Let’s be clear. I am NOT saying that there is no value in studying the humanities. I have spent my life pursuing concentrated studies in history, literature, language, music, and art; I obviously consider the studia humanitatis a fundamental part of the ‘examined life.’ But then let’s also admit that a college degree does not confer upon a person the status of ‘educated.’ Unfortunately, what most American universities offer today in the liberal arts in terms of degree-granting programs are anything but serious investigations into Truth, Beauty, or that which makes us human. We might also ask why, if university ‘educators’ are actually doing their job, more than one-third of all college graduates can not find employment in jobs that demand a college education? And according to those official agencies that track such things: Humanities majors dominate this category; performing arts, English literature, history, and philosophy all combine low earnings with high underemployment. (I am not the only one who has seen the decline in quality of liberal arts degrees. See Forbes and Wall Street Journal/ and there are many more articles that could be listed.)

The modern university campus has a serious problem with intellectual diversity, viz. they don’t have any. The ideas of free inquiry and free speech have effectively been shut down. To my knowledge only TWO major universities (the U of Chicago and Ohio State) have come out in the past couple of years and announced their commitment to intellectual freedom and diversity.

What is Liberal Education? It has become an indoctrination in aggressive Identity Politics, a schooling, that is, in the practice of indictment, assault, exclusion, and contempt, all of which contradicts the statement of the Universal Humanity upon which all its educational “ideology” rests… These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete — actually to contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition…. Of course the Liberal Arts student will look for certainty, and he will find it in the herd. Being equipped with neither experience nor philosophy, he will adopt the cant of those around him; and his elders, far from correcting him, endorse him, and, indeed, charge him for the experience, and call it ‘college tuition.’ But it is Socialist Camp, and creative not of productive citizens, but of intolerant, uneducated, and incurious graduates, who now, at the age of 22, must either look for work bagging groceries, or defer the trauma by further ‘study’.

What family or graduate is going to benefit from a degree in film or gender studies or, indeed, English literature ? What are these people going to do, save spread the gospel of the use of their particular discipline in the hope of obtaining a place in the continuation of the farce?

David Mamet

When I say ‘get a real education’ I mean educate yourself for what is coming, for useful engagement in a society that will rely more and more on robotics and artificial intelligence. Your university years should both expand your knowledge of self and the world AND help you prepare for your professional future. The future will not, in my opinion, look kindly upon the type of ‘history’ that is currently bandied about the academy. Just like the Soviet ‘scholars’ of 1920-90, theory-driven clap-trap of the contemporary university will end up on the garbage heap of history.

“To their shame, American universities have abandoned the task of cultivating a sense of common purpose, with ruinous consequences.” READ MORE HERE

If we don’t collectively make the decisions now about AI, the government will make them for you.

A Response to a Former Student Interested in Pursuing History:

Firstly, I am not rejecting the study of history itself. My indictment is against the universities for allowing a serious academic discipline to degenerate into something akin to an after-school hobby or some kind of political activism club. Since the Renaissance, the studia humanitatis has included a rigorous course in the study of history, and I am of the mind that no person may call themselves educated without a grounding in historical knowledge – but REAL historical knowledge, not the theory-driven drivel that all-to-often passes for ‘history’ in contemporary university courses. 

I have concluded that we are in a similar situation that the first humanists found themselves in during the 14th and 15th centuries; viz. that the institutional centers of ‘education’ have not only abandoned truth for doctrine, but actually have become inimical to truth-seeking itself. Like the Humanists of the 16th century, I believe that we need to look to, support, and establish alternative institutions in the face of such entrenched and wrong-headed programs of indoctrination. I agree whole-heartedly with Peter Gay who writes of the Enlightenment: “The man who practiced humanitas was confident of his worth, courteous to others, decent in his social conduct, and active in his political role as citizen. He was a man, moreover, who faced life with courageous skepticism: he knows that the consolations of popular religion are for more credulous beings than himself, that life is uncertain, and that sturdy pessimism is superior to self-deceptive optimism.” (‘Social justice’ and post-modernism classify as “Popular religion” in today’s materialist culture) Can we honestly say that university history programs are offering the rigorous pursuit of humanism?

My thinking on this topic has percolated for some time. But events of the recent past have convinced me that our society is now reaping what it has sown for the past 40 or so years by failed public education and defunct university programs (I hesitate to consider most of them even pragmatic at all!), viz. the abandonment of the humanities has lead to an ill-informed, mutton-headed mass of college graduates (in the humanities, that is), who have lost sight of core goals (become a functional citizen) and methods (rigorous empiricism) of the humanities. 

This year (2017), the 500th anniversary of an educational revolution initiated by Martin Luther, I decided to become vocal due to the overwhelming evidence that the emperor has no clothes.  Here I stand! I can do no other. God help me!
Some more points that come to mind: – PARTISAN POLITICS. The study of the past should encourage active participation in the present, civic engagement, but should not be distorted in the interests of partisan activism. Any serious-minded student of fascist Germany or communist USSR will confront ‘histories’ that were produced for the political and ideological battlegrounds of the 20th century. These regimes destroyed the freedom of historical inquiry.

LACK OF SERIOUS PROFESSIONAL SCHOLARS ARE TEACHING UNIVERSITY COURSES. I think it is common knowledge that the humanities in today’s universities have, for the most part, been high-jacked by a politicized professoriate. Reading serious authors with a critical eye is out. Empiricism and scholarly debate is no longer in fashion. To make matters worse, 60% of all undergraduate instruction is NOT conducted by a tenured professor (not that a Ph.D. in _____-studies stands for much anymore) . Adjunct professors and graduate students (who receive little money for the work they do and no benefits) tend, on the whole, to be the most  jaded, embittered, angry, and politicized groups at the university. Most would rather take you to an anti-capitalist rally than discuss a Great Book.) In the end, they neither develop institutional loyalty nor receive much direction or oversight. You are paying for top-notch educational opportunities, but instead of engaging with full-professors who know their field and carry a certain gravitas, you get the radical feminist gender-studies ‘expert’ who wants to school you on your ‘privilege’.

LACK OF RIGOR/NO SYSTEMATIC PROGRAM OF STUDY. YES, of course there are still good historians in our universities. What has been lost, however, is any systematic discipline directing the study of history. Most degree programs now simply ask a student to pick-n-pass enough courses from a smorgasbord of, mostly, peripheral topics and themes. (The see the address by Naill Ferguson.) Also, the rigor has been drained of most programs (some of which are no longer even history departments, but rather ‘cultural studies’ – another post-modern and Marxist-inspired joke on the university system), which not only have become politicized, but have become safe harbor for many ‘students’ who can’t make it in other fields. I was, for example, shocked that even among Ivy League schools, many departments no longer even demand that a student write a major research thesis before conferring a degree. This move to mediocrity has reached a ‘tipping-point’ – serious-minded students who want rigor are moving instead into fields that provide it. The chaff is what remains. In history, serious scholarship has given way to ‘critical theory’ and cultural tribalism.

LACK OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM OR INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY. Given the climate in most American departments, true freedom of inquiry (at least among teaching faculty) has been eroded by economic pressures of the modern university and an increasingly shrill, anti-intellectual, political correctness that has destroyed any sense of proportion or judgment in discerning valued scholarship from trite observation, mediocre writing, poor apprehension of sources (or even facts), and consciously-constructed untruths about the past.
In the late 1970s the historian Fritz Stern gave a lecture on ‘Einstein’s Germany’ wherein he stated the following: “Greatness in any guise is not in vogue today, not in my discipline and not in our culture. We are uncomfortable even with the rhetoric of greatness, devalued as it so often has been. I would simply say that I find it inspiriting to look upon great peaks, as from an alpine village, and contemplate the distant mountains — cold, awesome, unattained, and unattainable, mysterious.” Stern, who died last year, witnessed, from the inside (at Columbia University), the complete transformation of the American university system. He emerged from an era of great scholarship, one of titan historians who did more than dabble in faddish corners or partake in meaningless debates over jargon, and he witnessed the surrendering of the discipline (of academic discipline itself!) to a generation (mine) of spoiled, whining, self-promoting, victim-lovers who not only chucked-out the values of Western Liberalism (the 19th-cen. use of that term), but dug a grave for empiricism itself. (I think we are seeing this today in the so-called debates surrounding the presidency; truth itself is not only a victim, but has ceased to be even a goal for most journalists, politicians, AND professors.)
so…
For what it’s worth: given the state of academics today, I would seriously advise AGAINST pursuing a degree in the humanities.  Study the humanities, yes. To be sure, they are crucial for apprehending the ‘Good Life’. Even take a class that interests you, of course. But the American university has ceased to be the place for acquiring a serious and systematic degree worth its salt (at least in history). You  have access to the tools to learn German or study history on your own. Read the Great Books, perfect one or two foreign languages, find the best conversations online, but get an engineering or science degree. Don’t waste your parents’ money.