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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm in the humanities.  I have 4 degrees, and they were all completely free (1 degree is from overseas and 2 are Ivy League).  I make a comfortable living in my field at a job I love that really gives me the chance to help students.  I never took a STEM course after high school and don't care if my kids do either if that's not their bliss; conversely, if they want that pathway, I will do everything possible to support them.

There's nothing useless about what I do or about the students who want to study it.  It's just not CS or STEM.  But I have a hard time believing my field shouldn't have the right to exist.  If people don't want to study it, they don't have to.  But humanities are actually pretty cheap to maintain at the University level in terms of costs.  The main reason to discontinue programs is so that salaried positions can be eliminated, not because the programs themselves are considered to be intellectually useless.

Getting rid of the humanities is kind of like saying anyone who doesn't have the height shouldn't play basketball after age 16 because it's just a waste of energy since they can't turn pro.  But there are lots of good things that can come from pursuing a sport on the nonprofessional level.  The humanities are the same way: they train your mind in certain habits and skills that STEM presentations just don't do.  Maybe you don't feel you or your student want or need those things.  That's OK with me, but there are still plenty of folks who do want and need them.  And as long as that's the case, I'm lucky to be part of it.

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How many faculty slots should a department struggling to attract majors be allotted when other departments have to turn away prospective majors due to overwhelming demand? [/quote]

Sure. Harvard should ditch their divinity school faculty. Because who needs any of that useless religion stuff anyways, right?

SMH[/quote]

Harvard can afford to meet the needs of every student. Most schools aren't Harvard. Should a school that has to turn away kids who want to major in business or engineering have an English department with staffing levels that were appropriate when they had twice as many majors?

"According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major[/quote]

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