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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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 [b]critical theorists[/b] have done their work too well: [b]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[/b]. So why bother? Get an engineering degree and a job.  [/quote]
Sorry, I know it's somewhat off-topic, but I have to point out that if your profs said this then they were deconstructionists or some other type of postmodernist (or poststructuralist), not proponents of critical theory. Deconstruction and postmodernism certainly were fads in the 1970s through the 1990s, but (a) actual critical theorists criticized those movements, and (b) 21st-century movements like the 1619 Project (mentioned by someone on the previous page) are not postmodern -- at least, not in the way your professors (who sound like deconstructionists) were. The 1619 Project is about getting history [i]right[/i], not about revealing the absence of a 'transcendental signified' or any such gibberish.

To tie it back to the theme of this discussion, if a young man is curious about the possibility that historical evidence actually falsifies some of the historical narratives he grew up with -- a matter of intellectual rigor, on any plausible definition -- many of those Swarthmore history courses may be just his thing.[/quote]

I’ve often seen deconstruction referred to as a type of critical theory.  But there’s no need to debate the taxonomy.  If you’d rather use postmodernism or poststructualism that’s fine too. The larger point is that the academic climate in the humanities is generally off-putting to those who are interested in understanding the western intellectual tradition as such, as opposed to those who are interested in deconstructing it or subjecting it to a race- and gender-based political reappraisal.  Not that that is an illegitimate kind of intellectual inquiry, of course, it’s just not appealing to a lot of young men. In theory, critical theories, deconstructionist theories, and more traditional approaches to literature could all exist in the academy; as a practical matter, however, they seem not to.  And I think you are entirely incorrect about the goal of critical theory—it’s not about getting history “right,” because it believes “right” is a meaningless concept.  It attempts to replace the dominant narrative with another narrative that centers marginalized groups. “Right” has nothing to do with it.  [/quote]
I know I'm going to lose this debate, because current usage of these terms is strongly influenced by people who don't understand the actual theoretical frameworks (I don't mean you but ideologues in rightwing think-tanks, the politicians they influence, and journalists trying to report what these politicians do), to an extent that the terms, thus used, don't really refer to anything at all. But in the interest of doing justice to what people are actually doing in the classroom, I have to insist that current forms of critical theory, including critical race theory, are in the business of displacing dominant narratives [i]in a broadly evidence-based way[/i] because they're interested in [i]the truth[/i]. The move of 'centering marginalized groups' isn't done because 'truth' or 'right' is a meaningless concept but because the truth about these groups has been distorted or suppressed by traditional (e.g. liberal) historians. The 'critical' part marks an orientation that's fundamentally modern, not postmodern, insofar as it echoes Kant's critique of the empiricism of his day (in the 18th century). I'm putting this as if I agree with the critical theorists in these debates. I don't. I think mainstream liberal or conservative historians often have good replies. But the challenges are nonetheless illuminating because they ask how best to pursue an evidence-based approach to history.

Debates between critical theorists and postmodernists were the comfort food of my undergraduate education in the 1990s (in English, comp lit, and philosophy). Again, these positions are, or at least were, opposed. See, for example, Habermas's mid-80s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a marked-up copy of which I still have on my shelf. Habermas was a critical theorist, and as such he was trying to show that postmodernists like Derrida and Foucault [i]are wrong[/i]. I used to carry the book around to help me refute my PoMo classmates back in the day. Critical theory is the enemy of postmodernism.

That's too simple, of course. Some of the rhetorical tics of postmodernism persist, and there's no reason why an individual scholar or teacher can't learn from both movements. But the movement you're referring to -- the idea that a 'radical' stance toward dominant narratives must question the very idea of 'truth' or 'right' -- is pretty much dead. That was the movement that I used critical theory texts to help me counter when my peers lapsed into navel-gazing worries about the 'phallogocentrism of truth' or 'the very idea of a metanarrative' 30+ years ago, and I think it's fair to say that my side -- the side of enlightenment and reason -- won, though not in the way envisioned in righwing think-tanks.

Sure, politicians like Ron DeSantis think all these ideas smell like 'critical theory' -- 'critical theory' being, in their mouths, just the name of a particularly stupid form of relativism or reverse-racist leftism or whatever. (Let's just call all the bad stuff 'critical theory' -- thanks, Chris Rufo!) If you want to talk like that, I can't stop you.[/quote]

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