I have humanities academics on both sides of my family tree (dad and maternal grandfather, both tenured with long careers at good schools) and classics as an omnipresent topic in my growing years. Out of my undergrad program, I got accepted to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. I opted instead to get a history degree at a smaller school and dropped out after my MA.
It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
Only shows the slow road to turning colleges and universities into Trade Schools is proceeding as planed by the US oligarchs.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
> But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
I'm not that shocked honestly, I did a humanities degree and when I checked UChicago's departments they were large and pretty good but not really cutting edge or doing anything radical or interesting. Seems like they were coasting on their reputation for a while.
Probably a good thing considering the decline of science and tech in the US and Western world in general. A casual visit to any major labs and observing their demographics makes it clear where all the talent in STEM is being created.
It's better to redirect that funding towards building the next generation of scientists and engineers rather than purple haired lib arts baristas.
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
For those here who are dismissive of the value of the humanities, consider that no problem and no solution is purely technical; there are always "humanistic" aspects. One can - and many do! - ignore these, or even be totally unaware of them, but they're there to be understood all the same.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
I associate the University of Chicago with a kind of religious exercise in economic theory, a movement dedicated to justifying a political stance in pseudo-intellectualism at the direct expense of empiricism.
The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
(Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards. It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a humanities PhD than retirement at 35.
There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them.
TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
They can keep acceping PhD students to these programmes every other year (or even once every three years). This will keep the esoteric fields alive, even if we assume that only UChicago can support them, and cut costs.
Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
Chicago has a $220 million annual deficit before the Trump issues. You can’t blame this fiscal mismanagement on the ebbs and flows of politics.
Everything has an opportunity cost.
Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
As a Chicago resident, I’ve always felt that University of Chicago is a more hardcore science and math research institution and that Northwestern is a more humanities driven social science institution.
It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] threadhttps://chicagomaroon.com/43960/news/get-up-to-date-on-the-u...
It became clear to me along the way that the world that a young humanities academic would have joined in the 1960s just didn’t exist anymore. Departmental politics, publish or perish, shrinking funding, and the declining prestige of the fields meant the gravy train was over.
It also became clear that unhappy academics are amongst the most miserable, impotent, and self-loathing people around.
In the past people would be expected to take and pass many humanity courses. Seems now schools are interested in training only, not real education. Now they want people to be automatons, unable to think for themselves.
I think this neglects the stark opportunity cost: PhD students are devoting years of their life to this endeavor, which may pay modest living expenses during school but otherwise provides no current or future financial benefit to the student unless they get a job in their field. Those years become lost years in their lives, years they can never get back.
Moreover, if the ultimate goal of training graduate students is to preserve human knowledge, how is that goal going to be accomplished when those students are forced to leave the field and find some other way of supporting themselves after grad school? Ultimately, the knowledge will still be lost, won't it?
In fairness to the University of Chicago, this is not a problem specific to the University of Chicago, certainly not the first straw but only the final straw. When the humanities are defunded across the board, and tenure-track jobs become nonexistent, the training of humanities PhDs becomes futile. We can't look to Chicago for a solution to this larger problem. Every university, no matter how big and prestigious, should and indeed must face the stark reality.
https://www.ft.com/content/4501240f-58b7-4433-9a3f-77eff18d0...
UChicago’s strains came after its $10bn endowment — a critical source of revenue — delivered an annualised return of 6.7 per cent over the 10 years to 2024, among the weakest performances of any major US university.
The private university has taken a more conservative investment approach than many peers, with greater exposure to fixed income and less to equities since the global financial crisis in 2008.
“If you look at our audits and rating reports, they’ve consistently noted that we had somewhat less market exposure than our peers,” said Ivan Samstein, UChicago’s chief financial officer. “That led to less aggregate returns over a period of time.”
An aggressive borrowing spree to expand its research capacity also weighed on the university’s financial health. UChicago’s outstanding debt, measured by notes and bonds payable, climbed by about two-thirds in the decade ending 2024, to $6.1bn, as it poured resources into new fields such as molecular engineering and quantum science.
If you're curious what I mean by this, Sean Goedecke's post "How I Ship Projects At Big Tech Companies" [1] is a superb example, particularly his definition of "what does it mean to ship?" No idea whether he's somebody who would say "the humanities are important" but I don't think you can understand his thesis as a technical one.
[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
The University of Chicago is basically Number Go Up University.
I don't see why this university, out of all of the high-prestige American schools, would care about humanities in a time when the conservative political movement has wholly embraced anti-intellectualism. The political movement no longer cares about presenting Number Go Up Theory as some kind of elite intellectual practice.
There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them.
TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
Everything has an opportunity cost. Can you defend funding full scholarship plus stipend PhDs in fields for which there are no jobs? (At the expense of undergrad financial aid or something else)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics
It’s kind of like Chicago’s version or Harvard and MIT.