Are the Humanities in Crisis?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: In the decade following 2008 in the United States, here, the share of people graduating with bachelor’s degrees in humanities dropped by a third. So, what’s at play here and why does it matter? Andrew Delbanco is professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the recipient of a National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He talks to Michel Martin about the importance of reversing this decline and learning the humanities.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Andrew Delbanco, thank so much for talking with us.

ANDREW DELBANCO, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ALEXANDER HAMILTON PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES AND PRESIDENT, TEAGLE FOUNDATION: My pleasure.

MARTIN: So, the immediate impetus for our conversation is a recent “New Yorker” article, by Nathan Heller. It’s titled, “The End of the English Major.” He starts with a study of English, but he kind of expands to sort of the humanities in general saying that, you know, the study of English and history has fallen dramatically. And he says, well, that’s a problem. So, like, what’s your top line reaction to that?

DELBANCO: I think it is fair to say that the article is a little too bleak. That is the numbers that he cites are sobering and they’re accurate as far as they go. But if you are only looking at English majors, you make it a different impression than if you also look at students who are minoring in English and students who are taking courses in English but not necessarily majoring. So — and there’s also a significant oversight in the article, which is that he doesn’t really speak about the very large sector of higher education, which is the community colleges, where something like 40 percent of undergraduates attend where humanities and the liberal arts are actually thriving there. So, the first thing I would say is, let’s take this picture with a little bit of a grain of salt. But look, having said what I just said, there — it’s certainly true that the humanities are in decline, that student interest in the humanities is falling rather than rising. So, one wants to think about, now, why might that be? And I think there’s no single answer. One answer that I would propose is that we all instinctively know that reading, at least reading something longer, let’s say, than a tweet, does not occupy the central place in our culture that it once did. In my own teaching, I have been moving emphatically towards asking students to read shorter works, novellas, stories, speeches, poems and the like. Another factor, science or the STEM fields, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, which so many students are gravitating today. Science is exciting. Science is about the future. Technology, which is the byproduct of science, promises to help us solve the climate change problem. Some people even believe that computer science, artificial intelligence, will someday make human beings immortal. But my point of view, it is perfectly reasonable to expect young people to be more interested in the future than in the past, which is fundamentally the subject of the humanities. Now, another reason, and this is a different kind of reason, is the place of money in our culture. When I was an undergraduate, if someone in the dining hall had said, my ambition is to become an investment banker, it would’ve been a conversation stopper. Today, it’s norm. It’s understandable as colleges have opened their doors to a broader demographic of students, many students who were first generation college students come from families for whom debt is a serious challenge. It’s perfectly reasonable that students are focused, sometimes single-mindedly on studying something that they think is going to lead to a remunerative job and a career.

MARTIN: And it’s also the fact that the cost of a college education has escalated far beyond the rate of inflation. So, it’s not an idle concern. So, there is that. OK. So, you’ve identified that there are certain trends that are moving away from people studying, you know, English and perhaps other humanities as their main focus while in college. Is this a problem?

DELBANCO: I am committed to the proposition that yes, it is a problem. It is a problem for young people individually and it is a problem for our society and its future. Young people still have an appetite, indeed an urgent need, I think, for what the humanities have to offer. Young people, indeed all of us, grapple with questions every day to which there is no right answer. They grapple with questions in their own lives that are the subject of literature. For example, what is the difference between love and desire? A central theme in many of the great novels of Europe and our own country. What is my responsibility to myself as opposed to my responsibility to others and how do I find the right balance? What is the shape of a meaningful life? What kind of life do I want to live? And my sense is that students have those questions on their minds at least as much as ever before, maybe more so given all the stresses that they are under. And in fact, there is evidence that there are some ways in which colleges meeting that need, for example, at Yale, one of the most popular courses is, of course, on happiness. At Harvard, for many years, there’s been a popular course on the theme of justice. These are the fundamental — these are core themes of the humanities. And frankly, one reason, I think, we are seeing this stampede away from English departments, if that’s the right word, is that English departments have not been stepping up and meeting this need as well as they could have done. They seem to expect that students will be interested in literary history or the theory of how to read. And in some ways, English departments have been in a sort of weirdly hostile relationship to literature, where these themes are to be found and explored. So, what I’m trying to say is I think the appetite for the humanities is still there, the need for the humanities, that is the value of confronting these questions with the help of rich text, a good teacher, and your classmates, who are grappling with the same questions, that need is unabated and I don’t think it ever will abate. The question is whether our colleges and universities can meet that need, and I think there are ways for them to do so.

MARTIN: There has been this sort of movement that, you know, dead white guys have nothing to teach us. And I just wonder if that point of view, that dead white guys, as it were, have too big of a footprint in the literature and that there is something about that that’s taken hold in a way that kind of the profession is sort of eating itself. Does that — could not be true?

DELBANCO: Well, first of all, English departments have spent a lot of, I think, unproductive time arguing about exactly which books, by which kind of authors they should teach. There are powerful texts by dead white guys and by living writers of color and by woman and by non-western authors, old books and new books and medium paged books. Our problem is there are too many good books rather than the opposite. So — but yes, this sense that the subject of the English department is somehow a tradition that we should discard as oppressive and irrelevant is part of the problem. I don’t think it is the core problem. And I think, actually, English professors are waking up to this problem and are moving more in the direction that I’ve been talking about. But it is a problem and perception becomes reality, as we all know. If that’s what students think.

MARTIN: One, among your many books, is a book about college. Like what is college for? What it has been? What it could be? But one of the things that you pointed out in your book is that these kinds of hand wringing about college and the quality of teaching and what we are teaching, is not new. But there does seem to be something new here. I mean, if you look at the number of people who are rolling in English departments in a number of institutes, it really has fallen precipitously, at least in certain some of these four-year universities that you — that Nathan Heller writes about in his piece. He talks about Harvard but he also talks about Arizona State. So, do you think this is kind of a particularly — I don’t know if I want to say precarious moment, but a particular moment where something really specific is going on here that we need to pay attention to?

DELBANCO: It is, absolutely. It’s a particular moment when people who believe in the humanities need to step up and thinking fresh ways about what it means to teach the humanities and whether it’s really appropriate to worry so much about how many English majors there are. That’s really — you know, I don’t think that’s a productive path to go down. I can’t make a good argument, in most cases, for young person to choose an English major, unless they happen to aspire to a life as a college professor, which is a risky bet. But I can make a very good argument that they should read books and debate and discuss the themes of those books with their peers in a classroom with a sensitive and interesting teacher. And I think we see evidence, that’s why we didn’t want to say that the problem can be turned into an opportunity. We see evidence that at many institutions that do not make it into Mr. Heller’s article, the faculty has woken up to the reality that their — if they sit back and wait for the students to come to them, they’re going to be waiting a long time. What they need to do is get up and go to where the students are. And where the students are, in most places, is in the general education program, which is that sort of interval between arriving in college and choosing a major when students are asked to explore subjects to which they may not be familiar and which the institution thinks is important to them as adults and as citizens. So, Purdue University, which is a very STEM-centric institution, the vast majority of students arrive there aspiring to become engineers or scientists of one kind or another. They got a new dean a few years ago who discovered that fewer than 10 percent of the students there were — had ever taken a literature class or even a history class. He said, this is not OK. He identified a magnetic and charismatic history professor, named Melinda Zook, who went to the English department and to other humanities departments as well and said something like, hi, colleagues. You may have noticed that we don’t have any students. Your classes are emptying out. Why don’t you come with me over to the general education program? We are going to meet the new students, the 17-year-olds who are coming in or planning to become engineers. We are going to have a small class for them and you’re going to teach them what we’re going to call transformative texts. Not great books, not classics, but transformative text by which they meant a text that has changed the world and retains the power to transform individual lives. That program began, and full disclosure, with a grant from the foundation over which I preside, about five years ago, with 60 students. Today, there are 4,000 students each year at Purdue voluntarily enrolling in those classes in their first year, what we used to call freshman year. In which they are reading, yes, some books by dead white males. They’re reading the “”Odyssey” by Homer. Why do they respond to that? Because every student is trying to figure out what kind of voyage they are on in their lives. “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. Because lots of students are concerned about the uses and abuses of technology, can it take over from us? “1984,” because lots of young people are worried about whether we’re drifting toward totalitarianism in our society. These books are immensely popular, the students are having a powerful experience and a few of them will, yes, become English or philosophy or history majors, but not so many, and that’s OK. They’re having a humanities experience.

MARTIN: I’m going to push you again on why this matters because there are a lot of people who will listen to this conversation and be like, sorry, that’s too bad. We need people to write code. We need people to do your back surgery when you get to that point. You know, look, you know, love you all, but that’s great, but that’s — you know, literature is a hobby. It’s not a job. And so, this — the society really needs people to do these other things. What do you say to them?

DELBANCO: Well, a couple of. First of all, it’s not an either-or question. All the best doctors I’ve ever known have a humanistic interest, have had some liberal education before they became pre-med and then, scientific specialists. And I think that goes for creative scientists as well. In fact, I think one of the secrets of our country has been that our science has proceeded out of a sense of curiosity and adventure that you get from getting a liberal humanities-oriented education. So, it’s not an either-or. But more broadly, yes, we need all those specialists. We need all those competent people. We need experts in this and that. But we also need citizens, right? Those people are all citizens. They have to grapple with the tough questions, like, where do I find the right balance between personal liberties and the public interest? The kind of question that we were dealing with during the COVID years. How do I think about the nation state in a world where microbes and refugees from vicious regimes don’t care about national borders, right? Those are hard questions. There are no right answers to those questions. And if we’re going to have a functioning democracy where politicians can be called to account when they talk nonsense about such questions, we need an educated citizenry. Democracy depends on that. So, yes, we need the technical training but we need people who are capable of thinking about complex problems, listening to other points of view and coming to a reasonable consensus about what is best moving forward. That’s the fundamental case for the humanities. And whatever is going on with the enrollments in English departments, we cannot afford to lose the humanities in our colleges and universities.

MARTIN: Are we relying too much on colleges and universities? Do you think that there are perhaps other places in society that should be stepping up to promote the humanities, reading, you know, English, ideas, history and so forth?

DELBANCO: There surely are. People are joining reading groups. People are participating in public events where they get to discuss these kinds of issues and hear thoughtful people talk about them. It is critically important that students get introduced to these opportunities in high school, before they get to college. But I would say that there is something special about those years between, say, 17 and 20, roughly 21, where students, young people are sort of in that space between adolescence and adulthood, where they have achieved a measure of freedom, but not full freedom compared to when — where they were when they were living with their families. That’s a very special time of life. It’s a time of life when the kinds of issues that we have been talking about have a great intensity, they feel dangerous, they also feel exciting. So, college is a really good places to promote the habits of mind that I’ve been talking about. And while other places could be doing it too, we don’t want to lose sight of the centrality of these institutions.

MARTIN: Are you worried about whether or not, as citizens, as our country, that people are absorbing the tools to make these kinds of decisions, to function as citizens in a way? I mean, the fact of the matter is when it comes to things like, should we, you know, wear masks or not and when and if so and when, like, you know, those are the kinds of things where there isn’t always one right answer. If you take the argument that, you know, a functional understanding of humanities, of English, of science, of history is necessary to that project, are you worried that we don’t have it? That we’re not getting it? We’re not doing it?

DELBANCO: I’m very worried, but I’m also resolutely optimistic. I think in that little book that you kindly mentioned, I said something like, a college classroom is a rehearsal space for democracy. The college classroom is a place where we can’t retreat into our ideological corners, ff the future doesn’t let us. We have to be open to alternative points of view. We want to leave the room not sure that we have the right answer, but actually having doubts about the answer with which we came into the room that we were certain about. That’s the place where you learn to be a participant in democratic society. So, I’m worried that we’re not doing enough of it, people don’t value it enough. But I’m optimistic that if we recommit to that aspect of what college is about, we can make a significant contribution to the strengthening and maybe even the saving our democracy. College is a powerful institution, and that’s why it’s so important. I think that everybody who wants to go to college and have the opportunity to do it in an affordable way. College is a place where you can figure out how you want to live in this messy, complicated, maddening democratic culture that we have and that have to do everything possible to maintain

MARTIN: Professor Andrew Delbanco, thanks much for talking with us.

DELBANCO: Thank you. I appreciate it very much.