By Fonda Shen
I had an English professor in college who would forlornly query his students as to why they were taking his class — I can’t remember what exactly he would say, but in essence he would suggest that his own research and teaching offered little in terms of professional marketability. He would teach with great aplomb, he was well-regarded in the department, and he was generous with his students. He also never hid the fact that his was an increasingly precarious field. When he asked this question, his undergrads would proffer increasingly novel answers while his graduate students would look increasingly green. I had always thought it was a rather depressing exercise. It did not help that the class required us to think deeply about atrocity, so that this question usually came at the end of a discussion about the bombing of Dresden, the diaries of Bartolomé de las Casas, or the Nanjing massacre. I loved that class, and so it pained me to think that perhaps I had arrived at the beginning of the end. So it goes.
It’s not news that the contemporary neoliberal university is not conducive to critical thought and is slowly chipping away at the last vestiges of humanistic inquiry. One reporter recently wrote that the humanities are rarely talked about in the mainstream press unless another person is predicting its collapse.
To begin with, the baseline expenditure in 2007 for the humanities was only 0.3 billion dollars, while there was 36.7 billion dollars in spending for STEM academic R&D. In 2019, the R&D spending for the humanities was only 0.7% of that spent for the STEM subjects. The trend worsened during the pandemic and is only bouncing back to 2019 levels. Apart from R&D has also been declining. Federal funding, for example, dropped from 472.24 million dollars of NEH appropriation in 1979 to 180.00 million in 2022, adjusted for inflation. This trend is also not isolated to the United States. Internationally, too, there appears to be a decline in funding for the humanities since 2009.
The academic job market for the humanities is also declining, despite no net decline in graduate student degrees from 1988-2020 in the humanities during the same period of time, according to a study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A caveat, however, is that if examined on a shorter timeline, from 2015-2020 for PhDs or 2012-2020 for Master’s degrees, there is a decline, especially amongst Master’s degree conferrals, far less so for doctorates, given that the number of graduate degrees in the humanities peaked in about 2012 (Master’s) and 2015 (PhD).[1] However, job prospects of PhD humanities students have declined from 63% of Humanities PhDs in 1990 to 47% of humanities PhDs in 2020 having definite job prospects upon graduation. Universities are downsizing these departments and replacing stable tenure-track positions with precarious and cheaper adjunct positions.
In terms of demonstrated undergraduate student interests, according to a study by Harvard University, between 1966 and 2010, “Bachelor’s Degree Completions in the Humanities halved nationwide, falling from 14 to 7% of all degrees taken.” But that does not appear to be the whole story. According to a study by the MLA, the most significant drop actually occurred in the 1970s, with the low around 1980. The percentage of students increased throughout the 1980s then hit a peak in 1992, before continuing to decline until 2015, which is less than the low in 1980. In a way, this is welcome news — it is possible for the humanities to bounce back. But on the flip side, it suggests that the humanities are considered a sort of luxury subject — in an era where higher-education has become increasingly democratized, the humanities are not only primarily the realm of the affluent class, but easily scrapped during times of austerity.
As with any crisis, it might be helpful to consider how this phenomenon fits in a larger context. The university as an institution committed to serious thought and discovery is a relatively new concept. In her book Allies and Rivals, historian Emily Levine studies the development of the modern research university in Germany and the United States through the late 19th and 20th centuries. Although institutions of higher education in other countries have also contributed to the development of the institution as we know it, Germany and the United States, because of their nation-building goals during the last century and a half, have been primary contributors to its development. In the eighteenth century, for example, universities were mostly institutions for disseminating received wisdom, while academies like the Paris Academy produced new knowledge and discoveries. At the advent of what is now considered the “Ivy League,” colleges in the new United States were primarily “finishing schools” for young men. By the eighteenth century, universities in Europe had fallen from their medieval peak.
In the nineteenth century, the century when Germany unified, the process of nation-building led to the university to become a symbol of progress and modernity. The American system adopted heavily from the German system. It was not until the First World War that the idea of “academic freedom” was coined, and it was during the Gilded Age that the university became heavily influenced by philanthropists who incentivized universities to focus on the hard sciences that would aid industrial production. In fact, it was the post-WWII boom that not only democratized higher education, but democratized and prioritized the study of humanities in particular.[2] Without this democratization of what was originally an explicitly elitist realm of study, one might argue that a shrinkage of the field would be both less noticeable and less objectionable.
I. New Contributing Factors
Today, what is more concerning is how politicians are encouraging the decline in students studying the humanities. Conservative governors like Rick Scott, for example, have tried to require humanities majors to pay higher tuition fees. This year, the importance of the humanities has perhaps been repeatedly validated in the negative. There have been so many attacks against critical thought that they almost seem to prove its importance. On the flip side, such attacks are not benign. Following a couple years of culture wars in school board meetings — most notably the absolutely deranged attacks against the straw man of Critical Race Theory in conservative spaces — conservative politics has turned to book bannings. And even more terrifyingly, well-established apparently apolitical educational organizations are permitting it.
In Florida these days, book banning in schools, which just a couple of years ago would have immediately been a red flag for fascism, is in full force. According to PEN America, at least 176 books have been banned in Duval County, Florida. And just this year, a terrifying new phenomenon occurred. Governor DeSantis recently criticized then banned the new AP African American Studies course that the College Board has just released, after reading a draft version. The College Board revised its curriculum to exclude or de-emphasize Critical Race Theory, the Black Radical Tradition, and other more left-leaning thinkers. Furthermore, they added sections on Black Conservatism. Far from being blindly swayed by his constituents, DeSantis is only too aware of what he is doing. As news articles on the subject have repeatedly mentioned, Ron DeSantis was Yale educated. He understood well the value of the books and subjects he banned and the power that critical and sustained thought can have on a status quo. Professor Robin D.G. Kelley, one of the authors who was removed from the AP African American Studies curriculum, spoke with Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recently on “The Meaning of African American Studies.” When asked about the purpose and history of Black studies, he responds that “Black studies is supposed to be an epistemological break, and that’s why it’s dangerous—because it actually wants to try to figure out a way to make this country not racist.” As Derecka Purnell said in a recent seminar, the reason that institutions do not like to give Critical Race Theory Programs is because once students learn about CRT, “then they’ll start asking for the land.”[3] The result of new and provocative thought, as opposed to disciplinary education, is not a more docile subject, but rather an understanding of the world that leads to a desire for change.
II. Other forms of media
The agents for less critical thought are also encouraged, unfortunately, by the tidal wave of new forms of media living on our screens which improve certain forms of cognitive abilities, but nevertheless erode our capacities for sustained and reflective thinking. Different sources contradict one another on whether the decline in readership has to do with a decline in the number of books read per person or a declining number of people who read, but they agree on the overall decline of reading within the population. According to a poll by Gallup, it appears that the number of books read per person has fallen rather than the number of people who read. This decline in the annual number of books read was especially significant amongst college graduates. It appears that the reading decline is mirrored by an increase in consumption of TV. The New Yorker gives even more damning evidence of how TV has been cutting into the amount of time people spend reading. It also seems to contradict the Gallup poll by indicating that the decline in reading was not in number of books read per reader, but number of total readers. This might be because Gallup measured from 1990 to 2021 while the New Yorker graph is only from 2003 to 2018. In a 2019 study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, they showed a similar decline in reading from 2003. Improvements in student achievement increased much more dramatically in math than in reading from 1990 to 2017, they also demonstrated. This change is now reflected in corporate strategy. Marketing professionals, with their finger on the pulse, have noticed. Forbes published an article in 2013 indicating that advertising was switching from text to images due to the rise of image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Tumblr.
The effects of the rise of screen use has been well-documented psychologically for over a decade. In a 2009 paper published by UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield in Science on the effects of technology on critical thinking, she found that decline in reading and an uptick in technology use have changed how people learn. Reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary, she writes, and there has been a resulting decline in these skills. However, there has been an increased ability for students to process visual media. While Greenfield does not posit this change in thinking as an absolute negative, for our purposes it is an alarming indictment of the decline of critical thought.
This year, the rise of ChatGTP has caused an earthquake in higher learning. It is not only able to pass bar and medical licensing exams — which are arguably sufficiently rote that a machine should be able to take them — but it is also turning into a paper-writing machine for college and graduate students. It is, superficially, exhibiting the capacity for human intelligence, not only able to produce correct answers where there is an established right or wrong, but also able to produce thought that is both novel and flawed, much like a human being. It has managed to exhibit in some instances political views, and reflect prejudices of our society. Although the novelty of the program and AI more generally limits what might be extrapolated regarding its effects, it is perhaps safe to say that the rise of such tools will further discourage the development of critical thinking skills. I would argue, however, the rise of such technology and the apparent closing of the gap between human and artificial intelligence should not serve as proof that human thinking is less valuable. Instead, it is even more vitally important to cultivate these skills. The algorithms for these programs are not based in the void. Instead, they are derivatives of human values, human prejudices, and the ways in which humans believe they should interact with each other. Scientists in the STEM fields developed the app. But humanistic values underlie the code. In a recent article in The New Yorker on ChatGTP’s functions, writer Ted Chiang explains how the program’s current form is based on what is essentially a compressed version of the information available on the internet. The very reason that the bot resembles human intelligence is not because it is able to think beyond human intelligence, but because it is able to take existing human knowledge and regurgitate it with a level of paraphrasing that resembles understanding.
There are perhaps infinite reasons for justifying why the humanities should be preserved. The market today, the arbiter of truth in our neoliberal era, would argue that none of them are sufficient. I am merely putting forth one (and arguably not a particularly novel one)— if we insist on cohabitating as a species, the humanities give us the tools and space to reflect on how well we are achieving that goal. College marketing departments try to sell the humanities by emphasizing the transferable skills — writing, reading, textual analysis— that would give their students an edge in the job market. But frankly speaking, if the goal is to make marketable professionals, the humanities are likely not as useful as a degree in engineering or accounting. Highlighting the derivative employment benefits of the humanities as quantifiable assets cheapens it. The humanities don’t make replacement parts for the job market. They instead equip their students to think about whether the job market as it stands now is a good vehicle for our collective survival.
III. Do we need the university?
In her book Undoing the Demos, Professor Wendy Brown examines how the pervasive political rationality of neoliberalism has infiltrated all aspects of our lives, including higher education, and is eroding the critical thinking skills needed for a functioning democracy. Brown indexes how democratic values and practices, especially as practiced in the modern era starting from the European liberal democratic model, are not themselves an absolute good. The history of liberal democracy shows how the principles of equality and liberty explicitly outlined within Enlightenment tracts have enabled exclusionary accumulation of power and capital along class, racial, and gender lines. However, Brown argues that these dissonances are both generative and preferable to the alternative. The broken promises of liberal democracy set the stage for the realization of anti-colonial and feminist movements, and furthermore, even barring such change, the value of rule by the people rather than of an external power remains preferable. As Brown writes, “Never did the demos really rule in liberal democracies, nor could it in large nation-states. But the presumption that it should rule placed modest constraints on powerful would-be usurpers of its ghostly throne, helped to leash legislation aimed at benefiting the few, rather than the many, and episodically incited political action from below oriented toward the ‘common concerns of ordinary lives’.”[4]
Brown does not address the possibilities or potential benefits of forms of democracy external to liberal democracy aside from noting that other forms of democracy are myriad albeit minimally realized. Her focus is instead on the conditions necessary for a functioning democracy and the stranglehold that neoliberalism has on them. Neoliberal rationality, she argues, has led to the displacement of the political subject, homo politicus, by the neoliberal iteration of the economic subject, homo oeconomicus, who unlike the liberal form, is not one of exchange, but one of competition. The human subject becomes human capital, someone to invest in, with the expectation of garnering returns— either personal, political, or financial. In relation to the university, the overwhelming presence of the homo oeconomicus turns education into a form of investment into oneself as human capital. This contrasts sharply with the value of education for the homo politicus, who would need education not to maximize individual competitiveness, but rather to grasp the tools to be a fully engaged and sovereign citizen. As Brown writes:
“Subjects, liberated for the pursuit of their own enhancement of human capital, emancipated from all concerns with and regulation by the social, the political, the common, or the collective, are inserted into the norms and imperatives of market conduct and integrated into the purposes of the firm, industry, region, nation, or postnational constellation to which their survival is tethered.”[5]
This is occurring, now in the twenty-first century, after decades of expanding not only the demos in the United States – the product of the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and so forth – but also one of the underlying drives of these changes: a democratization of a liberal arts higher education, often in public universities, in the wake of the Second World War. What should have remained a continued democratization of power, however, has now become a retraction – while the new expectation of college as an idea remains accessible, the actual content of a college education, especially within public universities, has diverted away from the liberal arts and humanities and toward more marketable job training programs. And in turn, what should have been a growth in the role of the homo politicus, provided a more educated citizenry, has turned instead into the development of college-educated homo oeconomici.
And thus, Brown argues, as “economic parameters” and the values that accompany them become the only ones that matter, “neoliberal rationality eliminates what [was] termed ‘the good life (Aristotle) or ‘the true realm of freedom,’” in other words, people become forms of being that reduce the human to mere a mode of survival in a field of interpersonal competition.[6] Neoliberal rationality limits democracy because it arrests the imaginaries and priorities we need in order to thoughtfully consider how we would like to be governed, and how we would like to coexist with each other. And these logics are obvious and especially pernicious in universities, especially public universities, as they themselves are resembling firms and at the same time no longer providing the education needed to stop this trend. Universities are important because they are incubators not just for democracy, but for people who find themselves responsible for determining how they would like to coexist with others.
One option, then, is to do as Brown does and advocate (implicitly, at least), for the reform of the university as it stands now. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write of a different option: the undercommons. These are the spaces for the precariat, including the graduate students, contractual faculty, adjuncts, postdocs, and others, who are committed to deep radical thought and praxis not with the intention of becoming a more professionally marketable thinker for the academy, but rather to abolish it as it stands. They take issue not only with the neoliberal university, but arguably also with every iteration of it that came before, none of which was any less fundamentally Eurocentric, colonial, or exclusive in their values (despite the inclusive practices of the post-war period). They write in The Undercommons that prison abolition is not just the abolition of prisons, but rather the abolition of a society that could have the prison. Analogously, one might say that their vision of the abolition of the university as the gatekeeper of not only people’s futures but also the future of thought is not the mere abolition of the university as institution, but of a society which would not permit the production of knowledge and the exchange of thought to be warehoused within universities and dampened by student debt.
“Surely the university also makes thought possible? Is not the purpose of the University as Universitas, as liberal arts, to make the commons, make the public, make the nation of democratic citizenry? Is it not therefore important to protect this Universitas, whatever its impurities, from professionalization in the university?” they ask. This is directly in conversation with the crisis that Wendy Brown outlines. Moten and Harney answer — “But we would ask what is already not possible in this talk in the hallways, among the buildings, in rooms of the university about possibility?”[7] In other words, rather than serving as a possibilizing institution, the university forecloses critical conversations. Even a “critical education,” they write, completes rather than contradicts professional education, with the university essentially swallowing the threats against it.
They agitate instead for the idea of fugitive thought. There is an element of secrecy but also, and importantly, a political commitment to remain a threat to the university while it stands. Furthermore, unlike the departmental crises within the university, fugitive thought does not expect to sustain itself indefinitely in the same form. Instead, it exists like flashes of lighting, brilliantly, but ultimately impermanent, destined to end up back in its obscurity.
“The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings,”[8] Moten and Harney write, echoing in part what Robin D.G. Kelley says about Black Studies. The university, as a place committed at least in name to academic freedom and critical thought needs the radical thought of the undercommons for its legitimacy, and yet, if this thought is sufficiently powerful, it would destroy the university itself. While it is true that the university might need the undercommons, it might not be true that the undercommons need the university. The relationship between the truly subversive intellectual and the university can only be one of theft, Moten and Harney argue. And that implies that the university provides neither legitimacy nor authority to the undercommons — it is far more pedestrian than that. The university is (merely) a source of material goods and space that critical thought needs. The humanities have existed before the university as we know it now, and we might suppose that it has the ability to far outlive its current home.
IV. Humanities in Practice
There are important and ongoing disagreements about whether the university can ever serve as a locus for actual critical, world-changing thought. But these arguments might remain academic. On the flip side of what John Guillory thinks is the hubris of literary criticism in trying to remain politically relevant, it is precisely the duty of the humanities to highlight how we don’t always have the correct values. The fact is, we are not that good at figuring out how best to coexist, or even where to go about doing that. We cannot cede to the market, we cannot cede to technocracy of any kind, we cannot even cede to the hard sciences, to determine what all of our knowledge should be used for, and what new knowledge we need. Instead, it is imperative that we put the humanities into practice. This does not mean practicing writing, reading, or the analysis that the disciplines require, but rather the forms of thinking necessary for determining how we participate in a society.
In a way, even if we take into account the profound critiques by Moten and Harney, Brown is right — the only point of a humanistic education is to encourage democracy. But it is not the procedural democracy that we understand in the Western world. Returning to the idea of fugitivity, the form of democracy that humanities today must support is what Professor Sheldon Wolin called fugitive democracy.
Disillusioned by the mere procedural democracies of the most developed capitalist societies, Professor Wolin does not rest his hopes in the institutionalization and professionalization of democracy. Rather, he argues for the substantive and concrete democratic instances that are authentic but also ephemeral. He writes: “Democracy needs to be reconceived as something other than a form of government: as a mode of being which is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives. The experience of which democracy is the witness is the realization that the political mode of existence is such that it can be, and is, periodically lost.”[9] And the “political mode of existence” is at least in part the “self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.””[10] And the humanities are loci in which we can discover these “common concerns.”
The point of democracy, Professor Wolin seems to be saying, is not to design the ideal city-state, or nation-state, or any perfectly existing body. Rather, it is meant to emerge at points where members of a society make a decision about how they would like to live with each other. As Professor Wolin explains in an interview: “I think fundamentally democracy in a democratic culture comes down not to big, highfalutin institutions or policies. It comes down ultimately to how we treat each other in our ordinary range of relationships and conversations.”
This negotiation of how we treat each other does not vanish once we enter the undercommons, which itself is not a monolith. Even in spaces where the ideas of harm and accountability are most heavily and progressively debated, where the theories and individuals of the undercommons are most prominent, it appears that we are simply not that good at coexisting yet. From this point of view, the humanities are profoundly practical — in fact, they must be practiced.
The book I Hope We Choose Love by trans author Kai Cheng Thom begins with an essay on the violence that is replicated from the neoliberal, capitalist, imperial, racist reality in which we live into abolitionist, trans, deeply radical spaces. Their essay is not to indict particular individuals or to wring their hands at the impossibility of eradicating patterns of violence, but rather to indicate how naming and recognizing the problems in our existing forms of coexistence are not enough to actually solve them. Mitigating these forms of violence — especially the violence of policing each other — requires thought. It requires novel approaches to forms of accountability, appropriate ways to address interpersonal violence without resorting to carceral logics (which are not only carried out through using carceral systems), forms of apology that are not also deeply disempowering, and so forth.
Thom’s ideas are important to note because they are exposing how even within the most radical spaces, people are not always very good at admitting when they are struggling to engage with others only through a non-punitive method, devoid of shaming or other kinds of harm. Their politics and practices are still in flux also. Stretching this one step further, it begs the question of what the internal politics of communities can be like even when the structural forms of violence we are familiar with have been recognized and mitigated, at least in theory, if not completely eradicated in practice. One wonders, going back to The Undercommons, whether even external to the academy, within maroon spaces, similar patterns of inequality based upon “merit,” favoritism, scarcity are reproduced.
Ironically, as robots are getting better at being human, it is even more important for humans to get better at being humans too. It doesn’t have to happen in the university, although it would be nice to not cede all of those resources to future McKinsey consultants. But it is crucial, no matter where we end up, to acknowledge that we are simply not that good at figuring out how we as individuals are meant to coexist with each other. The humanities do not give us the answers, necessarily, but unlike other disciplines and forms of thinking, it is not wedded to superficial goals of efficacy, efficiency, economic growth, productivity, or even the concept of human progress. Rather, it gives us the space, the resources, and the time to consider this question, and to reconfigure our priorities so that this question remains at the forefront of our minds. It is a practice in considering how we want to be human.
Notes
[1] See “State of the Humanities 2022,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at page 7 https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2022_Humanities-Indicators_Graduate-Education-Workforce.pdf.
[2] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 184-200.
[3] Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, “Utopia 8/13: The Role of Lawyers in Progressive Politics,” https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/utopia1313/8-13/, at 35:00.
[4] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 207.
[5] Brown, Undoing the Demos, 108.
[6] Brown, Undoing the Demos, 43.
[7] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 31.
[8] Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 25
[9] Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 111.
[10] Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy, in Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 100.