During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. What’s going on?
And the humanities’ desperate efforts to compete, Hana added, merely ceded the terms. “I remember being excited about taking a Folklore & Mythology class,” she said. “But the people in the department were marketing it, saying, ‘Oh, well, you know, consulting is just ‘telling a story’—and we have people who study Folk & Myth going into . . . consulting!”
And the techie-fuzzy collaborations have good models. One afternoon, I visited the chair of Harvard’s comparative-literature department, Jeffrey Schnapp, who is involved in Kelsey’s disaggregation. Schnapp, a shaved-headed man with a trim gray Vandyke and two small rings in his left ear, sat me at a round table in an office filled with industrial-design artifacts. “I always thought that the models of the humanities that we inherited were open for expansion and innovation,” he said.
To fund metaLAB, Schnapp has had to be strategic about adapting projects to what he called “research incentives”—though the techie cast of his work helped. “There’s no commensurability of scale between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said. They weren’t even close. “A friend of mine likes to point out that the total budget of the N.E.H. is the same budget as just the Vienna State Opera.
A side effect of A.S.U.’s remote-learning boom has been improvement in its humanities numbers. On paper, the number of English majors at A.S.U. has grown, even as the number of students in English classrooms has dropped. Several professors insisted to me that they really, truly felt no preference for online or on-site students—but that they did notice a difference in the demographics of who showed up onscreen.
Surprisingly, many in the future biz concur. A funny thing about the market mentality, they note, is that it knows only what’s judged to have future value right now. Career studies have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.
And yet the blissful English students whom I talked to—there were many—surprised me with their indifference to the things that grownups higher in the food chain said they wanted. Ashley Kim, a junior, had been an intended economics major with a falling-asleep-in-class problem. When she kept emerging happy and alert from Tara Menon’s 9City Fictions course, she switched to English. “It isn’t just people trying to learn something to get a job,” she explained.
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