The decisions we make now will be especially important and will have continuing ramifications for what American universities look like for years to come. But the drop in majors since 2008 has been so intense that I now think there is, in the only meaningful sense of the word, a crisis. One thing I learned earning a history degree is that people usually announce a “crisis” so they can trot out solutions they came up with years earlier. Declines have hit almost every field in the humanities (with one interesting exception) and related social sciences, they have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom. Student majors have dropped, rapidly, at a variety of types of institutions. Almost every humanities field has seen a rapid drop in majors: History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak, while the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s. But since then, I’ve been watching the numbers from the Department of Education, and every year, things look worse. Five years ago, I argued that the humanities were still near long-term norms in their number of majors. Because of this long history, I’ve always been skeptical of claims that the humanities are in retreat.Īctually, the humanities aren’t in crisis.īut something different has been happening with the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2010, Wayne Bivens-Tatum provided a useful walk through the first 50 years of the humanities crisis, until about 1980. While coverage of individual academic disciplines like musicology, history, or comparative literature often deals with the substance of scholarship, talk of the humanities in general always seems to focus on their imminent extinction. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship in 1987 humanities degrees quickly rose. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities.
P eople have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. About the author: Benjamin Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and a core-faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.
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