Recently, I have read alarming articles about state universities eliminating majors in the humanities as a cost-cutting measure while expanding departments that grant degrees in computer science, business, and other job-related fields. Just last week, The Atlantic published an article about the downsizing of foreign languages, linguistics, and other majors at the University of West Virginia, even though the state has a surplus of nearly $2 billion. Other universities are cutting majors in history, the arts, and political science in favor of majors that enhance immediate employability.
Gayle Greene, professor emerita at Scripps College in Claremont, California, contends that such actions are short-sighted. Today—in a world of disinformation, fake news, and Artigiani intelligence—we need the humanitities more than ever so we can discern and weigh facts and reality. In this essay , she shows how tech titans like Bill Gates have encouraged the destructive trend of favoring job-ready degrees.
Greene writes:
“College is remade as tech majors surge and humanities dwindle,” announces Nick Anderson in the Washington Post, May 2023. “Remade” is an understatement, when more students today are majoring in computer science than in all the humanities– English, history, philosophy, languages, the arts— combined. And what for? In the past year, tech has laid off more than 200,000 workers, with more layoffs predicted.
There was a chorus of Cassandras warning against this remake: do not whittle education down to preparation for jobs that might not exist in a decade; do not sacrifice the humanities to STEM. But the hype was so loud, it drowned out the warnings. The STEM skills shortage was broadcast by business leaders, lobbyists, politicians, think tanks, media, and especially by Bill Gates, who spread the word far and wide. He announced to Congress, in 2008, “U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.” Obama echoed him in his 2012 State of the Union Address: “I hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the U.S. but can’t find workers with the right skills.” Obama reiterated the message in his 2011, 2013, and 2016 State of the Union Addresses, announcing, in 2013 a competition “to redesign America’s high schools,” rewarding those developing STEM classes to deliver “the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”
The hype was hot air. “If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising” rather than staying flat as they have “for the past 16 years,” wrote Ron Hira et al in USA Today, 2014. Obama might have heeded him or Andrew Hacker, Ben Tarnoff, Matt Bruenig, Michael Teitelbaum, Gerald Coles, Walter Hickey, Michael Anft, who raised similar alarms. Or Paul Krugman, who warned, “the belief that America suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true”; it’s “a zombie idea… that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”
When an idea persists against all evidence, you have to ask: who profits? A 2012 Microsoft publication warned that the U.S. faces “a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating”—even though, in the summer of 2014, Microsoft laid off about 18,000 workers. Other companies,Boeing, IBM, Symantec, were also laying off thousands, sometimes rehiring them at lower salaries, even as they lamented the “lack of qualified applicants,” wrote Hacker.
The problem for a company like Microsoft has not been a lack of skilled workers, but that U.S. tech workers expect to be well paid. Foreign tech workers in the U.S. make about 57% what their U.S. counterparts make. Hence the tech industry’s push for easier immigration policies and H-1B visas, visas that allow U.S. businesses to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty work like IT. If we don’t ease up on immigration policies, Gates told Congress in 2008, “American companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete.” Hence Gates’spush for coding and computer classes in schools and colleges. “Nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers,” wrote Tarnoff, “and where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools.”
The STEM skills shortage was the PR of an industry wanting a large pool of workers ready to work for less, an industry with enormous lobbying power. The campaign has been so successful that now hundreds of thousands of trained workers are newly unemployed in a market flooded by as many as qualified as they. It’s succeeded in bending higher education to its purposes, re-directing it to training for jobs, with tech jobs the most hyped–even though tech comprise less than 8% of the economy. Colleges and universities direct resources that way, private donors pour enormous sums that way, and students follow the money and the buzz, whatever their interests and talents. Humanities enrollments have plummeted, courses, programs, departments have been gutted, and tenured faculty let go.
But what even the most dire of Cassandras failed to see, even those working in AI, was the seismic upheaval AI was about to create.
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Obama might have been more cautious about dismantling an educational system that’s served the U.S. so well, a system widely believed to have been the engine of this country’s power and productivity. The U.S. still has the universities that rank highest internationally and have world-wide draw, in spite of the assaults higher education has lately endured. But he went ahead and based his educational policies on the vision of a technocrat (Gates’ word for himself) who sees the purpose of education as making a workforce that will allow U.S. industries “to compete in the global economy,” as Gates said in Waiting for Superman, 2010, a public-school-bashing documentary film he funded and starred in. Obama turned his education department over to the Gates foundation, as Lindsey Layton documented in the Washington Post, 2014: “top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped theadministration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.”
With K-12, Obama uncritically adopted No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the test and assess regime George W. Bush inflicted on public schools in 2002 in the name of “reform”—even though NCLB was an acknowledged disaster by the time Obama took office. Schools could be closed if test scores declined— many were closed, especially in underprivileged areas, where kids don’t test well—which left teachers no choice but to teach to the test and strip curricula of subjects not tested, including literature, history, philosophy, the arts, languages, social sciences. The panic about test scores made a boondoggle for new ventures supplying materials for test- prepping, test-administering, test-scoring, and assessing. In fact, what test scores most reliably measure is how well kids take tests, which penalizes students from disadvantaged backgrounds and makes a mockery of claims that testing levels the playing field, the rationale for so-called reform.
Obama tightened the screws on Bush’s program, requiring states to agree to certain conditions to qualify for federal funding, each of them high on the Gates agenda. States had to agree to make room for more charter schools, and they did—more charters were founded on Obama’s watch than Bush’s. Gates claims that charters will create “choice” and “competition” and incentivize teachers to raise test scores. In fact they have not raised test scores, though they have succeeded in routing public funding to private interests, as they were meant to. States also had to agree to adopt a standardized curriculum. This came in the form of the Common Core State Standards, Gates’ brainchild, which wedded teaching even more closely to testing, assessing, and technology, since standardized material is easily computer-administered and scored. The Common Core has reduced reading and writing to decontextualized skills — “find the main point,” “identify the figures of speech”— which has been a major turnoff for kids. The moaning we hear lately about declining test scores is beside the point: the point is that kids are massively alienated from school because “drill, kill, bubble fill” is all they’re fed.
Gates has admitted that transforming K-12 is harder than he’d anticipated: “We really haven’t changed outcomes” (i.e. test scores). But he should not underestimate his impact. His perpetuation of the broken-public-schools narrative, his attack on teachers and tenure, his imposition of mechanization and measurement on an enterprise he knows nothing about, have driven teachers out of the profession in record numbers, with few lining up to take their places. Teachers have written and spoken against the Common Core, forming advocacy groups to resist it, and tens of thousands of parents have opted their kids out of testing— but the machine rolls on. The foundation “has influence everywhere, in absolutely every branch of education…federal, state, local,” with politicians, journalists, administrators, think tanks, summarizes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute.
Higher education has been harder to get hold of, on account of the respect it commands throughout the world. But harping on its failures to meet market needs has done much to skew it the Gates way. “The [Gates] foundation wants nothing less than to overhaul higher education, changing how it is delivered, financed, and regulated,” wrote Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Becky Supiano, in a brilliant expose, “The Gates Effect.” It “would like college to be cheaper, more accessible, and more targeted towards the specific skills desired by employers. Instead of a broad education where a college student might take courses across a range of subjects, the new model has students demonstrating ‘competencies’ by passing tests in specific areas, and receiving a certificate upon completion.” Thefoundation “hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon,” the authors conclude; “it has worked to build that bandwagon.”
And its stranglehold on mainstream media is murderous. As with K-12, “Gates buys up everyone and engineers the appearance of a consensus,” writes Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was in the first Bush education department and a proponent of No Child Left Behind, but turned against it when she realized its purpose was to route public resources to private interests; she has been a powerful advocate for public schools ever since. As with K-12, “the foundation has bought the research, bought the evaluations, bought the advocacy groups, and bought the media to report on what the foundation is doing. It has lavished support on education journals, while also saturating them with ads and ‘sponsored’ articles.” As with K-12, this creates the sense of a hue and cry from many quarters, of widespread agreement that higher education is broken, resists change, resists innovation, needs technology, needs to produce more STEM workers.
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Fifty years ago, the humanities had a “national mandate,” writes Nathan Heller in a widely read New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major,” February 2023. The liberal arts had pride of place. Now the mandate has moved to STEM, with more than a little push from business interests keen to transform higher education to job preparation and right-wing anti-education agendas.
In 2013, Obama’s administration produced a “Scorecard,” an online tool to show “folks” where they can get “the most bang for the buck,” as he promised in his 2013 State of the Union address. The Scorecard has Gates’ fingerprints all over it. It ranks colleges according to number of graduates, speed to graduation, starting salaries, time taken to pay back student loans—which makes a college rise higher in the rankings for graduating a hedge fund manager than a teacher. And higher education has cooperated, inviting managerial administrators in to make education “more like business,” lean, mean, and cost effective. They’ve stripped away courses and programs with no “real world” value and cut back in areas they deem inessential— like teaching, which has been turned over to part-timers or online programs, while tenured faculty are let go, and with them, tenure. Administrators hire more administrators, offices and functionaries proliferate, and academia is saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy that drains resources. Then along comes a pandemic that cuts into college enrolments and devalues any enterprise without immediate utilitarian value—and here we are. The humanities are beyond crisis; they’re “on life support,” writes James Engell, Harvard Magazine, February.
And the STEM bandwagon rolls on, powered by Gates lobbying, onto the floor of Congress, where the Higher Education Act, the federal law governing crucial policies such as accreditation and standards that qualify colleges for financial aid, is overdue for reauthorization. In May 2019, the Gates foundation established a new lobbying group, “Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education,” to make sure Congress understands the “value” of postsecondary education, “value” defined in terms of graduates’ salaries and social mobility. Prior to this lobbying group, the foundation exerted its influence from behind the scenes, but launching a 501c (4) nonprofit enables them to “talk directly with legislators about laws,”explains Nick Tampio. In May 2021, the Commission published a 117-page report, Equitable Value: Promoting Economic Mobility and Social Justice through Postsecondary Education, which spells out elaborate systems of measurement and assessment to make sureschools render dollar for dollar return on investment. The foundation is now in a position to assure that federal funding gets routed to majors leading to jobs Gates sees as vital to the economy.
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In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt cautioned against remaking higher ed to meet alleged market needs because nobody could predict what jobs would look like in ten years. Now, with AI to do the work of many humans, we might ask what jobs will look like in ten months. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that “generative AI may expose 300 million jobs to automation,” work that “might be reduced or replaced by AI systems,” summarizes Benj Rfestfd in Ars Technica. An insider, “Scott,” comments on a NYT article, March 28, on likely effects of GPT (“generative pre-trained transformers” that produce human-like text and images):
As a software entrepreneur who is part of a think tank that studies AI, I can tell you that GPT is not overhyped… it impacts every job from manufacturing to knowledge work, and with some imagination even agriculture, food production and restaurants… People are focusing on a single job? You should start thinking of entire professions, industries and companies (thousands of which GPT will put out of business this year). Our politics are not ready for the disruption, deflation and unemployment.
“We have summoned an alien intelligence,” write Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin in the NYT in March. Our first contact with AI, they note, the relatively simple manipulation of attention by social media, was catastrophic: it “increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy.” What comes next is anybody’s guess, but a lot of people are worried, including more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers who signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of GPT, citing its “profound risks to society and humanity.”
“It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” says Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” who resigned from Google so he could speak freely; and it’s likely to be “much more intelligent than us in the future.” It has the capacity to flood the internet with fake images and misinformation so convincing that we may “not be able to know what is true anymore”—which is dire for democracy. There are calls for regulation, including from Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company that created GPT-4: “the current worries I have are of disinformation problems, economic shocks, or something else at a level far beyond anything we’re prepared for.”
Meanwhile the titans, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, are out of the gate, racing for the spoils.
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How to deal with an alien intelligence that’s faster and smarter than we are? Killing the humanities has left us a bit understaffed in this department. By eliminating subjects that might teach us about ourselves and our fellow beings, we’re exacerbating the problems confronting society. Misinformation and conspiracy fantasies flourish, racism and hate crimes are on the rise, along with mortality rates, not only from Covid but “deaths of despair.” Quality of life in the U.S. has plummeted.
Many people fear that the STEM craze may be turning out graduates ignorant of the past and their world, ill equipped for the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future. Spending one’s college years mastering the practical skills of a specialized field does not cultivate a broad understanding of the world. Minds need to be developed all around, if they are to “understand human behavior” and achieve “emotional intelligence and mental balance”— the capacities Yuval Harari says young people most need as they face dizzying change. They’ll need, above all, ”the ability to keep changing,” qualities of adaptability and versatility cultivated by the kind of education we’ve trashed.
“Major in being human,” David Brooks advises young people who are wondering where to turn with AI threatening to steal their futures. Ask yourself, “which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human?” Gravitate toward classes that will help you develop “distinctly human skills… that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone your imaginative powers.” That would be the humanities, small, discussion-based classes where students learn about the past and creations of their kind, about what humankind has been and might be; where they learn to articulate their positions and see that others have positions too, that they can disagree yet get along—which goes a way toward learning to live in society. Find the human, urges Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human, and find the others who can help us resist the anti-human agenda and “restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans.”
The stakes are high. A 2020 study, “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes,” found that in all the countries surveyed, higher education correlated with resistance to authoritarianism, but it made the greatest difference in the United States, on account of our unique system of general education based in the liberal arts. Yet this is the system we’re letting go. Authoritarianism thrives on misinformation, on simplistic, us-them thinking. Democracy requires that people deal with complexity, think, question, interpret, inquire, sort out information from misinformation, push back against agendas being pushed on us, take nothing on authority. It requires that people know how to read their world, interpret, evaluate, inquire, consider context and consequences, and know how to seek sources other than social or corporate media. Decoding has a longer shelf life than the coding Gates is pushing. It’s crucial to democracy –and to employability, it turns out, since skills alone become rapidly obsolete.
To disinvest in the humanities is to disinvest in the human, to give up on the hope of a livable world and more humane future. Which is why it’s urgent to resuscitate the humanities and not outsource our humanity to Hal.
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Gayle Greene is Professor Emerita, Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Her most recent book is Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), which makes a case for the humanities by actually showing what goes on in a small discussion class.
Gaylegreene.org
Related- Senate Bill 83 in Ohio, an attack on collective bargaining rights, in particular, college faculty rights-
We are Ohio asked today that citizens make a call the Ohio Speaker of the House, 614-466-1366, to register opposition to the bill and to the office of Rep. Gayle Manning, 614-466-1366.
I don’t listen to anything Bill Gates has to say and wonder why others do, esp. when he talks about Public School education. Gates has NO CLUE about Public Education, one of our treasures.
agreed
Science and technology are needed disciplines, but so are the arts and humanities. Colleges and universities that offer both serve the talents and interests of most students. We already have institutions that educate students in science and technology, and the study of the arts and humanities has its value and place as well. We as a nation will do better if we can produce young people with a variety of expertise. Not every solution in the future will depend on science and technology, although many will. We also need those that understand culture including foreign cultures, languages and the arts as these people are often divergent and creative thinkers.
Another factor in the decline of the humanities is that almost all humanities departments have become extremely politicized – all to one side of the political spectrum. This blog will deny that factor, but it has been written about extensively elsewhere. I personally know several recent college students from various colleges who are quite liberal but who told me they were turned off by the pressure to conform to prevailing orthodoxies in their humanities courses.
There is a point is this long essay that I never thought I would see included on this blog: “Administrators hire more administrators, offices and functionaries proliferate, and academia is saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy that drains resources.” Is Diane Ravitch willing to call out her ideological soulmates in academia for their self-serving ways that benefit themselves but not the students?
I greatly value the humanities; 800+ serious books in that area are what I’ve spent much of my leisure time reading over the last 40+ years. It’s a free country, and everyone can do likewise. Most people choose not to because they just aren’t interested. Whatever colleges do or don’t offer in humanities courses has little to no impact in how people choose to spend their free time. A very low percentage of college graduates will read even one serious book over the next twelve months.
Nate-
Does it count if they read many “serious” articles on the internet? Is it only “serious” if it’s in the humanities genre?
I’m also curious about the “self-serving” observation. Do you mean that, in the context of faculty and students who seek the promise of an America with equal opportunities? You know, the whole thing about the US as a meritocracy instead of a bastion of White, heterosexual men, some of whom use conservative religion as a means to continued entitlement for their demographic?
In terms of politicization, I see your point, if it’s an elite school and viewpoints that benefit the 90% are discussed, there well may be people in the 1% who see the slant as self-serving where as their GOP views are not (sarcasm).
The humanities are not particularly political except perhaps for some literature or play that is inspired by some political movement. In the study of social sciences there is a greater potential to make a political connection in the content in subjects like sociology, political science or economics. Even if some political material is presented in a course, the material is generally accepted as a springboard for discussion in most universities, not indoctrination.
This back and forth in the comments is a symptom of a general phenomenon: There is a shift in our culture GENERALLY toward the left as people become more educated and become denizens of world-wide social media. Look at the Pew studies of the political beliefs of the young people coming up. The Repugnicans have lost them utterly. It’s not just in Academia. It’s everywhere throughout the culture. The Repugnicans and DINOs want to hold onto their racism and sexism and classism and backward notions about sex and sexuality and immigration and religion and politics and everything else. And they are being left behind. So, they scream that what is happening is a liberal takeover of the universities or indoctrination and grooming by teachers in public schools.
No, you fools. It is a culture IN GENERAL that is far out ahead of you, that is leaving you and your backward notions behind. It’s not the 1950s anymore.
There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
RT,
Agree. Reading Shakespeare is not leftist. Nor is reading Byron, Keats, Shelley, or Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau.
Linda,
You are completely predictable. Every comment is the same monomanias: identity politics and anti-religious bigotry, although you of course never condemn Islamist patriarchy – that would be Islamophobic.
The explosion in DEI bureaucracies is hugely wasteful, as many liberal professors have often said in the NY Times and elsewhere; those resources could better serve students if used otherwise. It’s amazing that the most dogmatically left-wing environments in America – college campuses – are so overrun with all the -isms and -phobias that they need massive numbers of DEI staffers.
Does it count if they read many “serious” articles on the internet?
Of course this counts, but in order to be educated, one must, over a lifetime, read serious books. Lots and lots and lots of them. A lot of topics simply cannot be covered adequately in what passes for an essay on the Internet.
It’s one thing for some people to want to hang on to racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc. Too many on the right want to normalize their bias and codify it into laws. Consider what happened to Roe v. Wade.
Yeah, RT. Too bad that some of the really old foggies are on the Supreme Court!!!!
Mr. Shepherd,
Several insightful comments of yours on this blog have noted how immature teenagers and young adults are. You have cited your dismaying experiences teaching high school just before you retired: the lack of student self-control, often appalling behavior, the extreme emotional swings in their young brains, etc. You were recently appalled by the high percentage of young people who justify the recent terrorist attack in Israel by Hamas, per several opinion polls.
But you then claim that young people are a moral example to older folks because of their views on sexuality and the other issues you note in your comment. You say their views are not because of the indoctrination they receive in their schools and in the popular culture they consume. So these young people are all-in on the 57 varieties of sexuality, but they also are to a large degree pro-Hamas. The youth culture is far out ahead of their supposed (older) inferiors: the young people are very advanced thinkers who justify Hamas.
I know you detest Hamas. How do you explain morally superior (in your eyes) young people who justify Hamas terrorists?
I doubt quite seriously that if you took a poll of our country’s young people that anything approaching a majority would support Hamas. So, the premise of your question is false.
BTW, it is widely believed that young people in the U.S. in the 1960s opposed the Vietnam War. In fact, most didn’t. People 65 and older did. So, that those young people grew up to vote for Reagan is no surprise.
BTW, are you aware of the fact that sex outside of marriage, STDs, and pregnancies among teenagers in the United States are at historic lows?
Two separate phenomena are being conflated here.
First, there is a general shift in our culture toward the left. One sees this EVERYWHERE–in our media (popular music, film, television), in our popular culture (in fashion and design, for example), in schools, in academia, etc. On almost every issue–abortion, LGBTQX rights, Medicare for all, religious belief, etc.–Repugnicans are on one side and young people are on the other. The fastest growing religious group in the U.S. among young people is NONBELIEF.
Second, there is the fact that longitudinal fMRI and other studies have shown that the parts of the brain that do planning and control are just beginning to develop at the age of 16 and are not fully developed until about age 26. So, there’s that. Teens are volatile and impulsive.
They can be right about a lot of the issues (intellectual stances) and still be volatile and impulsive. There’s no contradiction there.
Oh, and btw, political scientists have shown that political persuasion tends to be stable over the lifespan. So, this is very bad news for Repugnicans. They better set up a lot of fundamentalist Christian nationalist Minivan Taliban madrassas quickly or they go they way of the Know-Nothings.
Nate,
Just idle curiosity- would you belong to a religious sect that told men they weren’t equal?
If the very small Muslim patriarchy in the US. (less than 3%) had the same legislative influence as the USCCB and Catholic conferences, I would comment more about them
If a Muslim majority on SCOTUS made decisions to advance Islam, I would comment on it.
If my prior response to you was hackneyed, was your comment that provoked it also in that category?
The comfort you found in the past came at the cost of the discomfort of more than half the population. You had a good run of unmerited entitlement, man up and break with Robert P George and Tucker Carlson by accepting that it’s over and all of the trappings used to legitimize it are under scrutiny.
Mr. Shepherd,
You responded to me as follows: “I doubt quite seriously that if you took a poll of our country’s young people that anything approaching a majority would support Hamas. So, the premise of your question is false.”
From a recent Harvard/Harris poll: “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or
is it not justified?” For ages 18-24, 51% say it was justified, 49% not justified, i.e. a small MAJORITY. The age group you want to be our moral arbiters has been so indoctrinated by the oppressed/oppressor narrative that about half of them rationalize the mass murder on October 7.
See p. 43 on this linked study.
Click to access HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf
Thank you for that information, Ms. Nasser. I am shocked and horrified.
Really shocking.
That’s utterly appalling, Ms. Nasser. Thank you. I stand corrected.
Susan,
That’s a very disturbing statistic. There are no circumstances that justify the savagery of October 7. Hamas knew exactly what would happen, they knew that the mass murders, rapes, and kidnappings would provoke a brutal response, and they got what they wanted. I long for new leadership in Israel that seeks peace and a two-state solution. Hamas opposes both.
Here’s a poll showing that about 45% of 18-29 year olds think the Nazi Holocaust is either a myth or is exaggerated.
https://x.com/elikowaz/status/1733265260101210507?s=46&t=vV_4bJ7GuABaalzetJofQA
Susan’s goal may be propaganda instead of information. It’s reported that the GOP has identified Gen Z as the most important enemy they have. We should expect the kind of polls that make Gen Z look bad. This is not a new tactic by the right wing. They used it against teachers, against public schools, etc.
This isn’t directly on point (it’s a graduate program, and it’s social work), but the fact that I was not surprised to read this is noteworthy.
Could you summarize? I do not have a subscription.
Here’s a gift link.
It’s basically a walk through the glossary of key terms given to students at orientation day:
Click to access DEI-Glossary-of-Terms-2022.pdf
Thanks, Flerp. It’s a pretty good list.
I read the article and I thought this was a good example of Paul’s insipid writing.
“White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.”
Um, nope. Presenting some rarely occurring scenario as cogent argument that “the sky is falling because of those horrible anti-white liberals” is typical for this insipid column by a mediocre thinker (a white woman rewarded with many opportunities who no doubt believes were given to her because she was vastly superior to every other possible candidate).
The New Yorker ran quite a good profile of her in January 2023 “The Rules According to Pamela Paul”
“An occupational hazard of critiquing consumer culture is overstating the power of marketing; in this respect, Paul’s rapt attention to external expectations leaves her particularly vulnerable. “In our consumer society, it’s almost as if we think that by spending money on our weddings, we’ll be able to buy ourselves happy marriages,” she writes in “The Starter Marriage,” a book that attempts to extrapolate a broader trend from her own experience of early marriage and swift divorce.”
Extrapolating some trend that is supposed to signal others to feel concern or outrage seems to be Paul’s version of critical thinking.
“If people on the fringe are accusing me of ‘making straw-man arguments’ or ‘both-siderism’ or ‘false equivalency’ or ‘just asking questions’ or ‘concern-trolling’—and please put scare-quotes around those things—then I know that I’ve done something right, because it means I’ve written something smart and complicated.”
Yes, a sign of a brilliant mind is to be certain that all criticism is “fringe” and that all criticism means that you have written something very smart.
Contrast this insipid Pamela Paul with Diane Ravitch. A wise woman who actually isn’t arrogant and smug and so certain of her own perfection that she has no need to ever consider criticism.
It’s a shame because Paul is capable of raising some real points, which would be interesting to read if she stopped framing everything to present herself as some admirable contrarian who just happens to be legitimizing right wing tropes.
I understand that right wing support for Israel is like right wing support for “free speech” — not worth the paper it is written on and something that will be easily sacrificed once it served their purpose.
It’s a shame when Pamela Paul and so many other self-described “liberals” at the NYT delude themselves into believing their “both sides” presentation of reality is them not being useful idiots for those who want to end democracy.
None of that made sense to me except that you don’t like Pamela Paul.
The definition of “capitalism” in the glossary —
“a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit” — is by itself so hilariously stupid and ideologically packed that whether a reader recoils upon seeing it tells me almost everything I need to know about that person.
The only thing dumber than the glossary is the fact that students probably pay something like $60,000 per year to that school. And a large percentage then probably complain that they don’t make enough money as a social worker to pay their rent and repay their student loans.
None of that made any sense to me except you have great respect and admiration for Pamela Paul and great contempt for schools of Social Work.
I must have missed Pamela’s Paul brilliant analysis demonstrating that Social Work schools have made ideology more important than the needs of clients. I do see from their reply that FLERP! found Pamela Paul’s argument incredibly convincing, perhaps because she so brilliantly showed the danger in that glossary of terms and she included that quote by the incredibly knowledgeable scholar who explained how “White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.” Yes, I certainly accept without question that is an enormous issue putting us all in danger as all of us psychologically struggling white folks desperately looking for therapeutic help are simply told that we should stop “subjugating others” and all will be well. That really happens, I know because I read it in the NYT!
I am not sure if Bob Shepherd recognized the extreme danger to all of us reflected in that glossary.
And anyone who has ever gone through the textbooks we all had to read in high school and college 30 years ago with a fine tooth comb can find some ridiculous and laughable line. It’s a shame that only privileged people with columns at the NYT can cite a line or a textbook or a definition in a glossary and claim that it is the cause of all the ills in this country.
Although given that Trump is most popular with white folks who are 50-64, perhaps it really was those terrible textbooks from the 1960s – 1980s that are the cause of this country’s problems, and the only reason we haven’t already descended into Nazi Germany fascism is that those “dangerous” textbooks were replaced by more woke ones and the young folks recognize a lying con man when they see one.
Seems like my evidence is just as strong as Pamela Paul’s.
It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t find that glossary ridiculous. We disagree, as usual.
FLERP!,
Some of the definitions are worthy of criticism, but the vast majority of those 100+ terms seem perfectly fine.
Which was my point– that at first glance that list seems fine, but if you go through it with a fine tooth comb you can find something to criticize. Which pretty much describes every textbook I used in high school and college.
The only difference is that the snowflakes of today try to garner outrage and project danger whenever their combing through every sentence finds something to criticize. While we non-snowflakes who were exposed to 100x as many problematic sentences when we were being educated didn’t realize we were supposed to profess to have been irreparably harmed by random self-important or ridiculous sentences or phrases in our textbooks.
We certainly do disagree. When I see some right wing provocateur posting some random slide from some random DEI presentation, or an edited videoclip of some hapless, well-intentioned educator, I know that provocateur is just trying to foment outrage and division. While you re-post those links here to help amplify the outrage.
But who I am to criticize you? If you believe that there is now a real danger because “White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.”, then you should definitely keep sounding the alarm. I am sorry if the therapists you or people close to you have encountered have tried to convince you that your distress comes from your subjugation of others. I certainly would not blame you (or anyone) for leaving such a therapist stat. I just question this as a real danger. So many real dangers as our country descends to neo-fascism, but instead the right wing gets the NYT to amplify fake ones.
By the way, I particularly liked this definition in that Columbia School of Social Work glossary:
“Tone-policing – A silencing and derailing tactic used by focusing on the delivery rather than the truth of the narrative.”
In my humble opinion, a very important concept and I am glad it was included in the glossary.
I strongly recommend a far better NYT opinion writer – Michelle Goldberg – over Pamela Paul.
Michelle Goldberg: “As an opinion columnist, I don’t claim to be objective: My politics inform most of what I write. But I do strive, always, to be accurate and fair. In addition to getting my facts right — or running a correction if I don’t — that means never quoting people out of context, or omitting important information that might cut against an argument that I’m making.”
versus
Pamela Paul: “I always write what I believe to be accurate and true, even if it means presenting facts and opinions that challenge readers rather than reaffirm their preconceptions or preferences. I strive to write about complicated issues with clarity, nuance and sensitivity.”
Striving for accuracy, versus striving for “what I believe to be accurate”. Interested in providing the full story even if it cuts against the argument, versus presenting a straw man in which all criticism is simply coming from people who demand that their preconceptions and preferences be reaffirmed. Accuracy has nothing to do with how strongly one truly believes they are being accurate. It is about a search for truth. And most people with real intelligence (which is more than having an elite college degree) don’t simply decide in advance that all critics are simply upset that their “preferences” aren’t being reaffirmed. Arrogant people do this, and unfortunately, too many NYT reporters are certain that “what they believe” to be accurate is in fact, the entire story, and their critics are just upset at them for not reaffirming their preferences.
Pamela Paul wrote a similar piece of dreck about hiring efforts at universities like Berkeley which similarly misinformed readers but which I have no doubt she “believed” was giving NYT readers an absolutely accurate picture of a very concerning and dangerous issue that must be addressed for the good of this country.
I don’t always agree with Michelle Goldberg, but I respect her desire to inform instead of rile up.
Goldberg’s piece today about how the college presidents got caught in a trap during the antisemitism hearings was spot on. And she actually gave a full, accurate picture of the entire hearing, instead of lazily reporting the questionable narrative that she “believed” was accurate as many of the other NYT writers did. “At a Hearing on Israel, University Presidents Walked Into a Trap
Dec. 7, 2023”
Nate,
Unlike you, I don’t know what “almost all humanities departments” are teaching. I do know that Charles Koch has created “institutes” to spread his far-right views at more than 300 colleges and universities. My own liberal arts college (Wellesley) received $1 million to host such an institute; students heard lectures on the virtues of fossil fuels, for example. The College changed the leadership to make the lecture non-biased.
My hope is that liberal arts colleges help students to demand evidence, not opinion. To the extent that Americans learn more about history, literature, languages, the social sciences, and how to weigh competing claims, that’s a very good thing.
Ms. Ravitch,
You know full well that almost all colleges are very left-wing. You also know that even many liberal (usually older) professors are dismayed by the intolerant strain that has taken hold of most of academia. You can’t be in that tightly sealed of a bubble to believe otherwise.
I repeat that I am all for the liberal arts. Few people have that interest, including the vast majority of college graduates. The most truly well-educated people are the voracious independent readers, whatever their political opinions are.
No, I don’t know that “almost all colleges are very left-wing.” Yes, I have seen articles by individual professors saying that it’s so, but I prefer evidence.
If you mean that colleges teach students not to be prejudiced against others, I think that’s a good idea. Wouldn’t it be awful if they didn’t?
I think Nate’s point is that college faculty don’t usually vote for a MTG, a Boebart, a Santos, a Tuberville, Gosar, etc.
College faculty are better educated and their voting reflects that, whether they are in red states or blue states. Generalizations about level/quality of education and intelligence dispersion in the Northeast population as contrasted with the Southeast is also reflected in the blue state voting vs. the red state voting.
Studies showed that people who listen to Fox are less well informed than if they listened to no news. Fox appeals to Republican voters. I surmise that few faculty would seek out Fox for information.
Don’t think college faculty are monolithic in their views. They are however better educated than the average GOP VOTER.
Aren’t these cuts being made in response to dwindling enrollment?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/19/college-majors-computer-science-humanities/
same
Gift link:
https://wapo.st/3GTTuWF
“ The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000.”
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing those numbers, Flerp. I wonder to what extent the fall-off amount History and English majors is due to people not wanting to become teachers in the age of the Gates/Coleman Test and Punish Regime and the Minivan Taliban. A lot of people took those majors because they were going to become teachers. Who wants to go into a profession where he or she will be micromanaged by morons, paid little, and disrespected? I wouldn’t do it now. No way. And if I did, they would probably fire me a couple months later for speaking truth about history.
As the essay points out, the tech companies are laying off people with those skills.
I have no beef with job skills, but I have always believed that as citizens we need a good knowledge of history, literature, science and the social sciences. We vote to choose our leaders and we need a good education to assess their claims.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/tech-firms-wall-street-lead-job-cuts-corporate-america-2023-12-04/
I agree in principle, Diane (I’m a humanities guy myself), but at some point universities must react to enrollment trends. If the demand for certain courses isn’t there, you can’t keep acting like everything is the same.
FLERP,
Colleges set their requirements. History, literature, the arts, and science used to be part of “distribution requirements.” No one asked incoming freshmen whether they wanted to take courses in history. It was a universal expectation. The decline in the humanities may be related to the election of so many stupid people to run states and the nation.
I remember when the demand for physics classes in some liberal arts colleges was very small (and it likely still is).
Colleges didn’t stop offering physics. But the students who enrolled in the higher level physics classes found that they had very small classes.
I guess I missed all the calls to eliminate physics departments because of lack of demand.
We keep coming back to this, hopefully after a decade it is not behind a NY Times fire wall.
” And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued”
“And the modern counterparts of those wool workers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills?
Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt). ”
The most widely taught definition of Politics, taught in intro Poly Sci and Econ courses was written by Harold Laswell in 1936.
“Politics who determines who gets what, when and how”
Productivity gains in the industrial revolution did not raise the standard of living of workers. Political change that forced the the fruits of that productivity to be shared with the working class in Europe and America created what we like to call the Middle Class (for some reason everyone thinks they are part of it ).
Narrowing education down to skills based certificates ensures that the working classes never obtain the skills that force political change.
“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.”
(Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, August 13, 1786)
The pursuit of Happiness as defined by Locke and later Jefferson is the pursuit of wealth. So to take a little liberty on Jefferson, education ( History and the Humanities ) is the means to ensure freedom and to diffuse wealth(solve inequality) among the people.
There are no free markets. How markets operate and who they deliver most for is always a political decision. In the greatest Libertarian dream where Government regulates nothing but provides a Police force for the protection of property. That too is a decision. They never leave out the Police part.
The micromanagement was always bad, but now it has moved to the level of horrific theatre of the absurd.
Might want to read this artic
Let me put on my mukluks and snow glasses and I’ll get started.
Maybe the guys in the white suits showed up as Mad Mikey was preparing his latest expectorations.
Replying to Bob Shepherd some comments back: Have you ever read The Analysis of Social Change: Based on Observations in Central Africa by Godfrey and Monica Wilson. I think this is the book that was recommended to me when I was an anthropology graduate student several lifetimes ago (actually in the late ’60’s). As I recall, it explains that different segments of a complex society advance or regress at different rates. BTW Gayle Greene’s Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm is a must read.
In the last generation, a whole host of English majors became the first to write code. I personally know 4 different people who essentially taught themselves Fortran and C+.
I learned Fortran in college classes, not on my own, but I am one of those English majors who learned how to code.
Bill Gates is the evil master of wage suppression. He is greed gone wild, simple as that. Anyone in government who can get him removed from power is a superhero saving the world.
Yeah, at one of the conferences he is constantly being invited to speak at, he recently said that chatbots are going to take the pressure off labor shortages.
In other words, they are going to displace workers and make fat cats like Gates even fatter.
Meanwhile, the Attorney General of Texas is willing to let a woman die rather than have an abortion of a severely malformed fetus that is putting her life in danger, and the idiot Repugnican legislators of Missouri are considering two bills that would designate abortion as murder.
These are not sane people. And don’t forget that the pathetic one-time lothario Trump was the guy who put the troglodytes on the Extreme Court who overturned women’s right to autonomy over their own bodies and reproductive abilities.
Another proof of my thesis that we are witnessing a shift to the left OF THE CULTURE IN GENERAL is the fact that conservatives are complaining vociferously about the fact that several of the AI chatbots routinely express what they consider to be “left-wing” (as opposed to simply informed and moral) views. These bots scrape enormous bodies of text throughout the cultural landscape. The views they express reflect writing in the culture at large.
Conservatives want to blame this on indoctrination by K-12 teachers and Humanities professors. ROFLMAO.
Clueless about what is actually happening, that these folks they are blaming are mirrors of the culture, not its creators.
Hello Diane: Last night, I read through everything here (article and comments) and want to thank you (kiss your hand, actually) for posting this article because I probably would have missed it; and it gave me quite a lift . . .
BTW, if anyone wants a good accessible dose of pro-humanities talk, David Brooks is your man and is all over YouTube with several lectures and talks. In one of his talks, like you Diane, he reflects on the massive changes of heart view . . . insightful turnarounds . . . that he has undergone over his lifetime. He attributes the turnaround and broadening of thought to his reading habits.
On Bill Gates: We should all ship or e-mail copies of the article to Gates; and someone should sneak into his house and glue it to his refrigerator door. Like Musk, Kissinger before him, and like a true Nazi, however, I doubt it’s in Gates’ DNA to self-reflect and question one’s ideologies; or if he did, to give a hoot about the damage he has done. It would be comedic if it weren’t so horrible . . . how arrogance and ignorance about human things, wedded to unelected political power, has risen from an “education” that is a singular combination of hyper-tech, predatory capitalism, and egregious amateurism (he is not a professional educator) . . . and all grounded in an idea of freedom that is confused with license. I’m sorry that Obama was too busy to take on education. Had he done so, I doubt he would have so easily given it over to those who represent the best of how democracy goes into failure mode.
About the Hamas/Israel thing, most that I have heard and read about it, and especially coming from either/or explanations and arguments, and speaking of studying history, I doubt most understand at all the great differences between tribal and civil consciousness and the different kinds of conflicts that flow from either. Understood from having made that distinction, everything changes. CBK
CBK,
Read Sunday, first post.
Great read indeed. Is there a link to Greene’s article? Or did I miss it?
Gordon Gee is The Problem at WVU.
“ Gordon Gee is a legend. That academia generated its own Gordon Gekko—a prince of leverage, a duke of reorganization—is no surprise.
The thing is that Gee is infamous. Not only has he long been a college president, he’s long been among the highest-paid presidents in the profession. In 2014, Slate reported his earnings of more than $6 million at the Ohio State University—an outlier year, but in 2003 he was already clocking more than $800,000 annually at Vanderbilt. Cruelly, 2003 is long enough ago that adjusting that number for inflation: it would be more than $1.3 million today. He earns about $800,000 a year in base salary at West Virginia now, although other sources peg his total compensation at more than $1.6 million.
And that’s just salary. Gee costs his institutions MORE in other expenses. OSU had to renovate the president’s residence to the tune of $2 million in 2007. A shade under $3 million today! His post-presidential office at OSU cost at least $50,000 in renovations. And those look like bargains compared to his $6 million.
Gordon Gee will move on from his career. WVU may recover, sometime. The faculty who will be laid off will, largely, have to leave academia or take severe financial penalties.”
https://musgrave.substack.com/p/gee-whiz