Higher education in impractical subjects

[_Chap]

99% of scholarship in antiquity published these days is as worthless as any Mormon apologetics.

Um, maybe that statement might deserve a degree of qualification? Or maybe I have misunderstood what you might mean by 'worthless'?

If you want to stick to what you said, I'll assume that you may be more or less right, and I'm sorry to hear it. I'm curious (no irony there) to hear your view of how it was that a whole field of scholarship ended up in such a dreadful state. Is it simply that the main lodes of interesting evidence about the relevant cultures were worked out years ago, or is it rather that the quality of the scholars has fallen through the floor for some reason?

[_Physics Guy]

Most departments don't give a flying ____ that the majority of their Ph.D. students don't have academic jobs or are living in poverty and surviving on government assistance while teaching as adjuncts and "lecturers," even as they take in more students every year without really disclosing to them their chances of employment (they just don't think about it, really).

This is the crying evil of academia, or at least of large parts of it. I feel better about it teaching in Germany, where there is no student debt because there is no tuition and where higher degrees are respected by industry perhaps more than they should be. My own former Doktoranden seem to be doing all right.

I still wonder, though, about all this advanced training in subjects with no practical direct applications. Most of the humanities tend fall into this category but theoretical physics is at least on the edge. The standard argument in favor of impractical subjects is that they teach highly transferable skills like writing and critical thinking. That's true, they do; I learned a lot from writing freshman English papers. Precisely because those skills are highly transferable, however, they could presumably be learned just as well by writing business cases or legal arguments instead of essays on 17th century poems, and then the graduates would have both writing and practical knowledge.

So I have a gnawing suspicion that all the impractical disciplines should just be accepting a lot fewer students, and mostly just offering courses in writing or mathematical modelling to engineering students. I don't want to believe that; I'm looking eagerly for arguments against it. Any ideas?

99% of scholarship in antiquity published these days is as worthless as any Mormon apologetics.

This sounds harsh. How did things get that bad?

[_NorthboundZax]

I still wonder, though, about all this advanced training in subjects with no practical direct applications. Most of the humanities tend fall into this category but theoretical physics is at least on the edge. The standard argument in favor of impractical subjects is that they teach highly transferable skills like writing and critical thinking. That's true, they do; I learned a lot from writing freshman English papers. Precisely because those skills are highly transferable, however, they could presumably be learned just as well by writing business cases or legal arguments instead of essays on 17th century poems, and then the graduates would have both writing and practical knowledge.

So I have a gnawing suspicion that all the impractical disciplines should just be accepting a lot fewer students, and mostly just offering courses in writing or mathematical modelling to engineering students. I don't want to believe that; I'm looking eagerly for arguments against it. Any ideas?

It's a question long overdue in academia. It rankles me that it's not even hard to find people in STEM fields that tend to disparage the humanities as irrelevant because STEM field employ people, right?

Where I think it has really gotten off the rails is academics having taken the lazy argument over the last several decades that education = employability. It doesn't and even if it were true, it is a weak argument for the kind of broad liberal arts education universities tend to require. Academics could have a strong hand, though, if they were willing to make the case that the community as a whole benefits from having an educated populace - not because individuals have job training (which they could get elsewhere), but rather we get better informed and deeper thinking voters, more innovation, and richer cultural activities among other things. If we continue to think about success simply in terms of employability, academics need to come to terms that our ratio of universities to technical schools is way out of whack.

[_Symmachus]

Um, maybe that statement might deserve a degree of qualification? Or maybe I have misunderstood what you might mean by 'worthless'?

If you want to stick to what you said, I'll assume that you may be more or less right, and I'm sorry to hear it. I'm curious (no irony there) to hear your view of how it was that a whole field of scholarship ended up in such a dreadful state. Is it simply that the main lodes of interesting evidence about the relevant cultures were worked out years ago, or is it rather that the quality of the scholars has fallen through the floor for some reason?

Maybe it's 97%, but the precise number we give it isn't relevant. I can't tell when it's hot or cold outside, even if I don't know the exact degree Fahrenheit.

It's a combination of problems, but you hit on some big ones. There is very little new territory to explore, for one thing. The twentieth century was so productive because of so many new material discoveries (not just interpretations) meant so much of 19th century scholarship (the golden age, really) had to be rewritten. Entire cultures unknown or little known to 19th century had to be integrated into the picture of the past (e.g. Hittites and Ugarit), and even in very old fields like classics, the decipherment of Linear B and the discovery of oral poetic traditions led to a complete renovation of the history of Greece and of Greek literature. Hardly anything on the later Roman empire was done until the 1960s.

Most of what has been going on since the 1960s to me seems like reinterpretation in light of post-structuralist conceptions of language and post-modernist political obsessions (power, gender, sex). Some of that offered useful correctives and clarifications, but I'm kind of tired of seeing the same old arguments in their predictable permutations everywhere, and usually with stereotyped titles: "[insert pun to show your geeky but a little cool, preferably something like "a tale of two X's" or "four X's and a Y" or something pop culture-ish]: politics, power, and representation [better: (re)presentation] in Augustan poetry" [always make sure you have a list of three things after the semicolon]." I get that every generation (whatever a "generation" is, anyway) updates the interpretation, but we've been updating the same interpretation for a few decades now. Brooks Otis's "Vergil: A Study in Civilized Poetry" is part of its milieu (post-war new criticism), but what book published since can offer you as much insight into Vergilian poetry as that book?

And yes, I do think the quality of scholar is markedly worse than what it was even thirty years ago. That's the fault of the educational system, in part, including the graduate programs in these fields. People like M. L. West could start publishing as undergraduates because they read Greek and Latin fluently already in high school, but scholars today rarely achieve that kind of fluency because they don't start until they are undergraduates. Scholarship is first and foremost a craft, but when the undergraduates, who can barely read the languages, get to graduate school, they are asked to learn very little of the technical parts of the field: epigraphy, linguistics, textual criticism (PhD candidates are usually discouraged from even working on these topics for their dissertation except incidentally, and forget trying to impress a job committee with a dissertation in anything technical, and for god's sake don't write a commentary). There is hardly anything on history unless they are in a specialized program. Top programs now allow reading lists for the qualifying exams to have significant portions in English rather than the original languages. That is just an accommodation to reality, but it is also a reality produced their scholarship from a much higher base line of technical ability and knowledge. At the same time, they didn't produce as much per year, nor were fresh PhDs expected to publish a "pathbreaking" or "groundbreaking" (something is broken, anyway) monograph within three to five years of graduation (Brooks Otis didn't finish his first book until he was almost retired). But even if a young scholar wants to improve the quality of her work, the institutional expectations were different in the past such that there was more time and space to perfect one's craft. Today, even an academic publisher (especially in the Anglosphere) will get nervous about a manuscript that is more than 200 pages; they don't like footnotes; they don't like appendices; they don't like complicated technical discussions anyway. But most importantly, it's gotta fit within whatever series they're marketing to libraries, which means your pathbreaking scholarship will have to be rewritten so that it can travel on that pre-marked path.

There aren't many problems needing to be solved anymore, and the educational regime doesn't offer the skills necessary tackle them anyway. The 20th century gave us Denys Page, Kenneth Dover, Louis Robert, Ronald Syme, M. L. West, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Jerzy Linderski, Erich Gruen, Alan Cameron, AHM Jones, Robert Palmer, Calvert Watkins, Stanley Insler, John Denniston, Warren Cowgill, E. J. Kenney...one could go on. Studying their work is like studying a chess game played by two masters; one is not quite the same after it. I'm not saying there aren't any anymore, but there aren't many, and I don't see how the younger generations could possibly fill the void. The 21st century just looks at that list and says, "I notice you don't mention any women" before telling me Mary Beard is a great scholar and that she was born in the 20th century. Part of that sentence may be true, but I only have two arms to carry books out of my burning house.

I still wonder, though, about all this advanced training in subjects with no practical direct applications. Most of the humanities tend fall into this category but theoretical physics is at least on the edge. The standard argument in favor of impractical subjects is that they teach highly transferable skills like writing and critical thinking. That's true, they do; I learned a lot from writing freshman English papers. Precisely because those skills are highly transferable, however, they could presumably be learned just as well by writing business cases or legal arguments instead of essays on 17th century poems, and then the graduates would have both writing and practical knowledge.

So I have a gnawing suspicion that all the impractical disciplines should just be accepting a lot fewer students, and mostly just offering courses in writing or mathematical modelling to engineering students. I don't want to believe that; I'm looking eagerly for arguments against it. Any ideas?

I agree with NBZax:

Academics could have a strong hand, though, if they were willing to make the case that the community as a whole benefits from having an educated populace - not because individuals have job training (which they could get elsewhere), but rather we get better informed and deeper thinking voters, more innovation, and richer cultural activities among other things.

There is no reason that higher learning should be something available largely to 18-23 year olds who are trying to find a job. There may not be many problems to solve but there is a lot of educating to do. Unfortunately, the current regime does not incentive teaching, if that is even the function of universities as their administrators conceive of it, and then added to that is the massive cost that results from a system whereby students have become a device for accessing public monies virtually without limit.

[_Physics Guy]

There is no reason that higher learning should be something available largely to 18-23 year olds who are trying to find a job. There may not be many problems to solve but there is a lot of educating to do. Unfortunately, the current regime does not incentive teaching, if that is even the function of universities as their administrators conceive of it, and then added to that is the massive cost that results from a system whereby students have become a device for accessing public monies virtually without limit.

I'm all for supporting an educated society but I'm vague on the alternative to delivering the education as part of job training in people's early twenties. Maybe there's a bit of a market for life-long continuing education but I can't help thinking of my own undergrad training in ancient Greek. Namely, I decided to audit an introductory course, got the feeling that Greek was keen on verbs, but never got any further because I didn't do any work.

A little bit of haphazard gee-whiz learning may be fun but serious learning is hard. People need time to learn, which is hard to find once we're earning a living, and maybe we also need the incentive of participating in college as a rite of passage, the recognized apprenticeship for adult life.

I'm not sure how stable the marriage of convenience between higher education and adulthood apprenticeship really is. The alternatives I see are for higher education either to lean more into training young people for their careers, or to sell itself to the less captive audience of working or retired adults. The second option probably requires making education entertaining. That might be an oxymoron. It's certainly tricky.

[_NorthboundZax]

maybe we also need the incentive of participating in college as a rite of passage, the recognized apprenticeship for adult life.

This is the note that I wish were played more. To a good degree we have already done this for high school. While there is always a bit around the edges of kids saying 'when will I ever need this?' for K-12, mostly that is dismissed as shortsighted thinking because we want our kids to be able to read, write, do some math, know some history, etc for their own sake. That doesn't translate well to the university - and universities stoke the short-sightedness by touting how important they are for job training. I think there ironically could be a better and more robust place for academic learning in society if we got away from stigmatizing people without degrees as being less employable. Can we not draw on how we view high schooling and encourage people to get degrees simply because they become better them?

[_Physics Guy]

While there is always a bit around the edges of kids saying 'when will I ever need this?' for K-12, mostly that is dismissed as shortsighted thinking because we want our kids to be able to read, write, do some math, know some history, etc for their own sake. ... Can we not draw on how we view high schooling and encourage people to get degrees simply because they become better for them?

For K-12, though, there is close to a universal curriculum. The basic education that we want everyone to have is the same education. At university we give that up and let everyone specialize in some major, with a random handful of electives that don't pretend to cover the whole rest of knowledge. So higher education comes in many different flavors.

Can it really be that all those flavors all make people better to the same extent? If not, then shouldn't we be narrowing the menu to the few best items? We could give everyone the same degree for the same curriculum, which will be a sort of "greatest hits" of higher education in general. Reject specialization at the undergrad level completely.

I like some things about that idea but it has the catastrophic flaw that no undergraduate would ever learn what it means to learn anything properly. By getting only superficial surveys nobody would come to realize how much depth of detail lies inside pretty much anything. That experience is arguably more valuable than learning any one thing in particular. So no, higher education should not try to extend the common curriculum from K-12 up to college.

But if the most important thing to learn is just how deep learning is, and that can be learned from studying practically anything in enough depth, then we're back again to the point about transferable meta-skills like writing and critical thinking. If you can learn them by using any particular subject as a medium, then why not use media that have their own practical benefits, like marketing or dentistry? Make everyone major in some practical subject, to learn both it and all those precious meta-skills, and then for breadth give everyone the same survey curriculum of supplementary electives covering the greatest hits of math, philosophy, history, whatever.

I don't really advocate that necessarily. It just seems like the logical conclusion of one line of thinking. I guess I really only have one main point, here, and it's one that I actually got from a comment I read on the blog of a disenchanted adjunct professor of English. The point is this: Impractical disciplines like the humanities and the more arcane sciences cannot really justify their existence as undergraduate subjects by claiming to teach transferable meta-skills, because if those skills are so transferably meta, they can be learned just as well in disciplines that are also inherently practical.

So all the rhetoric about studying philosophy or art history in order to gain meta-skills is pure crap. If disciplines are relying on that to justify themselves, then they're bankrupt. There is no escaping the onus of showing that the specific things one learns by studying a specific subject are valuable enough in themselves to warrant learning them deeply, even at the price of not learning other things deeply.

[_Chap]

It's a combination of problems, but you hit on some big ones. There is very little new territory to explore, for one thing.

I am sorry to hear that I guessed right, since if that is the problem it is pretty hard to solve, unless someone finds a huge library (baked but not burned) somewhere under Herculaneum ...

And yes, I do think the quality of scholar is markedly worse than what it was even thirty years ago. That's the fault of the educational system, in part, including the graduate programs in these fields. People like M. L. West could start publishing as undergraduates because they read Greek and Latin fluently already in high school, but scholars today rarely achieve that kind of fluency because they don't start until they are undergraduates.

The people I went to school with all learned Latin for at least five years - all of us in the upper streams (even a science guy like me) read Virgil, Ovid and Pliny, and those who did Greek up to university entrance would have had five or six years of it by then. My own Latin never vanished despite the science, and weirdly I now find it useful in reading much later stuff written by people who may have only passed through Italy as visitors. How on earth you can get anywhere worthwhile doing classics at university without that preparation I can't think.

I'm kind of tired of seeing the same old arguments in their predictable permutations everywhere, and usually with stereotyped titles: "[insert pun to show your geeky but a little cool, preferably something like "a tale of two X's" or "four X's and a Y" or something pop culture-ish]: politics, power, and representation [better: (re)presentation] in Augustan poetry" [always make sure you have a list of three things after the semicolon]."

Oh God yes. Each book must have a title that starts with something epigrammatic and opaque, and if what follows gives any indication of the actual topic it is usually considerably inflated in relation to the tricked-out PhD thesis that is what the book actually is. You see "Wheels of change: structuring space and time for a nation on the move": you get a thesis whose honest title would be 'Tramway timetables in Chicago, 1870-1908'. This happens in many other fields than classics, you will be reassured to hear.

[_NorthboundZax]

For K-12, though, there is close to a universal curriculum. The basic education that we want everyone to have is the same education. At university we give that up and let everyone specialize in some major, with a random handful of electives that don't pretend to cover the whole rest of knowledge. So higher education comes in many different flavors.

Can it really be that all those flavors all make people better to the same extent? If not, then shouldn't we be narrowing the menu to the few best items? We could give everyone the same degree for the same curriculum, which will be a sort of "greatest hits" of higher education in general. Reject specialization at the undergrad level completely.

I like some things about that idea but it has the catastrophic flaw that no undergraduate would ever learn what it means to learn anything properly. By getting only superficial surveys nobody would come to realize how much depth of detail lies inside pretty much anything. That experience is arguably more valuable than learning any one thing in particular. So no, higher education should not try to extend the common curriculum from K-12 up to college.

But if the most important thing to learn is just how deep learning is, and that can be learned from studying practically anything in enough depth, then we're back again to the point about transferable meta-skills like writing and critical thinking. If you can learn them by using any particular subject as a medium, then why not use media that have their own practical benefits, like marketing or dentistry? Make everyone major in some practical subject, to learn both it and all those precious meta-skills, and then for breadth give everyone the same survey curriculum of supplementary electives covering the greatest hits of math, philosophy, history, whatever.

I don't really advocate that necessarily. It just seems like the logical conclusion of one line of thinking. I guess I really only have one main point, here, and it's one that I actually got from a comment I read on the blog of a disenchanted adjunct professor of English. The point is this: Impractical disciplines like the humanities and the more arcane sciences cannot really justify their existence as undergraduate subjects by claiming to teach transferable meta-skills, because if those skills are so transferably meta, they can be learned just as well in disciplines that are also inherently practical.

So all the rhetoric about studying philosophy or art history in order to gain meta-skills is pure crap. If disciplines are relying on that to justify themselves, then they're bankrupt. There is no escaping the onus of showing that the specific things one learns by studying a specific subject are valuable enough in themselves to warrant learning them deeply, even at the price of not learning other things deeply.

Good points, top to bottom. But, let me touch on a couple.

Firstly, I am not advocating that we reject specialization at the undergrad level. More along the lines of giving people an opportunity to spend some time learning about something/anything that they find enriching. I think you are right that we do need to keep some degree of the transferable meta-skills, such as writing, but I hope even those we can encourage for their enrichment for a well-rounded person rather than as job-training. I get that this is a harder sell than the more correlated high school curriculum. But, if we could articulate that we all benefit from having those around us being more educated, I think it could have some sustaining power. Not sure if this is a great example, but I received a reference request the other day from a former student getting a job as a pilot. As I am in the geosciences, that could be construed as a failure on our part in that his training here had little direct relevance to his future job experience. However, I prefer to view it as the case that we are better off in a society where at least one pilot has had some decent exposure to Earth science. At a minimum, I think if we valued education for its individual and collective enrichment instead of in terms of what job that will get you, we'd have a better voting populace - which I think we'd agree that we'd all benefit from. My intuition tells me it could do more for society than just that, though.

When it comes down to it, I am sympathetic with the plight the blog post you refer to brings up and have to agree with the idea studying philosophy or art history in order to gain meta-skills is pure crap. I just can't bring myself to think that the answer is restricting the pipelines to philosophy and art history, though. Instead, I think we should quit pretending education is about job skills and recognize that while the true gains are harder to quantify than that, they are still substantial and far reaching.

Edit - it is probably worth asking Dr. Shades to split this thread as two conversations have taken pretty wildly divergent directions.

[_Physics Guy]

NorthboundZax suggested we split off this topic from the one about John Gee, this topic as I perceived it being: how does one justify higher education in subjects that don't directly prepare the student to earn a living?

Ideas that I saw being raised in the other thread included:

1) The possibility of higher education outside the traditional 18-23 age window, for purposes explicitly separate from acquiring career skills. My view on this was that few working adults are going to take time for a lot of hard study, so life-long-learning is likely to be mainly edutainment, which could be fine as far as it goes but it's not the real thing.

2) The theory that it's worth majoring in English or Classics because on the way you learn how to read texts and write persuasively, and these are transferable skills that will be valuable in many careers. I think this theory was shot down by a blog comment I read once, which pointed out that since these skills are transferable they could be learned just as well by reading legal texts instead of old poems and writing business memos instead of critical essays. So why sacrifice practical knowledge in favor of poetry when you can get your valuable meta-skills either way?

3) The option of paring back everything except a few practical subjects into a broad survey curriculum that everyone has to take, alongside a major concentration in something practical. So for example there would be no more English majors or English departments, but only a survey course in literature that everyone would have to take, plus a couple of courses in writing skills. This might be philistine but it might also be more ethical than taking tuition fees from students who are bound to be under-employed.

One idea that didn't make it into the other thread, but that has lately struck me, is:

4) that there is a difference between education for production and education for consumption. There's an awful lot to learn about appreciating wine, for example, and there's a market for instruction in wine appreciation, among people with enough money to afford fancy wine and enough time to take a course about getting the most out of drinking it. So in a sense education in wine appreciation is valuable. It's not valuable in the way that education in medicine is valuable, though. Your knowledge of First Aid might save my life, but your knowledge of First Growths will only benefit you. It's a consumption skill, not a production skill. We don't give degrees in wine appreciation, so why should we award degrees in fiction appreciation? A degree in fiction appreciation is what an English degree basically is.

Just because I think the transferable skills theory (2) is bankrupt as a defence for impractical studies doesn't mean I think (3) is the only viable route. I think that possibly

5) there could a defense that says that seemingly impractical subjects actually are practical. Perhaps studying ancient history means studying human society in a simpler era when basic patterns that are still active today were more easily seen. Perhaps studying literature equips people with a bigger toolbox for writing than anyone could get by practicing memos, and thereby prepares people better to write about the new business problems of tomorrow. And so on.

I think specialists often resist the demand that their subjects be exploited for contemporary practical purposes. It's like making their daughters turn tricks. But there are plenty of decent ways to be a working girl. Mining history for lessons about the present may make for distorted history but one can still fight hard against that distorting tendency while maintaining the goal of extracting lessons for the present from history: if you get the history wrong you will extract the wrong lessons.

Extracting practical value from seemingly impractical subjects is a bunch of hard work that has to be done on top of the traditional work within the subjects themselves. I think this extra work probably has to be done, though, if we are going to make higher education as we have known it into something sustainable.