Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                      WHERE HAVE ALL THE HUMANITIES GONE? 

About a month ago, the New Zealand Listener had a cover asking Is the B.A. Dying? which announced an article called Arts and Minds, researched and written by Paul Little. It was a very incisive article, largely investigating why fewer and fewer university students in New Zealand are now opting for humanities courses. So much were the numbers shrinking that there are now fewer full-time academics teaching the humanities. For example, while the English Department at the University of Auckland, once a major department, had 21 full-time professors and lecturers in 2013, it now has a total of 7 even though the university is larger than it ever was. I was aware that this trend was already happening in the early 2000s, when I was working on my doctorate in the university’s History department. Departments teaching foreign languages and literature were disappearing. I remember a professor of Russian language and literature having his department closed from under him for lack of students. He came to the History department hoping he could pick up some work teaching Russian history.

Paul Little’s article gave a number of credible reasons for the decline in humanities in our universities. One was the dreaded hand of neo-liberalism, which fell upon New Zealand about four decades ago and which promotes a very utilitarian view of higher education. Courses should always be “useful” or vocational and steer students into specific jobs or professions. At about the same time (the 1970s and 1980s) the Commerce departments were expanding and becoming dominant. This was also the time when tuition ceased to be subsidised by the government and free for students. Suddenly students had to pay hefty sums for tuition, which usually meant taking on hefty student loans which could take years to pay off. In such an environment, choosing “useful” subjects which would lead to employment became more attractive to students. Why bother with literature, foreign languages or philosophy when you were seeking a livelihood? And while this was going on, the urge to prove how many students had attained a degree meant that universities watered down courses [the rougher but more accurate term is “dumbed down”]. I am confident in my belief that a B.A. degree achieved in 1960 or 1970 required more real study and carried more weight than a B.A. awarded in 2010 or 2020. [By 2020, it was common for students doing other courses to say that B.A. really meant “Bugger All”.]                 

While I think all these factors are contributing to the decline of the humanities, they are only part of the problem. As I see it, the bigger problem is what I would call “presentism”. It used to be taken for granted that the wisdom and literature of the past were things to treasure and an important heritage; and the knowledge they gave made for a more mature perspective on human nature. To understand this was not to wallow in the past – people did and believed very stupid things in past ages just as people do now. But to study humanities meant to learn how civilizations developed and how human beings reacted. Now, however, there is a widespread assumption that the past is irrelevant. Only the age we live in is important. And in an age of multi-media, when people are spoilt for choice with pod casts and TV dramas, why should anyone bother reading hefty 19^th century novels, examining in detail the classics of Greece and Rome, or decoding the syntax of a foreign language? Didn’t the whole world now understand English? Wasn’t it easier to watch a TV adaptation of a canonical novel than to read the original text? Besides, the mass media bombarded us with so many stories anyway that we didn’t really need to know about the old stuff, did we? Real literacy – the ability to read in full and digest a canonical work – became rarer in students. In his article, one of Paul Little’s interviewees suggested gloomily that the day would come, not too far away, when nobody could actually read Dickens.

And, heretic that I am, I would say that while the humanities were being eaten away by presentism, those who taught the humanities, and who decided which courses should be available, were doing a very good job of shooting themselves in the foot. For some time, there was, in humanities departments, the plague of post-modernism, in which a language of impenetrable gobbledegook was invented to avoid saying things clearly and therefore to create the illusion that something profound and meaningful was being said. It was particularly true in literary criticism. This deterred many students from engaging in the humanities. Then there was the advent of ideologically-loaded courses – courses which told students what to believe rather than teaching students how to think. You yourself can decide which courses I am alluding to here. But there was something else bubbling up from secondary education – the high schools. Time was, to get into a university course you had to first pass either the University Entrance examination or the more prestigious Bursary or Scholarship examinations. This meant that freshers entering university had to have at least some academic competence. Then along came the very flawed system of NCEA, where so much depended on course-work and where pupils [I refuse to use the term “students” for high-school pupils] could re-sit and get credit for units they had previously failed. To put it simply, the bar for entering university was lowered. This could be [mis]interpreted as democratising universities, but what it really meant was a greater cohort of students who were not really up to academic study… so in universities, and especially in the humanities, courses were simplified – dumbed down… at which point many better students could reasonably say “What’s the point of doing this?”

As a product of the humanities, I admit to having made some big generalisations here, though I think my argument is still sound. Other distractions, and the urge to study something “practical” and earn money, have made many students turn away from the humanities. If I wanted to be really nasty, I could also refer to the many under-prepared and dull lecturers in the humanities, through whose lectures I had to sit while earning my degrees; but that’s not a story for today and probably there were dull lecturers in science and commerce departments too. And let me also admit that, even when the humanities were booming, most graduates in humanities knew that they would probably end up having to teach in high schools. A severe punishment indeed.

Meanwhile I continue to read canonical books as well as new ones, and wave my little banner wistfully hoping for a new boom in the study of real humanities.

FOOTNOTE: Only after writing the above diatribe did I hear news of Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka]'s plan to cut courses and dismiss a number of lecturers and academics because of a loss of revenue. I wonder if we will see the humanities axed first.