The humanities are in a bind out of Kafka
One morning before the start of fall semester, the liberal arts faculty at the University of Houston, where I am a professor, woke up to a Kafkaesque nightmare. Rather than discovering that there were two strange men in their bedroom or that they had morphed into monstrous beetles, they instead found that the enrollment cap for their courses had swelled from 20 to 30 or 35 students. (Befitting Kafka, these numbers remain murky.) More ominously, only those classes that reached at least 75 percent of the new, higher capacity would be sure to survive in future course catalogs.
Both faculty and students are still reeling. While not quite as bleak as “The Metamorphosis” or “The Trial,” the situation we now face speaks to the crisis of the humanities at public universities across the country. By now, the narrative is as familiar as it is dismal. Since the economic crisis of 2008, state funding of public universities has gone down substantially while tuitions have gone through the ceiling. At the same time, enrollment in STEM majors has exploded while enrollment in the humanities majors has imploded.
What’s a university administration to do? One answer is to hire, as in the recent cases of West Virginia University and the University of North Carolina, management consulting firms. At West Virginia, this led to the elimination of all of its foreign language degree programs, along with deep cuts in several other liberal arts departments. Or in the case of other universities like my own, the answer is simply to adopt a numbers-driven method for channeling students toward “market-driven majors” — maximizing graduation percentages and minimizing costs in the process.
Hence the buzzing of saws at UH as our dean lops off discussion sections from large lecture courses and trims from catalogs what he calls “boutique classes.” The drive to increase the graduation rate — which can be partly achieved by helping more students enroll in the classes they need within six years — will drive smaller classes out of the catalog, with professors shuffled into the classes that historically have higher enrollments, like film courses. (For spring semester, I had proposed a course, based on decades of research and writing, that explores the parallels between the work of novelists and historians. However, I will instead teach a course on world cinema, based on decades of buying popcorn at movie theaters.)
This means my class on the history of nihilism, where I teach Kafka, is bound for the boutique boneyard. This is oddly apt, since a recent scientific study on the impact of big classes on some students borders on the nihilistic. The chances of alienation and indifference seem to mount when these students have fewer opportunities to interact with teachers and teachers have fewer occasions to challenge students.
Perhaps Kafka is the wrong boutique product to cite. The real threat to the liberal arts at public universities like mine is not the culture wars raging at a few elite schools, not liberalism or conservatism run amok, but instead a kind of utilitarianism running us into the ground — one we can call, thanks to Charles Dickens, Gradgrindism.
2024 marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Dickens’s “Hard Times.” The novel stars Thomas Gradgrind, the superintendent of a grade school in Coketown. The good man’s credo is clear and crisp: “In this life, we want nothing but Facts, Sir; nothing but Facts.” He is a man, we learn, who carries “a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you exactly what it comes to.”
This is not just a fierce though fair description of the philosophy of utilitarianism in the age of industrialization but also the philosophy — if that is the right word — of university administrators in the age of brand and management consultants. Just as the management specialist Peter Drucker, our own era’s Thomas Gradgrind, often insisted, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
Clearly, metrics are essential to manage institutions for higher learning. Equally clear, though, we have a choice in deciding what metrics to use — a choice that must be informed by the kind of university we want. It should be a place that gives students the means to do better than their parents. At my university, many of the students’ parents never went to college, work in the nearby oil refineries, and raised their children in places like Dickens’s Coketown, blighted by “black canals” and “tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.”
The university’s role is obvious: to provide the skills these young people need to graduate into a better livelihood than their parents have had. This is perfectly justifiable. No less justifiable, though, is the question of whether this alone translates into a fuller or better life.
It’s one thing to aim to maximize the earnings of someone who wants to pursue optometry, kinesiology, or another “market-driven major.” But what are we to do with curiosity-driven majors? There is something odd, if not downright offensive, about the conviction that these majors are not suitable for students who want better lives than their parents. More than a few seem interested in having their education guided by a different set of metrics. For example, that the deepening of the imagination — belittled by Gradgrind as “fancy” — leads to the deepening of our comprehension. Or that the testing of truths and traditions can shape a more tolerant society. Or that the study of the past, though we might still make the same mistakes, will also make us more modest.
University administrators are under tremendous pressure from stakeholders — university boards, state governments, local businesses. But they should not lose sight of their most important stakeholders: students. At the end of “Hard
Times,” Gradgrind himself realizes and, too late, tries to reverse the tragic consequences of his numbers-driven pedagogical philosophy. To paraphrase the narrator’s final words, “Dear university leaders, it rests with you and me whether in our two fields of action, administering and teaching, we can guarantee not just the professional, but also the intellectual futures of our students. Let us act together to do better!”