College-based humanities accepted materialism centuries ago, when they got comfortable with the idea of training future clergy that could make a living in nearby towns. Travel the back roads of the U.S., and you'll see that New England, the Midwest and the South are rich with small liberal-arts colleges that began as faith-funded schools backed by specific denominations.

Humanities departments continue to operate with a vocational tilt that made sense in the 1950s (heyday of the GI Bill!) training students to earn Ph.D.s and become professors of the humanities at other, rapidly expanding institutions of higher learning themselves. In this model, which persists today, students learn the current cadences of academic writing. That is its own art form, which is fascinatingly different from all other types of writing -- and generally pretty unsuited to everyday use.

This hasn't worked out so well lately, because faculty job openings in the humanities are far scarcer than the supply of new graduates. So students hoping to make it all the way to a professorship end up stuck. As Prof. Schmidt notes in his piece, it's possible for humanities graduates to find good careers in the mainstream economy, but there are a lot of jitters about how to do so.

What's probably fueling this student anxiety (and a desire to avoid pursuing humanities majors) is an apprehension that the faculty is unfamiliar with career paths other than chasing a Ph.D. and trying to earn a faculty position somewhere.

It's actually quite striking how many anthro majors find their way to UX; English majors succeed in sales, etc. But there's no support from faculty to get there. And while understaffed career-services departments do the best they can, learning how to get here from there is much harder than it should be.

By materialism I don't mean earning a living. What I mean is the belief the material world is all that exists. We are seeing the belief work itself out in the destruction of the humanities. However, the science and engineering fields are not immune, since they all depend on the humanities for their credibility. I.e. what sense does science make if there is no objective truth? Or, why worry about engineering good quality products if goodness doesn't exist? Then it's just a matter of what everyone can get away with to get the diploma and the high paying job. Hence the high rates of cheating, plagiarism, faking results, etc.

Humanities education made a lot more sense when the subject of the humanities was believed to exist. Then there'd be reason to have many openings for humanities professors, spin off education jobs in public education, private education, etc.

Thanks for the clarification - and sorry to go full tilt at rebutting an argument you weren't making! (Though it was fun to cover the territory.)

You're right that without any aesthetic sense, everything gets bleak. Are things that dire, though? With the business media getting obsessed about unicorns, $1T market caps, etc., it's easy to believe that money fever has infected everyone. It hasn't. Friends who teach, make movies, deliver social services, write, etc. are still keeping some sense of goodness alive.

>Or, why worry about engineering good quality products if goodness doesn't exist?

Why bother reasoning from our intuitions about what we want when we could just pursue our subconscious goals directly? Who needs to be convinced that they want a product to be good-quality?

> Who needs to be convinced that they want a product to be good-quality?

Many people, apparently.

Is there really nothing about, say, a novel that is worth applying your mind to? If "accepting materialism" means quitting whatever it is that English professors do then maybe they should just switch to doing something that doesn't require belief in an invisible metaphysical ideal. There's obviously a difference between a good book and a bad one so perhaps they should just study that if the metaphysical ideals aren't holding up.

Good and bad are metaphysical ideals.

If you don't believe in anything metaphysical then good and bad are still statements about the human brain. If you really committed to materialism, you could keep going as an English professor but you would have to start explaining things in different terms.

If anyone was willing to do it, "this painting is beautiful," could be put on exactly the same footing as "this drug cures clinical depression."

I think you mean redefining "this painting is beautiful" as "this painting makes me feel good." Not the same thing.

That depends on your definition of "beautiful".

Sounds like you agree.

The core problem is that during the last century universities changed from places where the privileged would spend some years getting "an education" to basically vocational training schools that everybody who wants a job has to attend. Since humanities don't give you much competitive advantage on the job market, funding dwindles.

>Since humanities don't give you much competitive advantage on the job market, funding dwindles.

Aren't there still as many, if not more, elites than there were last century? I think a much more realistic picture is that both the sciences and the humanities benefited from the GI bill and grew massively, but the sciences "left the house and earned their paycheck" while the humanities remained reliant on teaching. Now that the demand for education is not growing so fast in and of itself, the sciences have kept up the pace by recruiting support from industry while the humanities have had to face the music.

The humanities are the supply line for society's leadership class. That is why WEB DuBois promoted classical education for the freed slaves, instead of just the job training that Washington Carver endorsed. Of course, the powers that be favored Carver's vision, since it meant the white elite would remain on top, so DuBois' chain of African American run classical education schools has all but disappeared and the NAACP he helped found has only become a special interest lobbying group.