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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Isn't there a decline in the number of liberal arts degrees? I read this not long ago, in an article by a reputable writer. He'd commented that the number of English majors at Michigan had dropped from 1,000 to 200 over the last 20 years (I think). The argument was that liberal arts faculties were so politicized that it was turning off prospective students.[/quote]

Liberal arts is more than humanities.[/quote]

Sure. But politics are across all the liberal arts disciplines these days. And that's the point. It's not necessarily the same liberal arts education from the past. [/quote]

Please give us more info that you totally made up without any justification or backing data.  It's really useful.[/quote]

Shrugs. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the education taught at liberal arts schools, at least many of them, is not the same as in the past. The objectives are different. Changes in the faculty, changes in the types of courses being taught, changes in the disciplines, changes in the attitudes and especially the approach in the critical analysis of the subject matter, which is a big part of the liberal arts philosophy. That itself means the education has changed. Some will see it as changing for the better, others will not.

The below is an extraction from an interview with James Oakes, who's a prominent US historian. It was posted on the World Wide Socialist website:

Q. Can you address the role of identity politics on the campus? How is it to try to do so serious work under these conditions?

A. Well, my sense is that among graduate students the identitarians stay away from me, and they badger the students who are interested in political and economic history. They have a sense of their own superiority. The political historians tend to feel besieged.

The reflection of identity politics in the curriculum is the primacy of cultural history. There was a time, a long, long time ago, when a “diverse history faculty” meant that you had an economic historian, a political historian, a social historian, a historian of the American Revolution, of the Civil War, and so on. And now a diverse history faculty means a women’s historian, a gay historian, a Chinese-American historian, a Latino historian. So it’s a completely different kind of diversity.
On a global scale the benefit of this has been tremendous. We have more—and we should have more—African history, Latin American history, Asian history, than we ever have. Within US history it has produced narrow faculties in which everybody is basically writing the same thing. [/quote]

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