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Dig, Don’t Dunk
Avoid the temptation of cheap intellectual thrills
The New Yorker recently published a piece on a problem that is close to my heart: the decline of the humanities in American higher education.
Nathan Heller’s article “The End of the English Major,” though by no means perfect (it will surprise absolutely nobody that a New Yorker author writing about college spent half of his time talking about Harvard and casually mentioned that he went there), is worth reading. The piece looks at a lot of the reasons why the humanities are “in crisis” and why STEM has conquered modern American education.
One little snippet of the story stuck with me:
Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard — not old or white or male — noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them.
This immediately rang true. I’ve taught history for over two decades, and it seems that my students are quicker than ever to declare…
