Jim Wilson/The New York Times
At Stanford this month, Jeremy Dean showed graduate students how to use Rap Genius to teach the classics in the digital age.
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: October 30, 2013 1073 Comments
STANFORD, Calif. — On Stanford University’s sprawling campus, where a
long palm-lined drive leads to manicured quads, humanities professors
produce highly regarded scholarship on Renaissance French literature and
the philosophy of language.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Tanya Llewellyn, a graduate student in English at
Stanford, at a workshop on a database analysis of 18th-century novels.
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"A university without a philosophy program is no longer a university."Rich, Pennsylvania
They have generous compensation, stunning surroundings and access to the
latest technology and techniques of scholarship. The only thing they
lack is students: Some 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford’s
main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities — but only
15 percent of the students.
With Stanford’s reputation in technology, it is no wonder that computer
science is the university’s most popular major, and that there are no
longer any humanities programs among the top five. But with the
recession having helped turn college, in the popular view, into largely a
tool for job preparation, administrators are concerned.
“We have 11 humanities departments that are quite extraordinary, and we
want to provide for that faculty,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford’s dean of
admission and financial aid.
The concern that the humanities are being eclipsed by science goes far beyond Stanford.
At some public universities, where funding is eroding, humanities are
being pared. In September, for example, Edinboro University of
Pennsylvania announced that it was closing its sparsely populated degree
programs in German, philosophy, and world languages and culture.
At elite universities, such departments are safe but wary. Harvard had a
20 percent decline in humanities majors over the last decade, a recent
report found, and most students who say they intend to major in
humanities end up in other fields. So the university is looking to
reshape its first-year humanities courses to sustain student interest.
Princeton, in an effort to recruit more humanities students, offers a
program for high school students with a strong demonstrated interest in
humanities — an idea Stanford, too, adopted last year.
“Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the
intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the
important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality
and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments,”
said Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor who writes about
higher education.
The future of the humanities has been a hot topic this year, both in
academia and the high-culture media. Some commentators sounded the alarm
based on federal data showing that nationally, the percentage of
humanities majors hovers around 7 percent — half the 14 percent share in
1970. As others quickly pointed out, that decline occurred between
1970, the high point, and 1985, not in recent years.
Still, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report this
spring noting the decreased funding for humanities and calling for new
initiatives to ensure that they are not neglected amid the growing money
and attention devoted to science and technology.
In The New Yorker in August, the writer Adam Gopnik argued for the importance of English majors. The New Republic ran an article, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” by Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist. A few weeks later came a testy rebuttal, “Crimes Against Humanities” by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, rejecting Dr. Pinker’s views on the ascendancy of science.
“In the scholarly world, cognitive sciences has everybody’s ear right
now, and everybody is thinking about how to relate to it,” said Louis
Menand, a Harvard English professor. “How many people do you know who’ve
read a book by an English professor in the past year? But everybody’s
reading science books.”
Many distinguished humanities professors feel their status deflating.
Anthony Grafton, a Princeton history professor who started that
university’s humanities recruiting program, said he sometimes feels
“like a newspaper comic strip character whose face is getting smaller
and smaller.”
At Stanford, the humanists cannot help noticing the primacy of science and technology.
“You look at this university’s extraordinary science and technology
achievements, and if you wonder what will happen to the humanities, you
can be threatened, or you can be invigorated,” said Franco Moretti, the
director of the Stanford Literary Lab. “I’m choosing to be invigorated.”
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