OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

It might be that such laments are offered more as rage-bait than as substantive suggestions.

Critics of higher education used to joke about students studying underwater basket-weaving. While we found no evidence of such a major, we did find that students could functionally build an entire course of study based on Taylor Swift.

Harvard offers an English course, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, students can take “Artistry, Policy, and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version” through the Department of Economics. Penn State Berks offers a course titled, “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication.”

Or such essays are elements of that ongoing yahooism incidental to bringing those rebellious academics to heel.  "The assault on the humanities is part of the larger effort to make America more and more hospitable to corporations and their allies."  That's the subtext in some December 2024 reporting from Madison's Badger Herald on the state of assorted humanities disciplines.

Professor Kate Vieira, of the UW School of Education, shared her perspective on the relationship between literacy and interest in the humanities. According to Vieira, language departments have faced demands to increase class sizes or even complete shutdowns.

Vieira said many of the challenges posed to the humanities can be linked to their ability to challenge existing conditions of society.

“I think a lot of the pressure that the humanities are facing is not because of anything wrong with the humanities, but because it threatens the status quo,” Vieira said.

Vieira further shared that increased control over education in schools can narrow approaches to inherently flexible subjects like reading and writing. Those who receive a more open education in literacy and the humanities can perform more effectively regardless of occupation, Vieira said.

Vieira, whose research concerns practical applications of writing, said language can support hatred but also peace and justice. Writing can also help people process their own experiences, especially when taught to children, according to Vieira.

Vieira said poetry written by children who had access to humanist education is often used to encourage peace in nations such as Colombia.

That there might be a lot of the status quo that is pretty good and there is a lot of introspection that led to it never occurs to such people, does it?  That the ancient verities still have merit finally present toward the end of the article.

[Historian Neil] Kodesh said while studying the humanities may appear like a privilege at first due to the lack of focus on career outcomes, courses across humanities fields universally apply to the workforce.

Anyone can study History and English, but studying these subjects in a college setting is a unique experience, according to Kodesh.

“[The humanities] help you think more critically about who you are and what you’re doing in the world,” Kodesh said.

Similarly, [religious studies' Susan] Ridgely said the benefits of humanities classes — such as stronger reading and writing abilities — are essential regardless of one’s occupation. The humanities also encourage creativity, which is heavily desired in most industries, Ridgely said.

I'll be charitable and grant "critical thinking" to mean the ability to distinguish rot from substance, to ask the right questions, to consider the ultimate as well as the immediate effects of some action.  If "critical thinking" is cover for woke-fault finding, they'll reap what they sow.  "[F]our decades of denying coherent beliefs and turning out the next generation of baristas will have that effect."

At a time in which employers constantly complain that new college graduates can’t write properly, don’t take their work seriously and are incapable of taking criticism, it is far from curmudgeonly to say that the course catalog might be part of the problem. A student who can tell you all about Swift’s entrepreneurship but cannot write a five-paragraph essay is not educated, but entertained.

Most fundamentally, these courses reflect how the university has lost sight of its purpose. Why attend college in the first place? Universities were once places where students and faculty alike pursued higher aims — truth, beauty, ethics and even the divine. What are they now? Too often, they resemble four-year summer camps, designed to make students comfortable with a participation diploma at the end.

Students — and society — deserve better.

Precisely.