Reply to Why the lack of men majoring in humanities?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Why the lack of men majoring in humanities?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]While some here are criticizing the humanities, remember that most of their teachers—the people responsible for developing their thinking skills for the high paying careers—studied social sciences or humanities fields in undergrad. This is true even of STEMlords.[/quote]

You're making some broad assumptions here.

Speaking of the decline in the humanities among men (and it's not just men, as fewer women are majoring in the humanities too), out of curiosity I glanced at the current history curriculum at Swarthmore: https://www.swarthmore.edu/history/current-courses

It's intriguing, to say the least. However your feelings on these courses, this would not have been the typical history department course offerings of 1990 or 1995 or 2000 or even 2005, when most of us adults on here would have been in college and browsing the course catalogues. I can also verify it's nothing like what my Ivy history department offered in the late 1990s into the 2000s. There are clear themes dominating the Swarthmore offerings in 2025 and I see why few young males would be interested in majoring in history. You'd have to be a particular type of student, either male or female, to be interested in these courses. You can also openly wonder if these courses are really a serious study of history or just something faddish, it's dominated by identity politics and one can be skeptical of any "rigor" being applied in these courses.

The teachers referred to in your post would have been educated under an older and different approach to studying humanities. Your claim doesn't hold up well.[/quote]
Compare Swarthmore's course offerings in philosophy: https://www.swarthmore.edu/philosophy/course-offerings

There's only one course, over the next two years, that might seem 'faddish' or 'woke': 'Critical Philosophy of Race' -- though that course could well be rigorous and even-handed. (Rigorous and even-handed 'Philosophy of Race' courses have been taught in mainstream philosophy departments for more than 30 years.) All the other topics are exactly what students would have studied doing a philosophy major 50 or 100 years ago.

Maybe that's a reason to prefer history to philosophy at Swarthmore; I'm not adjudicating which approach is better. But the list gives clear counter-evidence to the claim that humanities departments are offering mostly identity politics or other 'unserious' courses of study.[/quote]
It’s funny that you say this because philosophy is one of the only humanities that is majority male.[/quote]
It has already been stated that history is majority male. Kind of makes these mental gyrations even more gyrational.
[/quote]
If there are two humanities fields that are majority male (history and philosophy), and one is 'woke' but the other is not, that gives some pretty good evidence that the general under-representation of men in the humanities has little or perhaps nothing to do with 'woke'-ness. One could perhaps argue that history would be even more male-dominated if it were less 'woke' (I'm going to persist with the scare-quotes, since I'm quoting people I disagree with), yielding more men in the humanities generally, but the question isn't how to maximize that figure. Or one could argue that Swarthmore is in the 'woke' vanguard, and that other history departments are keeping their male enrollment numbers up by resisting this trend. I don't know if that's true, but I suspect it isn't, since the trend is decades-old and less elite history departments are stocked with PhDs from the same rather narrow range of graduate programs as Swarthmore's is. I think the moral is: high percentages of men will major in a 'woke' humanities field and in an un-'woke' humanities field. If men are being repelled from other humanities fields, it isn't simply because they are 'woke.'[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics