more effective approach to teaching and learning, we still have to ask whether the marginal difference is worth a couple of thousand bucks to the students and their families. We also have to appreciate that our calculus may differ significantly from the calculus made by people outside the academy. You could protest that the university is not a corporation and should not be run like one. And I’d agree. The rub here is that perfectly rational mothers, fathers, and anxious teens often measure the worth of an education the same way that they measure the worth of other goods. And we, as academics, will either provide more educational, cultural, and economic value for their dollar than the alternatives, or we will fail.

What can be done about this value problem? To begin, I would suggest that historians make a stronger case for smaller classes with research-active faculty and that they design courses with more student-faculty interaction built into them. I would also suggest research-active historians consider writing fewer books and articles (and blog posts, for that matter) so that they can devote enough time and intellectual energy to teaching, advising, and programming, thereb making the experience worth the extra money their students are paying to be around living, breathing professional historians.

Regarding Ben’s brief against altering PhD and tenure requirements, I may have gotten ahead of myself in this case. It is nonetheless clear that we are producing too many PhDs with Research I credentials who end up as adjunct lecturers working for $5000/course and no benefits. It’s also clear that we’re publishing a lot of scholarship, especially in the form of books, that gets neither read nor cited (the latter, of course, not always requiring the former). Would the field of history suffer if we produced twenty percent fewer monographs? I doubt it. My sense is that few historians can keep up with all of the work generated in their field of specialization, let alone the profession. Nor do their college libraries have enough money to buy all of the books in a particular sub-specialty from university presses that barely have enough resources to produce them. The point I’m making here is not new. But the convergence of dismal trends (see paragraph one above) does make it newly urgent. I am more and more convinced of the value of research to good teaching. But I don’t believe that we should continue increasing scholarly output just so that we can add lines to our resumes and percentages to our salaries. The educational value of research needs to be repeatedly demonstrated. Teaching and research really do need to complement each other.

At least a year before the recession began and the financial crisis struck, my friends and family members had started to badger me about the high cost of a college education. Was a four-year undergraduate degree really worth $200,000 they’d ask? I’d try to explain. I’d tell them about the generous financial aid packages, the luxurious student facilities, and the economic benefits of a bachelors degree—as well as the great education our students were receiving. They seldom bought it. To non-academics, our self-rationalizations are looking more and more like a bill of goods. As historians, the task of justifying our existence has never been easy. We know implicitly that we’re in the business of educating rather than job training. We know that our research can enrich our teaching. Now we may finally have to prove it.

The Last Historians?

Chris Beneke

In January of this year, Stanley Fish caused something of a stir (again) with a blog entry titled The Last Professor, in which he discussed Frank Donoghue’s sharp and gloomy book: The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. At the conclusion, Fish observes that he “timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.” Here was a nice occasion for Fish to emphasize his own humility and for humanities professors to reacquaint themselves with the sensation of excruciating professional angst. Donoghue’s argument, as you might guess from the title, is that the modern non-profit university is increasingly run on a corporate model with teachers hired for short-term contracts and institutional goals defined by explicitly professional ends (on the student side of things) and financial success (on the administrative side). The picture he paints of the humanities job market is bleak. The picture he paints of the conditions of adjunct faculty is bleaker still. Donoghue takes pains to emphasize that the tension between the corporate world and the academic study of the humanities is as old as the tenured, research-oriented humanities professoriate itself. Moreover, he denies that we’re in a “crisis.” This is a long-term trend, he contends, rather than a short-term anomaly. Still, Donoghue makes it abundantly clear that he believes the academic study of humanities subjects to be on the tail end of a long slide toward irrelevance.

What should academic historians make of such a scary report—and what can they do to alter the dismal trajectory that Donoghue charts? The Last Professors offers few concrete recommendations, aside from his wise injunction to stop defending tenure on the grounds of academic freedom because that strategy only “exacerbate[s] the divide between the dwindling number of tenured professors and the growing rank of adjuncts.” And so, with The Last Professors in mind, but with no pretensions to originality or expertise, I offer the following unsolicited recommendations:

First, we need to forthrightly and repeatedly stress the value of the humanities in general, and the work of history in particular. That means, too, that we should think hard and maybe even talk a bit more about the larger value of the humanities in general, and the work of history in particular. And please, let’s try to avoid making the process look like an extended graduate seminar.

Second, we need to make sure that what we do with our students in the classroom and on-line is as conducive to their learning and thinking as it is distinctive. If you’ve seen the lectures at Academic Earth or listened to the lectures at iTunes University, you will have already realized that much of a history professor’s traditional teaching responsibilities can now be easily replicated and widely distributed. Making sure that we bring the latest research into the classroom in an engaging way will help to justify our scholarship, as well as our teaching.

Third, we should ensure that pay, benefits, and respect are more fairly distributed to all of the professionals in our field. For a group that votes overwhelmingly Democratic , tenured and tenure-track professors (as a whole) pay inexcusably little attention to their colleagues who do quite similar work on short-term contracts and for much less pay. Equity and enlightened self-interest both demand that the most privileged among us attend seriously to the conditions of those who now teach sixty-five percent of our classes.

Fourth, we must be engaged with popular works of history that both non-historians and historians will actually read and discuss. We should even be prepared to write such books ourselves.

Fifth, we need to stop pretending that all the work in our discipline is, or should be, of intrinsic interest to the rest of the world. To this point, we could substitute more rigorous teacher training for grad school research commitments and alter tenure and PhD requirements so that a series of article-length essays may be accorded the same worth as a four-hundred page dissertation. We should also reward good public history as generously as we reward good intra-academic scholarship.

Frank Donoghue’s dismal trends may indeed have originated long ago and his dark prophecies may take years to fulfill. But if we’re to avoid being the last generation of history professors, we will need to act quickly.