Simon Lewsen: Despite tough times, the humanities aren't dead yet

And, in fact, in an era where everything is mechanized, including thought, they may be rebounding.

By: Simon Lewsen

I’ve never known a time when the humanities weren’t in crisis. As an undergrad at McGill, I switched my major to English just two years before the 2008 financial meltdown, when economically anxious students began leaving the humanities in droves. I’ve made my teaching career in the aftermath of that catastrophe. When, in 2017, I got my first course in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at the University of Toronto (where I still teach), there were 170,000 humanities students in Canada — 30,000 fewer than a decade before. Those numbers have since declined by an additional 30,000.

Apocalyptic omens are everywhere. Simon Fraser University recently killed off its English Language and Culture program, and York University paused enrollment in 18 humanities-related majors. In Nova Scotia, humanities instructors are wondering if their jobs will survive a government bill that requires universities to focus on three research areas — life sciences, energy, infrastructure — none of them particularly humanistic.

The crisis is real. But is it existential? I’m as nervous as anyone, but I’m not yet ready to say kaddish for the humanities. In my own classroom, I’ve encountered surprising signs of renewed life, which suggest that a renaissance could be possible.

What went wrong in the first place? There are three common answers. The first, favoured by conservative intellectuals, blames a culture of ideological narrowness. Great works of literature are polyphonous: within their pages, different viewpoints coexist. Historically, humanities instructors tried to replicate this humanistic impulse in the classroom, fostering an atmosphere where all ideas — conservative, liberal, reactionary, revolutionary — were taken seriously.

But, conservatives contend, humanities departments have turned into progressive monocultures. If students were once encouraged to explore how literature expands and destabilizes their worldviews, today they’re encouraged to assess literary works narrowly, based on whether those works uphold progressive ideals. This is boring stuff. And so, finding the work uninteresting and the culture stifling, students quietly departed for other disciplines.

Another explanation, favoured by progressives, puts the blame on neoliberalism. In the postwar era, the Golden Age of the humanities, people believed that the Great Books could make you a better person — more compassionate or civic-minded or … something. The written word was understood as a force for good, even if its benefits couldn’t be measured or named. Then came neoliberalism, which is obsessed with measuring and naming things. The salutary effects of the humanities are intangible, so they no longer mattered. People started denigrating the humanities as “useless.” Students imbibed this notion and abandoned literature for more “useful” —that is, lucrative — pursuits.

The third explanation is the obvious one. What’s killing the humanities? The internet, stupid. Social media and the smartphone have turned us into twitchy dopamine fiends incapable of sustained attention. AI thinks for you, and does your homework too. For bookish people, the digital era has been devastating. It robbed us of our attentional capacities — then made those capacities obsolete.

These theories are not mutually exclusive. To think about them is to envision what a revival in the humanities might look like — and what it might require.

The conservative critique of higher education is, I think, basically right. In the United States, studies based on survey data or course syllabi, have established what most people already know: humanities departments have a real left-wing tilt. I’ve known instructors who boast about evaluating student essays based on whether they uphold progressive ideals, and I’ve met students who feel pressured to affirm whatever left-wing shibboleths their professors favour. Of course students don’t love this culture. How could they?

A revival in the humanities will happen, if it happens, in spaces where political diversity is cultivated and encouraged. In my own courses, which focus on creative nonfiction and literary journalism, I teach all kinds of writers — socialists, feminists, social-justice progressives, humanists, libertarians, populists, constitutional conservatives, religious traditionalists. The primary goal is to understand: How do people arrive at their viewpoints? How are their arguments constructed?

My students are surprised to discover that sophisticated thinkers are ideologically promiscuous. Right and left converge. Ideologies mutate and reconfigure, like strands of DNA. This discovery is thrilling. It’s one of the pleasures a humanities education used to offer — and could offer again.

But, do students want thrilling intellectual experiences? Or hard skills and well-paying jobs? If neoliberalism is the real enemy, then cultivating a politically dynamic classroom won’t fix things. The truth is, I’m not bought in on the “blame neoliberalism” viewpoint. Maybe students today are more careerist than students six decades ago, but this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

If you attended university in Canada in the early ’60s, you were probably white, Canadian born, and affluent. University back then was a more elite indulgence: as a percentage of the population, the entire student body in late-Diefenbaker-era Canada was a fifth as large as today.

Since then, new schools have proliferated. Legacy schools have ballooned. Among Canadian students, women now outnumber men, and the proportion of white versus non-white people is approaching parity. Outstanding student loans in Canada currently total $41 billion; compared to that figure, the national total in the mid ’60s was a rounding error above zero. That’s hardly surprising. In a world where university isn’t the purview of the affluent, you’d expect debt to rise. And if students today are concerned with their career prospects, that’s not because they’re captive to neoliberal ideology; it’s because they have a lot to lose.

The “blame neoliberalism” isn’t totally wrong, but it’s rooted in nostalgia for a postwar era that’s never coming back. If you believe that a more diverse, democratized university system is preferable to a rarified, elitist one, then you have to consider how the humanities might thrive in this world. And you have to take students’ economic anxieties and career ambitions seriously.

When people talk about the crisis in the humanities, they often refer to declining enrollment in literature programs. Perhaps this is the wrong metric. Perhaps the salient question isn’t “Are students majoring in English?” but rather, “Are students thinking humanistically in whatever course of study they choose?”

The answer doesn’t have to be no. As campuses have diversified, so have course offerings. Today, there are interdisciplinary programs — Peace, Conflict, and Justice Studies at U of T; Social and Political Thought at Western — that didn’t exist in postwar Canada. These programs are more vocational than an English degree, but they require humanistic work — reading closely, weighing up competing ideas.

In my own courses, I focus on analytical and conversational skills. I want my students to become more generous thinkers and lovers of the written word. This is a choice other instructors can make too. There may be fewer literature majors today than a decade ago. But it doesn’t follow that humanistic thought must go the same way.

Unless the robots destroy everything. But I don’t think they will. I won’t deny that generative AI has altered the dynamic in my courses, mostly in depressingly predictable ways. But something else has happened. I feel a newfound sense of urgency or intensity. Absences are down. Students read with a degree of focus that puts me to shame. I’ve long had a ban on screens in my classroom, but I now find little need to enforce that rule. Class discussions are so lively I lose track of time.

I didn’t expect this, but I wonder if the emerging threat of AI is restoring a sense of vitality to the humanistic mission. Maybe, in an era when seemingly everything — including thought itself — is mechanized, people feel compelled to fight for the humanistic tradition because they can more clearly see its value.

Instructors today should do what they must to AI-proof their courses, relying on exams or in-class discussions. But they should also make a more galvanizing pitch to young people.

Something like this: As a student of the humanities — regardless of your political beliefs or program of study — you are called upon to defend an imperiled tradition, one that’s older and more vital to human flourishing than TikTok, Grok, or Love Is Blind. The humanities don’t have to survive. But they will if you want them to.

This pitch won’t resonate with everyone. But I suspect it’s resonating with many people already.

Simon Lewsen is a freelance magazine writer and instructor at the University of Toronto. This essay was adapted from a longer article which was first published by The Local.

A note from the editors: Universities Canada is a podcast sponsor this month, but for clarity, this piece is not part of that agreement. Just a quirk of timing — after we saw the piece in The Local we asked for a version we could run here.

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