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Let’s first consider some of the evidence. Back in June, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, announced that her institution’s new provost fired her as the dean of the Honors College that she had run for two years. Why? According to the provost, the program Frey established for the college was too expensive. But this was a puzzling suggestion. The university possesses a $1.36-billion endowment, and by all accounts Frey’s new program, which focused on reading core texts in the humanistic tradition, was phenomenally successful. Enrollment in Tulsa’s Honors College grew by over 500 percent. Retention rates in the college soared, and the program managed to attract multiple major grants and gifts. And although we’re often told that contemporary college students lack the skills, patience, or inclination to read great (or, now, any) works of literature, history, and philosophy, pupils flocked to Frey’s college.
Even administrators at far richer institutions are claiming the need to slash the humanities because of fiscal capacity. In July, the University of Chicago’s provost announced plans to “restructure” its Division of the Arts and Humanities, potentially gutting language instruction, consolidating departments, reducing graduate studies, and establishing minimum class sizes. As for why an institution with an over $10-billion endowment, famous the world over for its humanities programs, would make such dramatic changes, administrators offered a vague rationale centered on “historic funding pressures.” But what, specifically, are these pressures? As Clifford Ando, a distinguished professor of classics at Chicago, details in some illuminating articles, the university’s leadership has for years spent vast amounts of money, largely on STEM projects, and then attempted to weaken its Division of the Arts and the Humanities as a means to pay for these investments.
Obviously, there are fiscal problems in American higher education. But it’s quite a leap to suggest that the humanities are responsible for them, or must pay the greatest price. In fact, as Ando writes, they are the “only faculty in the arts and sciences who systematically pay for themselves: they do not need expensive buildings; they do not require substantial material infrastructure or expensive data sets for research; the provision of instruction in their fields is cheap.” Thus, it seems to many professors of the humanities that “fiscal crisis” has become a pretext for far-reaching changes that are not necessary so much as desired by university leaders. “The tragedy of the contemporary academy,” Frey concludes, “is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.”
But we should not overlook a deeper structural rationale built into the very creation of American research universities in the late 19th century. Prior to that time, higher education in the United States looked very different. The small colleges that dotted the nation then typically possessed a prescribed curriculum — a series of classes that were required of all students. Greatly influenced by the spirit of Renaissance humanism, these institutions devoted outsized attention to the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature, which students were to encounter in their original languages.
The leaders of the early American colleges believed that the study of the masterworks of Greco-Roman antiquity was key to shaping students’ characters — a prime goal of higher education in the United States. Thus, students who aimed to earn a bachelor’s degree translated a lot of Latin and ancient Greek texts during their school years; much of their education was taken up with reading both sacred and secular works from antiquity. By taking in the wisdom of these writings and the examples of virtuous conduct found therein, America’s young could learn how to live up to their higher potential.
Such a heavy focus on classical literature was always controversial here, and for legitimate reasons. Why, many wondered, should students devote so much of their time to the study of two “dead” languages? Why should the nation’s colleges prepare its pupils principally for a few so-called learned professions, for which a grounding in the classical humanities was necessary?
In the late 19th century, a group of American reformers radically recast their nation’s higher education, establishing a system of research universities that would eclipse the classical colleges. These reformers, whom the historian Andrew Jewett has called the first generation of “scientific democrats,” aimed to recenter higher education on the scientific method. Critical of the dominance of the classical humanities and theology in the classical colleges, the scientific democrats hoped to reorient American higher learning around the natural and social sciences, believing that the scientific method could supply the requisite tools to foment a cohesive and robust democratic society.
To this end, the scientific democrats jettisoned the prescribed curricula of the classical colleges, in which the classical humanities and theology played such a prominent part. Heavily influenced by the recent publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), these reformers favored an elective-based course of studies, which they cast as an educational “survival of the fittest.” Students would choose all their own courses, and those disciplines that failed to win sufficient enrollments would die — and rightly so.
Many of the scientific democrats turned their institutions into bona fide research universities where scientific-style research and the concomitant creation of new knowledge would thrive. Professors of the humanities — whose efforts were previously focused on the transmission of wisdom from masterpieces of the classical past — would now be compelled to produce such research, which always fit the natural and social sciences better than it did the humanities. In short, starting in the late 19th century, the sciences became the bedrock of American higher education, as could be seen from its new curricula and its new investment in minute and technical research.
American institutions of higher learning have obviously experienced many changes since then. But the system remains narrowly organized around the sciences and far less amenable to the needs of a humanistic education. As proponents of the humanities have noted for over a century, the humanistic disciplines were likely to wither in a system deliberately created to marginalize them.
Lost in these vicissitudes is the notion that American colleges and universities should be countercultural institutions, in the best sense of that term. In a society dominated by so much economic hustling, they should provide opportunities for Aristotelian leisure — to allow undergraduates the opportunity to contemplate the human predicament and determine the sort of life they’d like to lead and the sort of nation they’d like to inhabit. In a society obsessed with utilitarian approaches to education, our institutions of higher learning should focus on character development just as much as they highlight career training. And in a country often oblivious to the past, they ought to act as stewards of culture, protecting our common human heritage as carefully as they produce new knowledge.
Our system of higher education cannot do these crucial things with leaders who undervalue the humanities, who fail to broaden our approach to the liberal arts beyond the scientistic vision of higher education pioneered in the 19th century.
To a great extent, it appears, our crisis of the humanities is a crisis of academic leadership — a crisis of will, not capacity.
