The End of the Humanities Seminar

Above: A dying form of higher education

Caught a bit about the new president at Victoria University at the University of Toronto (although I’m not sure quite what this means. Do Canadian universities have college presidents within the larger university?):

As universities grapple with budget cuts, small seminars are needed more than ever, he said.

“What we can do at Vic is to … emphasize the way discussion about ethics and other matters takes place more potently in a face-to-face environment.”

I mean, that’s nice and all, but at least in the U.S., the small humanities seminar is disappearing fast. There are a few basic reasons for this. First, as corporations demand that universities serve as training grounds for them and as politicians defund higher education and as administrators see themselves as CEOs who need to push students into those corporate fields, students are fleeing the humanities majors. English, history, and philosophy are dying as majors. This means that there is less demand for those small seminars, even if many students actually would like to take them. Second, as administrations decide to run themselves like corporations, the focus has become all on numbers at the university. What is your average class enrollment as a department? That’s the key question. Sometimes it’s the only question.

So a department like history is severely hurt by offering a seminar with 10 students. And it might be rewarded by offering an upper division Holocaust or Vietnam War course with an enrollment of 125 students. What are those rewards? The ability to hire new faculty. At my school at least, departments don’t have “lines” anymore. If 5 people in my department retired or left this year, the provost might well theoretically replace 0 of them. Instead, all the money would go into Pharmacy or Supply Chain Management. So the only way to prove worth is to have lots of students in your classes.

That means the incentive is to make a major easier and to offer courses that appeal to large numbers of students. Never mind that a humanities education requires a lot of writing and course discussion. These things are impossible in a course of 125 students. Doesn’t matter anymore. It actually hurts you to do those things. Sometimes corporations say they want the skills students acquire in a liberal arts education. But I don’t think that’s true at all. They want to shift corporate training onto the universities to save themselves money. Their power over legislatures and representation on Boards of Trustees means they can do so. And thus we have the decline of the humanities and the skills small seminars teach.