Why I'm optimistic about the future of the humanities
David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He's the senior academic adviser to the history department at the University of Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed here are those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)The humanities are in crisis. They've always been in crisis, at least according to reports from the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and over the last decade, but it's gotten more and more dire.
David M. Perry
A gripping report called "Endgame" from the Chronicle of Higher Education charts rapid declines in the academic study of literature in particular, with a collapse in faculty hiring, new majors and overall enrollments. One year ago -- these reports are timed around annual meetings of academics in the discipline, which occur each January -- the talk of crisis centered on history departments and the loss of both majors and jobs since the Great Recession.
The problem is real, but every time one of these "crisis" moments in academia meets the mainstream press, journalists confront readers with two types of responses - defenses of the value of the humanities and suggestions that professors and institutions of higher learning are teaching students the wrong stuff. Both may have some merit, but they miss an even bigger issue: money. If we want to save the humanities, we have to make college cheaper.
Ross Douthat, conservative columnist at the New York Times, recently responded to "Endgame" by talking about a crisis of faith in both the value of a literary canon and a loss of faith in faith itself. This emphasis on curriculum is a typical response in many ways to longstanding worries about the decline of the humanities, especially from conservative white men.
Douthat's colleague, David Brooks, also argued for a re-focus on "western civilization." Max Boot, at the Washington Post, has blamed history's decline on an absence of teaching about the history of war and politics. Harvard professor Niall Ferguson has attributed the decline of history enrollments on too many classes related to topics like sex, gender, indigenous culture and emotions.
That idea depends on a correlation error: In the 1960s, more people took history and literature in a period when both subjects were more uniformly white and male in both content and faculty makeup. If today the numbers are lower but both the curriculum and fields are more diverse (if not equally so), writers like Ferguson and Brooks assume that diversity is to blame.
Over the past 25 years -- as a teaching assistant as a big public university, in graduate training, a professor at a small tuition-driven Catholic university, and now as an academic advisor embedded in the history department back at that big public school -- I've probably talked to thousands of people about their experiences in history classes and why they might be hesitating over declaring a major. Zero have mentioned too much diversity as a problem. Some have mentioned too little. Mostly, though, they increasingly fixate on the cost of college.
Here's how the conversation typically goes. A student will come to my office, meet me after class or show up at my table at a research fair and profess their love of history. I know my colleagues in literature and other fields like philosophy or religious studies have similar encounters -- and this is important, because there already are more than enough students who want to study the humanities. We don't need to sell them on this.
But then the turn in the conversation comes. Students reveal that they just can't consider majoring in history because they are so concerned about what comes after college. They are racking up tens of thousands of dollars of debt, if not more, and they need their first job after college to start paying it off. Often the students, especially if they are first-generation college students, cite parental expectations or financial concerns as a factor.
If we're lucky, the conversation comes early enough in a student's academic tenure that I can persuade them to consider a double major, or show them the piles of data revealing that history majors have a lower unemployment rate than economics majors, and English majors in their 20s do better than computer science majors. CEOs in the most lucrative industries want to hire liberal arts majors and often themselves have liberal arts backgrounds. Economists say narratives matter as much as numbers. Humanities majors find jobs and are happy. The value of the humanities are both intangible and practical.
Still, sometimes it does take a decade for earnings to even out, and I understand why students and their parents are driven to majors that come with an easier or faster payout, even if it means getting stuck in middle management and working for humanities majors -- often from wealthier backgrounds -- for the rest of their lives.
For the first time in my professional life, "Endgame" notwithstanding, I'm optimistic about the possibility of changing the public debates around the costs of college. It's not going to be easy, even just among political left. In just the most recent Democratic debate, we heard Elizabeth Warren's plan to use executive authority to cancel $50,000 worth of student loan debt for every student, while Amy Klobuchar keeps promoting the idea that free public college might somehow overly benefit billionaires (note: billionaires don't usually send their kids to public colleges, and if they do, the answer is to tax them heavily enough that they'll need free college).
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We have to get past means-testing and complex systems of financial aid to something simple - make public colleges cheap. The rest will follow, including, at long last, students more often being able to follow their passions instead of being chased by their fears.
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