In the Thoughtless Anti-Woke Campaign, Don’t Take Chances

In the Thoughtless Anti-Woke Campaign, Don’t Take Chances

Stop Teaching Liberal Arts (AI is Taking Over Anyway)

A UK friend, a US citizen, living in the South of France with her NY-born husband, asked me a poignant question: Will the United States survive? My abbreviated shorthand response: “Not intact. And only if younger voters, black and Hispanic males turn out to vote Democrat… along with women, Jews and educated White people. Otherwise, it is an accelerating march to autocracy. Keep reading my blogs.” What prompted this exchange was a New York Times article, written by New York Times OpEd writer (and Pulitzer Prize winner) and published on May 27th under the title Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ With Real Frankensteins at Large.

For those within the spread of potential candidates for GOP elected offices across the land ,who embrace the retribution/culture war politics that define the MAGA movement, of necessity they must prevent the aggregation minorities that are collectively the majority – champions of diversity, tolerance, truth and individual rights to free expression and personal medical choices, who believe that over concentration of wealth and money with special interests is unacceptable and that climate change issues both real and immediate – from voting… until voting is no longer necessary.

And if stopping or controlling the vote is not possible, the replacement killers – the rightwing militia leaders who are replacing the imprisoned leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and their ilk – believe that they are so well armed that they can force the issue. As the leading GOP candidates for the presidency suggest massive pardons for those attacking the Capitol on 1/6/21, insurrection has been legitimized and relabeled “patriotism.”

But there is a realization among students that stepping into liberal arts majors is to accept being dropped into the middle of a very real “take no prisoners” battlefield in those culture wars. With AI and algorithms threatening to automate cultural expression (can it?), the harsh reality of economic competition knocking on the doors of rising students everywhere adds gasoline to the Molotov cocktail fires of cultural devastation. Warrior Dowd, fresh from getting a late-career Columbia University Master of Arts in English, sadly noted: “The Harvard English department handed out tote bags with slogans like ‘Currently reading’ and dropped its poetry requirement for an English degree. But it was too late for such pandering. Students were fleeing to the hotter fields of tech and science.

“‘Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip,’ [wrote Nathan Heller, cited below]… Trustees at Marymount University in Virginia voted unanimously in February to phase out majors such as English, history, art, philosophy and sociology… How can students focus on slowly unspooling novels when they have disappeared inside the kinetic world of their phones, lured by wacky videos and filtered FOMO photos? Why should they delve into hermeneutics and epistemology when they can simply exchange flippant, shorthand tweets and texts?... In a world where brevity is the soul of social media, what practical use can come from all that voluminous, ponderous reading? Would braving ‘Ulysses’ help you pay the rent the way coding could?

“I wish I could adopt the attitude of Drew Lichtenberg, who has taught theater history at Catholic and Yale Universities. ‘We should hail the return of the arts and humanities to bohemian weirdos,’ he said. ‘It began as something for which there were no career opportunities or money to be made, and thence it will return. Like Gertrude Stein’s circle in the Jazz Age. Or like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the Symbolist poets in the fin de siècle.’

“But I find the deterioration of our language and reading skills too depressing. It is a loss that will affect the level of intelligence in all American activities… Political eloquence is scarce. Newt Gingrich told Laura Ingraham that the secret to Donald Trump’s success is that ‘he talks at a level where third-, fourth- and fifth-grade educations can say, ‘Oh yeah, I get that.’ ’” Indeed, Heller had some stunning revelations in his February 27th piece – The End of the English Major – for the New Yorker:

“The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. ‘It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,’ Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. ‘They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.’…

“For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. 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. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

“During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.” The real threat and risk are marginalizing who we are as a people, a nation, a planet of perpetually engaging and exchanging our thoughts and values… in short our culture which is irretrievably nurtured by diversity and mutual interaction.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if exploring and expanding our culture is marginalized and denied, exactly who are we?