Reply to Why the lack of men majoring in humanities?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]
You're right, of course, that there's no lack of male philosophy majors. From that perspective, my comment was off-point. But the discussion seemed to be degenerating into general humanities-bashing, and I wanted to counter that. Philosophy is often attacked as especially 'woke,' yet Swarthmore's philosophy offerings are strikingly un- or even anti-'woke' (without being ideological in the other direction either).[/quote]

I would not agree with you. I suspect you're being defensive. The Swarthmore list of classes is more "woke" than not with its clear deemphasis on a strong grounding in traditional historical topics. It's spread thinly across many disciplines save one, which does have some depth, and that's black/African.

The English major a few pages back gave an excellent overview of how many males would view the situation of humanities, how the courses are created, taught, the topics covered, the classroom discusses the professors allow, and why it would play a role in the large decline in men studying humanities in college. There's nothing new or speculative about it, it's a topic that's being talked about in many places.

If you consider yourself a progressive person and who signed up for the 1619 outlook, doubtlessly you'll find comfort in the Swarthmore offerings and will want to insist that the real reason for the decline in history majors is solely due to the cost of higher education. But most American men, as data has borne out, veer center to conservative. This is not a curriculum for someone with centrist or conservative outlook and who's more interested in a pragmatic study of popular history topics like the Civil War, US history from the colonial days, 19th century Britain, Europe in the age of empires, the great wars, etc. Swarthmore isn't offering enough of the traditional subjects to merit a major if those are your interest. [/quote]
Huh? In the comment you're criticizing, I'm talking about philosophy. You're talking about history. You're missing my entire point.[/quote]

English major from above:  there is of course a lot of noise and the “humanities” isn’t a monolithic thing. My sense is that philosophy tends to be a more intellectually rigorous major than many others.  I also wasn’t trying to get into the merits of “woke,” although I suppose that was kind of inevitable.  Whether you think the “woke” are correct, incorrect, or that this is an ill-defined category that doesn’t really exist, the point I was trying to make is that the current intellectual fashion just a different way of looking at texts—sociological, historical, often explicitly political—and that this kind of methodology may just not be very interesting to the kinds of young men who might otherwise be inclined towards the humanities because they loved King Lear or whatever. Further, the critical theorists have done their work too well: if you presume that every interpretation of every text is equally valid—which i heard all the time in classes even in the 90s—and that given the nature of language all texts necessarily always say both “A” and “not A,” it kind of all nets out to zero. So why bother? Get an engineering degree and a job.  [/quote]

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