Successful Future Humanities Programs Will Be Those That Provide High Literacy & Deep Numeracy
To get through the crisis, humanities programs should focus on equipping students to understand and act in the largely-symbolic networked world that surrounds them. My view: the crisis in academic humanities is not “political”; it is educational…
This last post-Thanksgiving weekend I found, in my email inbox, a wise thought from Matt Yglesias:
Matthew Yglesias: Thankful mailbag: ‘While entertainment is fine, it’s also good intellectual discipline to try not to develop false beliefs. So you ought to be at least a little suspicious of writers who you enjoy because everything they tell you is psychologically pleasing. There’s a real skill to that. To “explaining” to people in your ideological niche why every passing event in the news demonstrates their basic correctness about everything. And that kind of content, well, it can make people really happy. But it’s likely to be misleading….
And, via synchrony, I make one of my increasingly rare expeditions to Twitter—it really does give me hives these days—to find Matt Yglesias saying something I did not enjoy, and did not think was wise:
Matthew Yglesias: ‘I think a big part of the “crisis” in the liberal arts <https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1728405687162827209> comes down to the fact that the people who teach these classes no longer want to do what society wants them to do and expound on the greatness of our civilization…
At first I dismissed this as the Twitter effect—turning geniuses into normal people, normal people into morons, and angry people into Nazis or Stalinists or Stalinist-Nazis.
But, yes, he did expand:
Matthew Yglesias: Thankful mailbag: ‘There’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important…. Educated professionals… technical specialists (engineers, scientists, doctors)… [plus] lawyers, teachers, middle managers… a sort of collective social elite…. Over and above the specific skills members of this elite need to do their jobs, it’s good for them to be inculcated with… values… the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics… religious freedom… not a sectarian point (the point is religious freedom!)… develop[ed] out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation….
Historical events… Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America… philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls… literary and artistic cultures that were informed by these historical and intellectual trends and that also informed them. And you have traditionally had a belief that it is important for important people to be broadly educated in these themes….
That kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism (it’s good to be well-informed) and perhaps even a smattering of instructors who endorse the radical critiques (it’s good to sit in rooms and listen to smart people with ideas you don’t agree with), [but] the current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…
I find this last paragraph annoying. And, not just annoying, but it sets off alarm bells. This “current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates” is something I would expect to read as an irritable gesture from an underbriefed old-person-yelling-at-clouds writer like David Brooks or Bari Weiss, not from Matt Yglesias. So I want to call “bullshit”. But should I?
OK. Let’s collect a little data here (and let me telegraph my conclusion by saying that, yes, I should call “bullshit”—mostly):