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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Liberal arts is in theory a fantastic intellectual foundation for life and a career, but in practice its been wrecked by wokeness.  Everyone recognizes this and is staying away.

If we can reform the liberal arts, it will flourish again.  [/quote]
It did not die out due to wokeness.  Liberal arts degrees have been declining for many years in part due to the growth in the tech sector, and more students majoring in business.[/quote]

And why are people so interested in majoring in "business" which typically not a rigorous degree where you learn boring things that were just picked up on the job by intelligent, well-rounded people years ago without the need for any courses?  Perhaps its all the stories they hear about people signing for literature courses and having to listen to political drivel rather than actually learn to appreciate literature.  [/quote]
People are interested in majoring in business because there's more money to be made as a business major than an English major.

Seriously, it's not that hard to understand.

FWIW, I am not a progressive, and I dislike that my kids had to read so much woke books in school.  One year, the book choices were pretty much all about DEI. [/quote]

Ok, but this was not historically true.  Historically, business leaders actually went to elite, northeastern, private liberal arts colleges where they got a well rounded education learning about the intellectual history of Western Civilization.  Over time, that got replaced more and more with critical theory to the point where many of these departments were almost entirely dominated by critical theorists and people started mistakenly assuming that critical theory WAS liberal arts, not just one sector of it.  And of course what underpins critical theory is character assassination of anyone who pushes back on the theories, many of which are quite stupid.  There is a time and place for critical theory but it's about 10x more prominent than it should be in a well rounded liberal arts curriculum.  They also just started dumbing down the curriculum generally, which started to kids on the margins from failing out and getting sent to Vietnam, and really picked up steam when the colleges started jacking up tuition and treating the students (or really, their parents) as a revenue source and to be catered to rather than a pupil to be challenged.

Anyways, back in the day these well rounded students THEN went into business (some with MBAs, some without) and just picked up business on the job, which is fine because in most cases it ain't really that hard, esp. for someone that's in the top 1-5% of IQ and work ethic anyways, which is what the leadership was and is.  These colleges didn't even HAVE business majors since it wasn't a real subject.

Some of their employees, who wouldn't have been able to complete those liberal arts programs back when they were actually rigorous, went to lower tier schools where they did study "business."  Because they wouldn't have been capable of just picking it up on the fly, so they needed the extra training, and because they weren't being trained for leadership anyways, so having a broad education wasn't as important.

Anyways, you can think that system was great or terrible, but anyways it is 95% dead and gone and the critical theorists are the ones standing over the body with the murder weapon, desperately lecturing it about microaggressions as their disciplines fade further into irrelevance.  [/quote]
This analysis was so spot-on and so eloquently written! You must be a Liberal Arts (of old) major.[/quote]
It's also very old fashioned  thinking (back in the day) when people (mostly white men) got liberal arts degrees and then could find a white collar job after graduating because they didn't have to compete with uneducated men, minorities and women.

Times of changed. Supply and demand.  [/quote]

So tedious.  "We can't read Milton anymore because [wokeness]."  Meanwhile, there's a recent article in the Atlantic about how professors (even at really top schools, like Columbia) increasingly find their students cannot read college level books, have never read a book cover to cover at all, etc.

Btw, chat GPT told me that of the following schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore), only one of them has a business-related undergraduate major (MIT, which makes sense given it was historically more focused on trades).  For all the rest, there is no major in any of business, accounting, finance or marketing.  The closest approximation is studying economics, math or physics.  So what I am saying still holds true at the top end of the pyramid.  Interesting these schools are able to place so many into the upper echelons of business anyways and can do this even though white males are only a small fraction of their student body.[/quote]

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