Bringing the Humanities Home (via the Eighteenth Century) Linda Zionkowski (bio) During the past decade, scholars in the humanities have faced wave after wave of discouraging news. Some of this misfortune we share with all departments at our universities: institutions of higher learning across the country are struggling to meet enrollment targets, with many of them competing to attract the same declining demographic of high school students. The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization focused on inequality in education, predicts that starting in 2017 colleges should expect a gradual two-decade drop in the high school graduating cohort, eventually culminating in graduation totals that by 2027–2032 may be down 150,000 to 220,000 students from the national count in 2013.1 Empty seats, of course, create empty pockets: smaller freshman classes frequently result in substantial budget cuts, with universities, colleges, and departments scrambling to meet their operating expenses with fewer tuition dollars. Tax subsidies to public institutions do not alleviate this shortfall. Because higher education remains the largest discretionary component of many state budgets, the percentage of taxpayer funding to public colleges and universities has dropped sharply, with the trend moving steadily toward "divestment."2 Ohio, for instance, now spends 15.2 percent less per student than it did in 2008, despite adjustment for inflation.3 At the same time, tuition at public universities during this period has risen, in some places precipitously, with predicable results: our students, many of them first-generation, face the [End Page 365] prospect of accumulating crippling debt in pursuing a bachelor's degree at a time of economic uncertainty—a factor that contributed to my department's drop in English majors from 411 in 2008 to 199 in 2018. The migration of possible humanities majors to business and STEM fields remains a concern as well. Anxious about students' employment prospects, lawmakers, teachers, and, above all, parents strenuously proclaim the return value of investments in majors such as accounting, finance, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and computer science, whereas the return value of investments in English studies, history, music, art, classics, and philosophy is far less obvious and far more difficult to explain in econometric discourse. Given this situation, studying the humanities appears a luxury that few can afford, and universities themselves reflect this sentiment by eliminating supposedly under-enrolled programs and courses. As Benjamin Winterhalter states in The Atlantic, "The very people demanding to know why English and art history departments weren't doing very well were often the people who'd helped drive students away from those departments to begin with."4 While it is possible to dispute the data behind the apparent decline in the humanities, the idea of this decline has taken hold to the point of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And our field faces its own distinct challenges: as the number of English majors drops, period-specific courses often give place to more popular general education classes that skip from Will (Shakespeare) directly to Jane (Austen), avoiding the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a flyover zone between two very attractive destinations. But does all of this mean that the humanities are, as reported in American Affairs, "almost dead"?5 To address this question, it may be helpful to view education beyond the confines of the conventional undergraduate experience and remember that the study of literature, history, music, art, classics, and philosophy is not confined to, in Samuel Johnson's words, "the young, the ignorant, and the idle."6 Long before the Great Recession of 2008, adults, including people in the over 60 age bracket, manifested a strong and growing desire for continuing their education in arts and letters. As David Staley, Director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University observes, the revitalization of the humanities does not depend solely upon capturing the attention of the postadolescent demographic, since "there are clearly a large number of non-traditional learners who have demonstrated interest in the humanities, but who have either been turned off by, or simply not invited into, the academy."7 While Staley suggests the possibility of a "boomer college" for these students, we can attend to them in less exclusive ways as well. Nontraditional degree-seeking...
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Apr 7, 2024
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