"Art, literature, philosophy, history, and so on—we cannot abandon them." (Graphic via Canva)
Life in our economy is hard. Everything’s expensive, and important systems like healthcare and higher education continue to rise in price while average income stagnates. So it makes sense to want a degree that guarantees a job straight out of college.
As a journalism major, I get it. My field’s job prospects only ever seem to get worse and worse. But as someone interested in art and philosophy, it can be brutal watching as humanities departments across America die. In some cases, they lose funding. In others, they’re shut down completely.
In May, the Trump administration cut staff by 65% alongside thousands of grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nationally, student enrollment and academic employment continue to plummet. At the same time, STEM programs have done nothing except expand, mirroring both a changing workforce and a shifting social climate.
Here at Rowan University, while resources are more focused on enhancing STEM and vocational programs, rising operating costs and reduced state funding without increases in tuition mean humanities departments may be stuck with financial constraints.
Although no layoffs or significant cuts have happened, the humanities departments recently underwent a merger, creating the Ric Edelman College of Communication, Humanities & Social Sciences. This can be seen as a bad omen, as many universities merge departments and divisions due to financial difficulties.
The causes are diverse, but the most immediately intuitive change is the economy. Humanists often lack a direct, comfortable path from graduation. What’s an English or philosophy major going to do when they graduate if they can’t find a job in writing or academia? With no money and a mountain of debt, a degree like that doesn’t seem useful at all.
But STEM fields offer myriad career opportunities straight away. Most STEM jobs pay well, and job prospects are solid. And in an increasingly profit-oriented world, private universities are incentivized to move more and more towards job prep—not education for its own sake.
This echoes a much deeper problem. Martha C. Nussbaum wrote in her 2010 book “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” “Without the humanities, democracy itself is in peril. The imagination, sympathy, and critical thought they cultivate are essential for citizens who must see beyond their own local interests.”
In every sense of the word, she’s right.
While STEM builds bridges and helps robots to walk, the humanities underpin human culture, thought, and society. Art, literature, philosophy, history, and so on—we cannot abandon them.
These aren’t subjects we learn through experience. We can’t learn about historical materialism or Picasso or the ancient world just by walking down the street without humanists to educate us. More importantly, the humanities are the foundation for logic, critical thinking, and reasoning. Those are skills necessary for everyday life and one’s career, no matter the field.
STEM fields have advanced humanity tremendously. But they lose any value if they’re applied without knowledge of history, an ethical backbone, or artistic beauty. In other words, if they lose their soul.
With the increasing power of the market over everyday life, we risk replacing the humanistic world we had with a cold, corporate monochrome.
Because of this, universities don’t play the same role they used to. The impetus of higher education was to learn and to be educated, which are the goals of a liberal arts degree. Now, they’ve become—as are many things in modern America—privatized, unaffordable tickets to one’s chosen career.
However, not everyone pulled the plug. Some colleges opt to fuse technical and business programs with elements of the humanities. Others continue to offer a humanistic education in its fullest form. Major universities like Harvard University, Yale University, and Cambridge University, alongside public universities, such as the University of Arizona and the University of Washington, maintain reliable humanities programs, indicating cuts aren’t happening everywhere.
With the rise of adjunct faculty, jobs in academia, once filled by humanist professors and intellectuals, no longer pay the bills. However, the problem isn’t STEM, nor is it staffing or individual universities. It’s the economy, and the problems the humanities now face flow from this one source. Universities and students are making what they feel is the rational choice in neglecting the humanities.
Effective solutions don’t just treat symptoms; they treat causes, entailing something outside the market. In this case, government funding and regulation.
Leaving it up to universities to decide whether the humanistic world is worth it hasn’t worked. To fix this issue, we need far more federal and state funding for humanities programs paired with a return to full-time faculty, which means political reform that values more than just profit and economic utility.
Ideally, better funding could spell a return to full-time work, as universities wouldn’t have to rely on adjunct faculty to scrape by, though for now, there aren’t many regulations to stop a university from using said funding for other purposes. This means labor regulation may also help.
If we don’t reform anything, the humanities may not stick around for long, at least in the same form they’ve been in for centuries. While change can be a positive thing, in this case, I’m not too sure it is.
This deeply political battle for the future of education is an issue worthy of more attention than it gets. But regardless of what happens, good or bad, higher education will change by leaps and bounds. What matters is fighting for and hoping that this change is good.
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