The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century

Anyone in higher ed want to weigh in?

Liberal arts died before the 21st-century began.

Groupthink and intolerance of dissent has replaced discovery and openness. Unless you hold the “correct” opinions, your academic career will be sabotaged and any hope for a tenure position is a fantasy.

This insanity is infecting STEM fields now. Unless you are planning on majoring in a STEM field or a practical career (accounting, law) then college is a waste of time and money. Most graduates are more ignorant of the world than they were when they were freshmen.

I'm a lib arts professor. I always sell my field as a fine wine - it pairs great with other fields, particularly STEM fields. I think this is how we survive - selling ourselves not as the reason for, but instead as a great thing to take with.

Sad, honestly. We’re failing to bring the arts to the masses, so to speak. When I was in college I noticed how few students were in lib arts classes. It’s definitely a snobby, snooty field at times, plenty of faults, but still studying classics, the nuances of language, art etc. is so important to enrich minds. I hope we can find a way to bring this stuff into the 21st century so they’re not just specialized fields for the rich.

When I was in college 20 years ago the liberal arts included history, psychology, and sometimes the school of foreign languages, and some other disciplines. People will always require electives and there are certainly enough crazies out there to keep the psychologists going.

The 1% wants an ignorant population. The 21st century is about ignorance.

The reality is what the modern economy needs are programmers, engineers and people who can analyze data.

Given the cost of university, students have to be very conscious of their career prospects.

r3, I second you. I teach the arts as to make others better people, not to make them necessarily top-rate musicians or dancers, or actors.

R7, that's fine and dandy, but the L.A. works well in tandem with those studies.

It's a miracle they lasted this long.

Those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it?

R7, the critical thinking skills required to analyze data in terms of both short and long-term consequences are nurtured and developed through the study of the liberal arts.

I spent my graduate education hanging out with scientists and engineers. I even befriended computer scientists and statisticians. I could punch holes in all of their experiments, pose fundamental questions about their data, and I always majored in the arts.

I found that rather scary.

And to think there will be fewer people like me and more of them who do good work but often have tunnel vision ...

Maybe as they are taught in the majority of universities and colleges they should die. "Literary Theory", "Queer Studies", "Women's Studies", "Deconstruction", etc. etc. A few conservative professors, often in Catholic universities, are the only ones keeping the traditional liberal arts alive.

R13 never went to college, just repeats Breitbart takings points.

If that is what Breitbart says I have to start reading it.

I teach in a large public university in the humanities, r14. I have a PhD in literature. I have always voted Democrat. And I largely agree with r13.

Yes, in a story about the right-wing assault on low-cost, quality higher education, the villains must be "feminists" and "cultural Marxists." Fuuuuuck off. The stingy assholes who want a whole society of worker ants are to blame.

...the decline of the humanities major need not give us reason to anticipate the decline of the humanities: Academics do not have unique access to the instructions for being human. Whether they study history and literature, applied math, or organismic and evolutionary biology, people will continue to seek truth in philosophy, solace in music, and company in the pages of books.

In fact, we suspect that humanities professors’ effective surrender of any claim to objectivity—that is, their admission that they cannot provide authoritative understandings of texts on the grounds that no such understandings exist—was the first nail in the humanities’ coffin. Why spend four years listening to lecturers warn you that you can never really know anything? Or worrying that failing to dissect a text or event along the lines of race, class, or gender will result in an accusation of moral and intellectual responsibility (or worse, a bad grade)? The disciplines that once could claim to open the mind and free the spirit now seem to endorse a specific, sometimes discouraging, type of thinking.

Music is in the Fine Arts, along with actual Art, and Theater.

Bullshit, r18.

Recognizing that pure truth is ultimately unknowable, and that there is no "authoritative understanding" -- or at least none that any thinking person should uncritically accept -- is the core purpose of a liberal-arts education.

The belief that there is anyone who has all the answers, who can provide you with what appears to be an "authoritative understanding" is, on the other hand, the prerequisite for sheep-like acceptance of dictatorship. And that is precisely what the Scott Walkers of this world want.

Right, people. I, too, have a PhD. and I have faced the anti-academic snobs who claim my education is invalid because all you have to do is read a bunch of books. Right?

Wrong.

All those who feel threatened by broadening the canon need to look at themselves and quit quoting Allan Bloom. You advocate limiting the growth of knowledge. And now, it seems like knowledge will indeed fade away as we get rid our civilization of the liberal arts.

Get real. How many people actually support or seek out the arts these days? How many kids have their faces stuck in the phones and go through relationships like a box of Kleenex because they can find nothing deeper in life and wouldn’t know a metaphor if it came up and bit them in the ass?

Ugh. I am out of here. This is far too depressing.

Sure they will, just not in America.

Because critical thinking is taught in the humanities and critical thinking is what is needed for real life to work well.

Would be nice if that were true R23, but not really consistent with what I've seen in the real world.

I taught American Government, mostly at community colleges (and at two four-year universities, one private, one public), to students who didn't know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican, or the House and the Senate.

What we're seeing now is the result of not making that course mandatory.

[quote]The 1% wants an ignorant population. The 21st century is about ignorance.

Without massive ignorance, cultivated throughly by nearly 2 decades of indoctrination by government schools, people would see that their government has become the evil oligarchy, with the top 0.1% occupied almost exclusively by crony capitalists, war machine purveyors, bankers and politically active families/corporations.

The bottom 90% is dying of “soft” socialism.

R12

[quote]”...the critical thinking skills required to analyze data in terms of both short and long-term consequences are nurtured and developed through the study of the liberal arts.”

I would laugh if the comment wasn’t so oblivious.

Liberal arts no longer teaches critical thinking skills, data analysis, nor the ability to think logically and determine future consequences of current actions. It’s all about feelings now.

Facts have been deemed hate crimes.

I sit on an advisory board for a college organization, and the total lack of interest in facts is astonishing. Virtually every complainant talks exclusively about feelings, never facts or unintended consequences or negative repercussions. Many of these are graduate students. I don’t think I can take it much longer.

R14

Can you share the value created by gender studies or queer theory or any other manifestation of the Dadaist zeitgeist?

They are waste of time, talent, and money. Plus they leave the graduates less intelligent than when they started.

R20

[quote]Recognizing that pure truth is ultimately unknowable, and that there is no "authoritative understanding" -- or at least none that any thinking person should uncritically accept -- is the core purpose of a liberal-arts education.

That is the exact opposite of Liberal arts. You are describing post modern bullshit that has replaced liberal arts.

R23

Have you talked to a humanities graduate lately? They are wildly ignorant of the world and have incredibly warped views about virtually every subject.

They are the people that decided that “baby, it’s cold outside” was a rape anthem, despite the historic facts regarding the song.

They have been turned out like robots from these universities, and parrot the same bullshit with zero understanding of the real world consequences of their plan to “change the world”.

They want to destroy western civilization.

Nonsense R2. Groupthink is worst in business education and STEM disciplines. History is ESSENTIAL for the citizen, as it is the only way society ever improves, which is why conservatives have been lying about it, revising it, and pushing false slogans about it relentlessly. Academic history has mostly escaped them and improved, which is why they now want to kill it. History is the target here, and not by chance, by design.

Is this typically what happens before a society collapses?

R31

Do you think the students are given history lessons written from different perspectives? Or do you think that most of the books are pushing a specific agenda?

Do you think that they are encouraged to read Solzhenitsyn and contrast his experience with the current events in Venezuela? Or to understand that Orwell’s books were written as a warning to his fellow Fabian socialists about the potential evil that could arise from a society where only “right thinking” individuals were allowed to weigh in on public issues?

[quote]The reality is what the modern economy needs are programmers, engineers and people who can analyze data.

To what end? Are we really just going full-on consumerism as being the only thing that matters in human existence? That's the world you get if those are the only things people study. It's sad but the ultimate outcome of the path we are now on is everyone working on programs and apps to get people to buy stuff and medical professionals who are there to make sure the consumers live long enough to buy stuff.

I'm kind of hoping for an ELE. We need to start over as a species. Get forced back into line with nature kicking and screaming because that seems to be the only way we'll stop destroying ourselves and the planet.

(R32] Yes.

I teach at a university and most of what you've read here is bullshit. There never were huge numbers of certain majors (Philosophy for instance). It appeared in the college course catalog because it's a course of study that teaches you to think deeply, not memorize facts for a test, and there was a time that deep thinking was considered a good idea for a college graduate. Most of the courses deemed weird are in sociology, and, to a lesser extent in history and English - and most majors will only allow you to take one or two of those kinds of courses. There is no mainstream French, German, linguistics, geography, economics or music history course in gender studies for instance, unless it shows up as a 4th year elective.

Chart the rise in administrators in colleges over the past 40 years (presidents, vice-presidents, deans, provosts, chairs, associates and assistants of all of those positions) every one pulling 3 to 10 X's the salary of an average tenured professor and 30 times the salary of an adjunct. Also chart the way that state governments have balanced their budgets on the backs of universities for the past 40 years. (Whoops, our taxes declined - let's take another bite out of those nasty old university budgets). There is the "bleed" in university budgets that needs to be "rectified" by eliminating course offerings and majors. It's also the reason for the inflation in the price of a university education, which has long outpaced the general inflation rate by a factor of 10. High university cost and high cost of loans forces many students to choose preprofessional college majors in the hopes that they can find a job which will pay enough to repay those loans.

Many students are now picking their colleges on the basis of the performance of the college athletic teams. (Many of which are also money losers).

What the STEM professions are finding is that they are getting people (college graduates) who can do the basic grunt job, but cannot write or speak about it coherently or sell it to a buyer, because they lack communication skills. They would have learned those skills in their liberal arts courses had they been offered them.

But I will also grant that when 50 years or so it was decided that EVERY American should attend college, and therefore high schools didn't need to do hard-core teaching , colleges became the babysitting destination of a bunch of kids who should have gone to trade school. They weren't interested in academic subjects, and they go through the motions of attending college merely for the sheepskin. Many courses have had to be dumbed down to bring kids unprepared for college even to the minimum level of proficiency in many subjects (English and math being only the most typical examples).

Probably academia needs a major overhaul in the sense that no university should be trying to be all or do all. If a state school system has 8 universities, one ought to be a polytechnical school, one a business school, one a fine arts school, one a traditional liberal arts college, and so on. (Trade schools for grownups, with a traditional liberal arts school reserved for academic types). They already do this in Germany and some other parts of Europe.

R36 you got it absolutely right. Thank you for posting your thoughts. I especially notice what you wrote about the STEM graduates: knowledgeable about their specific skills but absolutely no skills in communication or critical thinking outside of their specific skill. They are experts on one thing and ignorant about everything else.

Part 1. I live in Silicon Valley, and I think the tech industry has played a huge role in doing damage to the educational system. The tech industry thinks EVERYTHING revolves around the computer. The tech industry is trying to make Americans so dependent on technology, that human beings don't have to think anymore. They are trying to have books totally removed to the point that if you want to read a book, it will be only on a Kindle, e-book, etc. All it is just another computer. In fact, book reading is heading in the direction of being reduced to an Icon placed next to Icons that are for tech games. I was watching a program which they said teenagers reading books has gone down dramatically verses 20 years ago. They don't have an interest to read and they would rather play computer games. Also, social skills are damaged as a result of computers. The tech industry doesn't care about history, the arts, literature, etc. They hate it! Some years back the ballet company in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley was running out and they needed donors. They went to the tech industry , who has enormous amount of money, asking if they can help the ballet company. Their response? Why should we give you money when we can watch the ballet on our computers if we want to? If the techies are interested in art, its only very, very contemporary art created in the now. They don't care about great artists and art created in the past. If you observe their homes, its depressing because its devoid of life. Their homes are super MOD that are just glass, and steel boxes. they are super minimalist containing very ,very little to no art, books, antiques etc. nothing that challenges one's intellect. Again, all they care about is the now and they don't care about they past which they hate. They are dogmatic about their lives ,and they want society as a whole to live exactly as they live in every way.

Back in the 90s I used to work at an enormous antique store, and I got into a conversation with this gentleman who was a customer in the store. He told me he quit working in the tech industry, and I asked him why? He said they are destroying our society, and they are taking America back to the Middle Ages. He said they are working on robots to replace human beings in the work force. He said they are aiming for a society which there will be a very,very rich class and a very,very poor class. The gentleman said they know what they are doing, and its rotten and corrupt. He said I took an early retirement because I have a conscious and I didn't want to be part of it. Back then when I heard this I took it with a grain of salt. Years later it has been reported that Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg and many others are promoting robots to take over jobs that human beings usually do. Mark Zuckerberg was asked, what will happen to the human beings in a society like that? He said they don't work ,and the government should automatically pay those Americans. Therefore, when you have a society like they are striving for, there won't be a drive to build one's intellectual knowledge. They want people to be ignorant to not think for themselves ,and take joy in the excitement of intellectual growth because they want total control ,and people working outside of the tech system to be dependent.

Part. 2

One of the major issues we are dealing with as a result of the tech control and manipulation locally is Mark Zuckerberg buying up the poor areas for his company and his employees because these areas are cheap. He has been running the people out of their neighborhoods and homes. Mark Zuckerberg offered these poor people a chance to stay if their children take his off of paying for their TECH EDUCATION and work for his company. However, if the children want a different type of education, they are screwed. Mark Zuckerberg is a complete megalomaniac along with many other tech big wigs. The locals have been trying to preserve local history because Zuckerberg along with other techies in Silicon Valley don't care in the least about our local history. They have played a major role in erecting small sky scrapers ,and they want the buildings to become even greater and much taller. This area of Silicon Valley is a small city ,and its not made for a large scale city. So many people don't want that to happened because they like a small city ,but people like the local city officials get payed off by Zuckerberg.

In addition, around 20 minutes from where I live Google is going to create a Google city, which everything will be totally controlled by Google. The police, firefighters, stores, etc. EVERYTHING. I have a relative who works for Google ,and he said what is going on behind the scenes is very, very scary.

By the factors I have stated in parts 1 and 2, and there are many more, regarding the tech industry, they are escalating the break down in the education and freedom of thinking ,which we are losing. They have a huge influence on the Millennials and younger generations to dislike education unless it involves tech. This is Orwell's 1984 and I believe the government needs to step in ,and break up this enormous power the tech industry has.If we don't say ENOUGH! we are going to pay dearly.

R36 is absolutely right, particularly about administrative bloat. Faculty salaries where I work (tenured associate professor, Ph.D) are shit, tenure is on the decline because it’s cheaper to hire and fire contingent faculty, and just get those of us who are salaried to pick up all the slack because they claim we can’t afford to hire administrative assistants and other support staff while they collect their inflated paychecks.

I teach religion in a philosophy department at a 4 year school and r36 speaks truth. Students do not know how to think. They can only memorize and repeat. We in the liberal arts fight every day to get them to analyze, critique and consider.

I was stunned this year when I asked my second year language students to write 500 word compositions in the target language (in class, of course, because otherwise they cheat). Beautiful compositions from shitty students.

They plugged it into Google translate and memorized the whole thing.

Never had that happen before.

Well, if they're successfully memorizing 500 words in a foreign language for an in-class exercise, r42, they must have other things going for them even if they aren't gifted in the foreign-language skill set.

Or maybe they're actually smart, and the problem is your teaching?

Just kidding about the last sentence...

Any Asian can memorize -- progress requires superior brains well trained in critical thinking.

R44: Die Racist.

R16: Any professor with a brain can type in English. Which means you vote DEMOCRATIC! But the truth is, you've never voted for a Democrat, and you don't teach anywhere, with the possible exception of Jiffy Lube Law School. You obvious troll.

R13: Considering that you cannot major in those subjects but only get certificates in them, which only require 12-18 credit hours, you have to major (36 hours or more) in something else. So your fears are unjustified and betray your hatred of gays and women. Get off this board, you Nazi troll bitch.

R36: As a grad student in political science, I commend ye and say, You are the Way, the Truth and the Light! No one will come to the liberal arts except through your suggestions!

You can most certainly major in women's studies and (more so at the graduate level) literary theory, r45.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss R13. The "Catholic universities" comment is suspect, but, as they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And R46 is correct; you can major in any number of intellectually bankrupt subjects nowadays.

R36's post was marvelous. If he's still here, I'm wondering whether he has any advice for those of us who would like to support the liberal arts in the short term, as well as the long term. A much-needed overhaul of state university systems, if it ever comes to pass, is still far in the future. What can we do right now?

Finally, R42, I'm assuming you gave your foreign language students the topic of the essay ahead of time, which was why they were able to prepare so robotically. Could you solve this problem by withholding the topic until the start of the in-class exam? That's what my professors always did.

[27}: Nope. I teach critical thinking. And the student damn well learn it. Lots of mentoring, repetition and re-writing, but by the end of a 14 week semester, they actually do it. So F you.

None of the stuff posted on this thread surprises me one bit. That's life in this depressing Kardashian/Trump era we live in at the moment.

And I do hope this is only a moment were in.

I wonder what Jackie Kennedy would think of this stupid tech, Trump/Kardashian reality tv, social media age we live in now? She'd probably be depressed. The cultural arts was her life after all, even the Met gala has gone to shit. Taken over by tech donors for their own nefarious reasons. At least their helping to fund it I guess.

R38/R39 everything you said was true. But also scary. I agree, the government needs to step in and do something about the tech industry. Their definitely trying to destroy society. Tech people kinda scare me. They seem very soulless and devoid of any kind of life. I always try my best to stay away from people like that.

Here's to hoping this moment in time is only a moment.

R45

Blocked.

The Atlantic ran this story again today.

Still depressing .

The Liberal Arts should teach you how to think, interact with others, make you intellectually curious, and so forth; but I think that is obsolete, now. Now we need higher Ed to actually teach things specifically necessary for employment

[quote]The Liberal Arts should teach you how to think, interact with others, make you intellectually curious, and so forth; but I think that is obsolete

Why r52?

“Why” what?

We live in a point-and-click culture now. Why would anyone want to learn anything? I say this as someone who adored his liberal arts education.

Why is the need for thinking, being intellectually curious, and interacting with others becoming obsolete?

Sad but true r55

R56 because interacting with the vast majority of people is a huge waste of time.

But it's always been that way r58

Indulging tranny madness has destroyed critical thinking, as they have banned it

Loon^

It's always good to have it reenforced that SJW aren't just liberals as this thread proves.

It's also hilarious how you are all commenting about how people can't disagree by saying that people shouldn't disagree with your opinion.

Critical thinking often seems to die with age.

Humanity is a failed experiment

Soon, there will no learnig taken place this century, when the oceans rise and plague, famine and cruelty reigns

NO FUTURE

DRATH TO THE WORLD

MARY!!!!!! r63

bump (so I remember to read it)

[quote] I teach the arts as to make others better people, not to make them necessarily top-rate musicians or dancers, or actors.

When I read shit like this, I love, cherish, and revere all the more the kids I know who are going into careers in music and theatre. Love them. Went to one of their concerts last night: contemporary classical music. Just delightful. I so want these kids to succeed.

My life would be totally different, and probably much less enjoyable, had I not been forced to read “A Day In The Life of Iván Denisovich” as a kid.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn changed my life.

I learned that liberal arts education was mostly propaganda.

It’s saved me from becoming a corporate slave.

R66

You aren’t teaching them skills that will serve them in real life, in most instances. Dancing and singing is recreational for 99.9% of the population. School isn’t designed to teach recreation.

You are wasting their time with trivial bullshit. Kids in school should be learning how to read, write, and learn math and science. Anything else is extraneous bullshit education should be for advancement of knowledge, not imparting knowledge that is common to a family.

If you focus only on business and industry not critical thinking or learning about society, politics and from history, you are just asking to have universities churning out Republicans. Is that what you really want?

[68]: The arts teaching ALL of Dr. Howard Gardner's 7 multiple intelligences. Which means that, once these kids graduate, they have the best option for surviving the difficulties of the public marketplace for jobs and, yes, even careers. These kids can synergize logical (numeracy/mathematics) and linguistic intelligences, with interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. They can mix spatial and kinesthetic intelligence to be the best air control people in the business. They can combine it all for nearly anything. That's the arts in higher education.

R70

The massive failure of the bullshit you are proposing should be enough to make an intelligent person question it. You are too stupid to actually think reasonably about the subject and the failure it has produced.

I was a lot more upset when they ended blacksmith apprenticeships.

r68 and some others need to think a little more deeply about why human beings exist. Why are we on the planet? What did we evolve to become or to do? Famed botanist Lewis Thomas felt strongly that human beings evolved to sing, dance, and make art, since these three things are universal in all human societies throughout the world:

"The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology."

I'm pretty sure that we didn't evolve to add up sums of figures for a bank. We didn't evolve to serve coffee in a Starbucks. We didn't evolve to sit in cubicles and write code. That we can do such things is wonderful - but to neglect things that are so obviously "dominant aspects of human biology" is something we do at our own peril as a species.