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
Diane Ravitch's blog 