I like to sometimes jokingly say that when I was an undergraduate I never took any course that had any practical utility whatsoever because that is not what college is for. I was presented with four gilded years to indulge in the life of the mind and I was not going to corrupt that opportunity or besmirch my college experience with anything other than ideas for their own sake.
This was a slight exaggeration, but I did go on to major in Latin with enough credits in ancient Greek to have declared it my major as well. Clearly these were not subjects known for their practical employment. It is only fairly recently that I came to connect my attitude, and the academic choices it fostered, to what was undeniably a position of economic privilege. Having been brought up in the post-War years, the economic winds were at my back with the result that I never gave any thought whatsoever as to how I was going to earn a living. My presumption was that the economy would take care of me, and while never having been wealthy, for the most part, it did. Immersing myself in ancient languages served me well and I have absolutely no regrets.
I now teach undergraduates at Hunter College, and conclude that if I were they, I could not be so cocky about the course of study I would engage and my relation to my college education. The economy has radically changed, and not incidentally, as a student in the City University of New York, my college education was free. Today, even public universities come with hefty price tags, and attending private colleges leaves one with crippling debt, sometimes for decades. My students cannot help but see their college diploma as a prerequisite for the careers that will financially sustain them. Some when asked have even told me that their primary reasons for attending college is “to get the paper.”
The liberal arts in American colleges are disappearing, and economics is no doubt a primary driver. Louis Menand, reviewing two texts on the “great books” for the current issue of The New Yorker, cites the decline of the humanities on college campuses. It seems precipitous. He notes,
“Between 2012 and 2019, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in English fell by twenty-six per cent, in philosophy and religious studies by twenty-five per cent, and in foreign languages and literature by twenty-four per cent. In English, according to the Association of Departments of English, which tracked the numbers through 2016, research universities, like Brown and Columbia, took the biggest hits. More than half reported a drop in degrees of forty per cent or more in just four years.
The trend is national. Some departments have maintained market share, of course, and creative- writing classes seem to be popular everywhere. But, in general, undergraduates have largely stopped taking humanities courses. Only eight per cent of students entering Harvard College this fall report that they intend to major in the arts and humanities, a division that has twenty- one undergraduate programs.”
Fairleigh Dickinson University, the largest private university in New Jersey, and where I have occasionally taught, maintains two campuses. Its campus near near where I live has totally abandoned the liberal arts. Long gone is the opportunity to major in philosophy and I believe the entire university retains only a single anthropologist. But one can readily acquire a degree in business, nursing or hospitality management. The University attracts primarily a working class student body, and no one should argue that fields of study that align with occupational needs is not a good and necessary function for universities and colleges to perform. But one can also ask what is lost to both the character of our nation as well as individual students if literature, foreign language, philosophy and the arts all but disappear.
We should be concerned about the imperious role of economic forces in shaping social priorities and the values persons hold. The corporatization of American life is hegemonic and almost total. Market values reign. At one time academia could be seen as type of “counter culture” that stood against the power of corporate forces and the culture of materialism it sustained. The liberal arts were situated at the center of that subversive trend. There was a time when college presidents were upheld as national sages. Today they are fund raisers commanding astronomical salaries. Such is reflective of the transformation of the contemporary academic institution and it is felt all the way down.
I was never one to see the humanities at war with the sciences. They can and should be complementary. The doctor or engineer versed in the liberal arts is a richer person and may in fact be a better doctor or engineer for having bathed in the waters of literature or music. Yet my own anecdotal familiarity with doctors and engineers seldom evinces professionals with broader sensibilities. The commercial character of American society, and the academic training that follows, markedly narrows personalities.
My own identity is deeply vested in this issue. When I was working on my doctorate at Columbia University, I was tapped for three semesters to be preceptor to teach undergraduates Columbia's course in Contemporary Civilization. “CC,” as it was commonly known, is one of the two foundational courses of Columbia's core curriculum. Its twin is Literature and Humanities. Developed after World War I, Columbia took the lead in formulating a canon of “great books” which presumably would form a common foundation of knowledge shaping American identity.
Contemporary Civilization, which presented the prevailing ideas of Western thought, and was required of all Columbia undergraduates, was reputed to be the college's most demanding course. And rigorous it assuredly was. It mandated reading in rapid succession original, and often complete texts of the Bible, Plato Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Freud and others. Often derided as the deliverances of “dead, white, European, males” the curriculum did make a nod to women and writers of color. A session was devoted to Christine to Pizan, the 14th century French woman of letters and arguably a proto-feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft, more solidly an early feminist and Enlightenment figure who authored The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was also required. When it came to minorities, the final two weeks of the course left options to choose from, among them the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Beyond CC and Lit. Hum, the core curriculum included courses devoted to writers well representing non-Western luminaries.
While I shy away from using the term glibly, reading these texts and preparing myself to guide class discussions with my students, was for me intellectually transformative. It solidified my enchantment with ideas, with a pronounced love of their genealogies as they developed through the ages. My relationship with the texts, in short, formatted my mind and as such helped mold my character in a manner which has forever been a source of confidence and delight.
For the past 20 years I have taught courses in human rights to graduate students at Columbia. Human rights is not an academic discipline, but a field that can be approached from a variety of perspectives. The international law of human rights has become increasingly salient, but it is not a function of my training, nor is it my perspective. Rather, coming to human rights academics as an activist, I see human rights primarily from the standpoint of moral justice struggles, and my pedagogy issuing from my commitment to the history of ideas, leans heavily toward the philosophical. I try to inspire my students with the questions that relate to the origin of rights, their justifications and theoretical debates that apply directly to the their application in various cultural and religious contexts.
I am a humanist, and humanism, however defined, is deeply immersed in the humanities and the liberal arts. At the most fundamental level it asks the questions, arguably beginning with Socrates, what type of person do I want to be? What makes for the good life? And by extension, what type of society do we envision for America, which is in a state of perpetual re-creation?
I do not argue for a specific canon. This can and should change. What I do argue for is depth, depth that emerges from immersion in ideas; not any ideas but those that transcend the realm of practicality and material aggrandizement. I argue for a curriculum that valorizes non-market values, which I aver goes to the heart of the human experience.
No doubt, survival, personal and national, is dependent on scientific discovery and applied technology, administration and sophisticated mechanisms to satisfy the material needs and wants of a growing and complex population. It is chimerical and reckless to think otherwise.
But my fear is that we can win the world while we lose our souls. A society impoverished by a want of culture, of literature, art, music, philosophical inquiry and all the loves and devotions comprehended by the humanities, and great ideas that ponder the wellspring of a meaningful life, I fear misses the point of a life best lived.
I worry that that our institutions of higher learning are moving onto the wrong track. Setting them aright is a question that they alone cannot fix alone. Change can only come from the culture at large starting from education at lower levels, and from leadership that has the courage and vision to look beyond the seductions of power, wealth and the gratification of immediate need. The alternative is a new Dark Ages.