10 ms·

If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will?

• greesil 1y ago
  Maybe a university that is better run? https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-universitys-financial-issues/ https://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
  • stockresearcher 1y ago
    All of that (and all of the title article) was written before this was made public: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acquire-center-research-security-prices-uchicago https://news.uchicago.edu/story/morningstar-inc-agrees-acqui... The significance to the University financial picture cannot be understated.
    • pklausler 1y ago
      It’s insignificant. There, I understated it.
• shermantanktop 1y ago
  I have humanities academics on both sides of my family tree (dad and maternal grandfather, both tenured with long careers at good schools) and classics as an omnipresent topic in my growing years. Out of my undergrad program, I got accepted to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. I opted instead to get a history degree at a smaller school and dropped out after my MA. It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over. It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
  • alexander2002 1y ago
    STEM has eaten the world (in a good way!)
    • PeterStuer 1y ago
      I hate to inform you "Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields" has applied to STEM just the same as the humanities.
      • shermantanktop 1y ago
        I’ve noticed that, but I think it hit the humanities in the 1980s and arrived at STEM more recently. It’s just the MBA-driven financialization and enshittification of everything. But it’s ultimately down to the fact that a college degree is no longer a ticket to the middle class, so it matters a lot what degree and from which school.
        • bonoboTP 1y ago
          It was a fundamental confusion of cause and effect. People noted that the college educated earned more, so assumed that expanding college will confer that same status to all that obtain that pledge. But it inflated its value. Similarly if you squeeze everyone through high school and look the other way even if they don't match the criteria, you just inflate the value of the high school diploma instead of giving the previous high school graduate prestige to everyone. Then the same happened with undergrad. More students, less requirements and then surprise that you don't get an automatic college wage premium for having studied English literature or psychology or communication at some low tier college.
          • terminalshort 1y ago
            Some people just don't seem to understand that the value of a credential rests entirely on the fact that other people don't have it.
• jmclnx 1y ago
  Only shows the slow road to turning colleges and universities into Trade Schools is proceeding as planed by the US oligarchs. In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
  • Levitz 1y ago
    Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.
    • behringer 1y ago
      Wouldn't there very definition of independant thought be understanding an idiology but not limiting yourself to it?
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • lapcat 1y ago
      It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks. The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.
    • ForHackernews 1y ago
      Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors. The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.
• lapcat 1y ago
  > But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate. I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back. Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it? In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
  • chongli 1y ago
    PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field I'd like to juxtapose your quote against a famous quote of John Adams: The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. -- John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780) In this quote, John Adams offers the thesis that what subjects we deem appropriate to study is determined not wholly by our interests, but also by the situation (personal, economic, and political) we find ourselves in. Within your quote is an implicit sense of urgency that weighs against someone's desire to devote years of their lives to studying the arts. Perhaps we are returning to John Adams's tumultuous time? Then it should be wholly understandable for more students to choose pragmatism over personal calling when deciding on a course of study.
• DiscourseFan 1y ago
  I'm not that shocked honestly, I did a humanities degree and when I checked UChicago's departments they were large and pretty good but not really cutting edge or doing anything radical or interesting. Seems like they were coasting on their reputation for a while.
  • genghisjahn 1y ago
    Honest question. What is considered radical or cutting edge in the humanities? I confess my ignorance upfront.
    • sapphicsnail 1y ago
      I know for Classical literature it's largely the theoretical approach to interpreting texts. Lit theory is always evolving and tenured faculty don't always keep up with the changes. There are also new interdisciplinary departments that pop up. I imagine it's more varied in fields that study things created in the last 2000 years though.
      • terminalshort 1y ago
        By what metrics are literary theories judged against each other? What makes the new "cutting edge" ones better than the old? It seems like there is no actual advancement going on, but rather just ever changing fads, which is why I question the value of the entire enterprise.
        • bonoboTP 1y ago
          I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. Of course the correctness of proofs is a checksum, but that doesn't answer which direction one should develop it or whether the thing you developed is found to be useful and interesting and elegant to other pure math people (often like a dozen worldwide). There's not further justification needed than the fact that other high prestige people find it cool and mind-blowing. Now my own opinion is that humanities academia is not a good concept. Literature, poetry, art are all great. But merely thinking and chatting about it is not a field. By all means go write great novels that express the human condition. But better go live a real life with adventure and real non-academics around you and write about that. Like Hemingway. Or write poems or paint impactful paintings. But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber. Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood.
• umeshunni 1y ago
  Probably a good thing considering the decline of science and tech in the US and Western world in general. A casual visit to any major labs and observing their demographics makes it clear where all the talent in STEM is being created. It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
  • AIorNot 1y ago
    The death of intellectualism in public discourse aside This administration’s systemic attacks on universities, science funding, national parks, national health, the CDC, NASA (science funding was gutted) and limp reactions from opposing views just accelerates the fall of the US and the decline of this country
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    >It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas. This is never what humanities at the university of Chicago represented, as the article points out: that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility. A lot of the people in the humanities involved with Chicago, Nussbaum, Dewey, Rorty, Roth, are defenders of exactly the Western tradition people ostensibly want to preserve. The assault on this isn't going to strengthen tech and science, which is under attack by the exact same people for the same reasons. Scientists, medical programs, vaccine research is coming under the cleaver just like the humanities do by the same strain of anti-intellectualism. This isn't revitalizing the sciences, as if the humanities are somehow at odds with engineering, it's a decline into Americas version of some kind of oligarchic Third Worldism.
    • gdulli 1y ago
      I don't think culture war catchphrases are intended to be accurately projected back onto real-life institutions. It's better for you to explain than to insult, but ignoring is probably the move.
• _hark 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/GWBEl https://archive.ph/GWBEl
• tarr11 1y ago
  Chicago had lower annualized endowment returns than similar universities, and so it couldn't support it's aggressive expansion. https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0898 https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0... UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university. The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008. “If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.” An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
  • DiscourseFan 1y ago
    A combination of bad bets and mismanagement. Ah! Well I have a friend who is currently going their for law school, so I shouldn't be celebrating this, it harms them and their career prospects.
• carbonguy 1y ago
  For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities, consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical; there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! - ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're there to be understood all the same. If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one. [1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
  • api 1y ago
    I place some blame on the humanities themselves. Mediocre blatherers like Jordan Peterson (to pick just one example) have captured the hearts and minds of young people because most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. Humanities work is written for other people in the humanities, not the public. It also tends to deal with subjects that are not of interest to 90%+ of the public. A huge vacuum has been created, and it's been filled with shit because it's there so something's going to fill it. P.S. For the inevitable defenders of Jordan Peterson: go read Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, and CS Lewis, to name a few. Peterson is one of those people for whom I'd say "what he says that's interesting is not original, and what he says that's original is not interesting." Take away the authors he draws from and what's left is a mix of stoner-esque rambling (though apparently without the pot?) and something like an attempt at highbrow Andrew Tate. The latter is why I genuinely dislike the guy more than I would if he were just, say, a self-help quack, which he also is.
    • murderfs 1y ago
      > most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon. The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
• cowpig 1y ago
  I associate the University of Chicago with a kind of religious exercise in economic theory, a movement dedicated to justifying a political stance in pseudo-intellectualism at the direct expense of empiricism. The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University. I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
  • wl 1y ago
    U Chicago is far more than Booth and the economics department.
  • robotresearcher 1y ago
    They were also the university of Michelson, Fermi and Gell-Mann, and many winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. Chicago is a heavy hitter.
    • wdr1 1y ago
      Indeed. The U of C is affiliated 101 Nobel Laureates (amongst the highest in the world) -- not to mention 10 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award winners, 58 MacArthur Fellows, 30 Marshall Scholars, & 55 Rhodes Scholars.
• agentcoops 1y ago
  (Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards. It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a humanities PhD than retirement at 35. There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them. TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
• macleginn 1y ago
  They can keep acceping PhD students to these programmes every other year (or even once every three years). This will keep the esoteric fields alive, even if we assume that only UChicago can support them, and cut costs.
• leoh 1y ago
  Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met. Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
  • Roscius 1y ago
    Strikes me as victim blaming and misses the point. Humanities are critical to society and have been for many thousands of years. Getting rid of the department because of "glum" people, is downright silly.
    • leoh 1y ago
      I think you are confounding "The Humanities" and the humanities practiced by contemporary faculty.
      • Roscius 1y ago
        As the above comment indicates, I guess I may be arguing with ChatGPT, but if it's broke, fix it, don't get rid of it.
        • leoh 1y ago
          You aren't talking to ChatGPT. I agree with you that the humanities would be "fixed" ideally. I don't know how you do that, though. I never said you should get rid of them. Just that I can't really blame UChicago et al. for not supporting what's going on. There are so many other issues with contemporary humanities departments I am not even touching on. Also, no one is "getting rid of the humanities" writ large -- in this case, we're talking about a particular program at a particular institution. Seen another way, retracting support from a broken branch is a good way to redirect resources to better-functioning departments at UChicago and elsewhere.
• mathattack 1y ago
  Chicago has a $220 million annual deficit before the Trump issues. You can’t blame this fiscal mismanagement on the ebbs and flows of politics. Everything has an opportunity cost. Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
• pjfin123 1y ago
  U.S. schools are facing a huge and permanent drop in enrollment as the fertility decline starts hitting too.
• iberator 1y ago
  Interesting trivia: there is such a thing as "Chicago school of economics" with one major agenda since 70": profit over people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
  • wdr1 1y ago
    If you take it as profit over people, you've grossly misunderstood it. Friedman explained numerous time how he went from a New Deal left (having grown up in the Great Depression) to an fervent free market capitalist because he believed capitalism was more effective in helping people. Now you may disagree, perhaps vigorously, but you should still be honest over their motivations.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• leoh 1y ago
  UChicago is definitely defending the humanities. This is an emotional piece that does not touch on the reasons that UChicago is rescinding support.
• daft_pink 1y ago
  As a Chicago resident, I’ve always felt that University of Chicago is a more hardcore science and math research institution and that Northwestern is a more humanities driven social science institution. It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.
  • wdr1 1y ago
    Harvard perhaps, but definitely not MIT. U of C notably does not have an engineering program. When I attended (in the 90s), the rumor was that, over the years, several alumni had offered to make significant donations to start one, but it was always rejected for being "too applied." We didn't even has a CS major for a long time, instead having "Mathmatics with a emphasis on computer science." When CS was introduced as a major, it was still very heavy in theory. I would estimate I didn't touch a computer for half of my classes?
• fortranfiend 1y ago
  Obligatory: Oh the humanities.