The wokest parts of higher education are the various ______ studies departments. You know, gender studies, Black studies, women's studies, and so forth. These are the disciplines that get the most criticism for being ultra-left, ultra-identity-oriented, and a disgrace to university standards in general. They also get pranked a lot. That's not entirely without cause, I think, but still, I got curious: how many of these people are there, anyway?
This was a little tricky to figure out until I hit myself on the head and just headed over to the Digest of Educational Statistics, which had the number of degrees granted in these fields in a single, neat line. Here it is:
Ah, sorry, that's not much help, is it? Let's zoom in:
Still not very helpful. Let's zoom in even further:
Finally we have it. In 2020, the various critical studies programs accounted for 0.36% of all bachelor's degrees granted. That's about 7,000 degrees out of 2 million total. Here's another look at that:
I dunno. These disciplines may or may not be credits to the academy, but after 50 years they account for a minuscule portion of degrees and they aren't growing. If this is a threat to the nation, or to Western civilization, I have a hard time seeing it. Just because they're loud and kinda nuts doesn't mean we have to pay so much damn attention to them.
". Just because they're loud and kinda nuts doesn't mean we have to pay so much damn attention to them." Geez, Kevin, tell us what you really think. Have a problem with ethnic/gender/cultural studies? Don't get a degree in it.
Well most of us do, so most of us don't.
But some people say....
Those studies are responsible for the moral and ethical decline of the United States of American since the 1950's.
Also responsible for mass shootings and and dogs and cats sleeping with each other.
So sayth the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Actually, Mike Johnson blames Darwinism for the increase in atheism and concomitant moral and ethical decline of western civilization. Of course, Darwin was a lifelong Christian, so you can understand why I have difficulty making the connection.
Not really. He did not like weighing in much on the religious debates raging around him and preferred to let Huxley fight those battles but when pressed he described himself as an agnostic
I have read that the death of his daughter Annie, age ten, broke his heart. His questioning of religion had been increasing, but after the loss, he could no longer believe in a benevolent God. It is a touching, very human story.
I have read that his pastor tried to comfort him, saying he should believe the daughter had gone to a better place and Darwin replied to the effect that he was unable to believe a thing only because it would comfort him to believe it.
"and Darwin replied"
From the dead? Link, please.
If, in the course of a long and wandering conversation, I mentioned that I had once read something (in the nature of an anecdote from a time long gone by), and someone asked me for the link to the source, I would probably tell him that I wasn't about to research my reading list of the past 70 years to try to satisfy his curiosity. And if it were a close friend who asked, I might reply, "What are you, daft?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Charles_Darwin
I'd also say some of them are loud and kinda nuts, as are some people in ALL majors. I was a STEM major, so I took the barest handful of non-science classes freshman year, but the number of rightwing nuts I met in my classes was not trivial. And they weren't particularly quiet about their generally right wing / libertarian nuttiness. The difference between left wing nuts and right wing nuts in college (besides the right wing ones being invariably huge assholes), is that there's a whole industry of right wing media devoted to digging out the worst possible examples of lefty nuttiness and blasting it across tv, cable, social media and print.
Exactly!! For decades the mainstream “liberal” media ignored the growing extremism and craziness on the right but whenever radicals (or just ill-informed ) on the left speak out the media gives them a megaphone which makes them seem to be a much, much larger part of the population. The media also seems to think that the only universities worth paying attention to are elite ones, not the ones the vast majority of people attend.
Eh, the libertariantech bros occasionally produce something useful. Navel gazing liberal X studies folks never do.
Well, ethnic studies includes Near Eastern Studies, East Asian Studies, Afro-American Studies, African Studies, etc., I'd have to say that group has indeed given us some useful things. Whether or not you see value in them is a separate matter.
Lol yeah destruction of economies is a really useful thing they give to us. Stfu.
Isn't that basically what he said?
Uh-oh. You’ve figured out the Fox News formula.
There are four trans high school athletes in Utah. And the entire legislature became hysterical figuring out how to ban them. Meanwhile, Salt Lake is turning into a toxic wasteland that within a couple of years will poison half the population and destroy the economy of the state, and none of them cares.
The sad thing on these charts is the lack of English and other humanities majors—the only students who actually have to write.
Within a generation or two there will no longer be written communication—only grunting and images. We’re doomed.
I can assure you that students in the hard sciences are required to write, and expected to do so at a high standard.
As a PhD molecular biologist for over 40 years, I can assure you that most science writing spans the entire gamut between bad and awful. I say that as someone who has authored or co-authored over 100 scientific articles that have been cited over 9000 times (h-index 48). Science writing isn't literature, it's journalism. The point isn't to entertain, it's to archive information.
When I was in college, I took a literature class most quarters. Turns out, the sort of writing prized by English professors doesn't work for science writing. I had to unlearn all the skills that got me As in English class.
"The point isn't to entertain" Have you seen some Nature or Science papers, and their press reports? There have been some real doozies over the years. I found cold fusion, arsenic based life and water remembers structures rather entertaining. 😉
We've made real and amazing progress in understanding the World around us. And even the "what where they thinking" papers and reports are evidence of the scientific method working.
I've done all kinds of things with water I would hope it would forget.
I've never been a scientist, but I've been a science student, which is what my post was addressed to. My professors did not require literary elegance, clarity was the priority, but they did demand correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax.
My Freshman Composition instructor had us exchange one of our papers for ‘grading’; I got dinged by the student who read mine, for using simple words and short sentences. My writing went downhill after that, in the course of getting a doctorate in experimental psychology: big words, complex sentences hedged all around with cautions and reservations on interpretation. Fortunately I left the academic world and spent my career focused on the design, simulation and testing of engineered systems.
My mom got her PhD in experimental psychology, then did a postdoc with Neal Miller at the Rockefeller. I wouldn't describe her prose as literature, but neither was is obfuscatory. Like it or not, her dissertation brought down the biofeedback work in Miller's lab.
"I got dinged by the student who read mine, for using simple words and short sentences."
Because long sentences with parenthetical clauses and exotic words are valorized in English departments. That's what I had to unlearn to be a successful STEM author. STEM majors would be better served taking journalism courses.
Joel, I totally agree with your last sentence. And BTW, I suspect that a lot of English Department majors who aspire to a career in "writing" (rather than journalism) would be well advised to start with journalism, then advance to "writing" after they mastered the techniques of organization, brevity and clarity.
And also BTW, my reply to the student who downgraded Ken Schultz's paper would be "I suppose the Nobel committee should have followed your advice and found somebody other than Ernest Hemingway for their 1954 prize."
I've been reading essays written by science majors for three decades, and while some of the students writing those papers do indeed write to a high standard, many do not.
FWIW, one of my college roommates was a chemistry major who was told by his advisor to keep doing the lab work his thesis was based on until a week before the thesis was due, leaving him very little time to write the actual thesis (let alone edit and rewrite). The reason given was that the data was the only thing that mattered, and even pedestrian writing would be more than good enough. That turned out to be very bad advice.
No they aren’t
Since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel I have seen and heard a lot of people in the mainstream media obsessing over what college kids on the left have been saying about Israel and their sympathy for Palestinians.
By the way, it seems business has been #1 since the latter '70s. (I had a pseudo-recollection that psychology may have been #1 at some point in the late '70s/early '80s, but apparently not.)
It would seem probable that there are many more students that take one or more "studies" courses as electives or even as minors than there are students who major in "studies". If those courses are a corrupting influence, presumably taking even one such course is going to corrupt the students.
Yeah, it's like academic Ebola. Nearly everyone infected dies. Amirite?
That's an inelegant way of saying that lots of people are blowing things way out of proportion when it comes to a perceived threat of the spread of political correctness in academia because their voices have an outsized representation in popular media.
Actually, I rarely see any "woke" people screeching like rabid howler monkeys passing a kidney stone. That seems to be the area reserved for conservative zombies that fire out waves of hogwash and, given the tiny fraction of people actually majoring in woke degrees, probably don't know a single actually woke person. But the sure are experts at practicing medicine without a brain... Loudly!!!
I wouldn't know. I'm just rewriting what KD was trying to express.
"Just because they're loud and kinda nuts doesn't mean we have to pay so much damn attention to them."
What's the basis that these disciplines are loud and nuts? Are you just going off a handful of sensationalist news stories, or do you actually have any direct experience with any of these programs or faculty at any institution?
Follow the links that Kevin provides in his sentence, "They also get pranked a lot."
Also, listen to any speech by Ron DeSantis. Yes, any.
I don't know, I feel like the ethnic/gender/cultural studies grads have kept the barista industry afloat.
And your mom has kept the prostitution industry afloat.
There's something very odd about the "Bachelor's degrees granted" data. I am a retired professor from a major state university. Practically everyone I know has a college degree. I have never heard of a Health major.
Is there really something that big that I'm missing?
Google is your friend.
https://www.worldwidelearn.com/education-rankings/25-healthcare-with-best-value/
Great site. As a Registered Nurse, I know my degree is from the health major field. I can't believe a college professor doesn't know this. Tunnel vision?
I have had many conversations with a sociology prof who worked in Black History. I once asked her if she felt ghettoized, because shouldn't it all just be history?
She said she got what I was thinking and thought about it all the time, but no, we need this. She felt scholars dedicated to looking at things that haven't been looked at was very valuable. Anyway, I liked her a lot, and miss the conversations. (Hi @socioprof if you're out there!)
I am disinclined to dump on "X studies" departments. They may sometimes say dumb things but then William Shockley was once a leading light in EE/Computing, and he was a racist shithead.
I'm not sure what "isn't it all history?" means. Your history professor worked on three specialized (and probably interrelated) fields in graduate school, then spent his or subsequent years in one of those three fields. Maybe they worked in Antebellum U.S. history, and focused on economic history. Maybe they worked on the early Byzantine Empire and focused on religious history. Maybe they worked on medieval France and focused on political history. Etc., etc. Those fields aren't exactly seen as ghettoized, and I don't really see why African history, or African American history would be any more so. The main difference would be that the chosen focus is somewhat novel, and the field is less well-established. Fifty years ago the same was true for people doing research on Japanese samurai, Greek courtesans, Indian emperors, or Jews in medieval Spain.
As a holder of a BA from UCLA as a history major my biggest concern was seeing social studies and history majors conflated. As a professor once remarked, "History has dates. Without that we'd just be sociology, you know." Horrors.
A better distinction would be that history uses sources, whereas social science uses data.
Nazi whore population is putting on a huge show at a congressional hearing right now.
you could cut the number of business degrees by 90% and i doubt you'd notice any economic loss
the world would be a far better place if trump and his progeny had gotten degrees in ethnic, gender, and cultural studies
Agree. And there’s data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/business/yourmoney/11harvard.html
The irony of the last chart is I constantly see pundits/govt leaders complain about useless degrees (humanities, etc) and how students should be learning more applied skills in the STEMs.
Meanwhile, Business degrees (way over valued) have been dominating for years. Never hear them say the same about those degrees. The best manger/sales person I've ever known never even had a college degree.
In my first engineering job, my boss' boss' boss was a guy who had never gone to college. His career path was assembly line worker -> foreman -> supervisor -> manager of small office department -> manager of larger office department -> manager of 100+ engineers. And he was effective.
The last chart shows “Theology” degrees just as prevalent. Does that make religion as minuscule a thing?
I'd like to know, but I don't: the question is what proportion of students NOT majoring in theology/_studies take/are required to take a course in theology/_studies, and what proportion of classes in other disciplines use tools/analyses from theology/_studies as part of their toolkit.
My impression is that it's far more likely for a history professor at a typical college to reference "misogyny" than "natural law", but I am not sure how to go about verifying that guess.
Here's a helpful way to think about it, "misogyny" is real and "natural law" isn't (except in a historical sense), so therefore it makes sense for there to be requirements about one and not the other.
The chart is for Bachelors degrees. Many fields are more popular as Masters degrees. For example, a person gets a Bachelors in History or other Humanities program followed by either a Masters in Theology or an MDiv.
For charismatics, there's no real need for any kind of formal education to be a preacher!
I'm surprised that Library Science even made the list. Library Science undergrad degrees exist mostly in universities that also have a MLIS. That's around 2 dozen schools.
I noticed that, too. I had no idea you could get a bachelor's of Library Science. It was always an MLS as far as I knew. What would you do with the BA, though? Any job you could want would require an MLS. Makes more sense to major in, say, History or Journalism for your BA, and then go on to an MLS program.
This brings up the question: "What is the minimum number of theologians required to create a schism?" Do they all have to walk into a bar to reach critical mass?
I have long been of the opinion that one of the underlying conservative errors is a lack of any sense of proportion. Or more precisely, prioritizing not on any utilitarian basis, but on how much things offend their weird, natural order based, morality. It's weird watching them condemn anti-semitism from the "left" after accepting it for years from their own fringe.
It fits into an increasingly common conservative view of reality. They want to control how people think, but many people don't think the way they want them to, so anyone trying to make people think differently than they already think is a disproportionate threat and evil. If they actually convince other people, they're an even bigger threat and probably corrupt and brainwashing impressionable people. (Note how things like "mind-control lasers" fit neatly into this world-view. There's no other explanation for how conservative ideas could be unpopular.)
Worse, they're mostly zero-sum thinkers: if you acquire any sort of benefit, that must have been at a cost to everyone else, including them.
So someone putting out controversial ideas from a Race Studies perspective is a triple threat: someone thinks differently from them, that person's ideas might actually lead to a change of some sort, and in the meantime, it's drawing attention and therefore hurts their own ideas. Control that by ignoring whatever merit (if any) may be present in the original ideas, instead ridiculing them, presenting them as wrongheaded or even evil, and suggesting they are an existential threat and must be countered. Whenever their ideas are mentioned, yours must have equal or superior place. You want reporters to refer to "Controversial agnostic Charles Darwin" and not "Revolutionary thinker Charles Darwin." Even better would be "Noted anti-Christian bigot Charles Darwin."
Note the intellectual inconsistency--idea X is ridiculous (no sane person would ever accept it) and also dangerous (too many people could accept it)--that demonstrates how much of this is about power and control, and not ideas. Worse, compromise becomes impossible, because at no point is the content of these ideas a part of the equation. What matters instead is their influence and the degree to which they challenge or support the existing conservative narrative.
If (like many liberals) you operate on the assumption that making other people's lives better is a benefit to you as well, not a cost, then engaging with people's ideas and incorporating or modifying your own in response is beneficial. If you operate on the assumption that changing your mind in a way that benefits someone else necessarily means that you have been harmed yourself, then why in the world would you be interested in an honest debate, much less compromising your understanding of the world? Allowing your opponents to speak hurts you; speaking for your opponents and controlling how others perceive them and their ideas gives you back control.
Looking at the last chart, what does a degree in 'Interdisciplinary' get you?
An education?
Ref. Saint John's College: https://www.sjc.edu/
Actually it means this,
How Interdisciplinary Studies Majors Work,
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-interdisciplinary-studies-majors-work
The complaining studies programs are the leftist social conservative political niche, the one thing without which they'd just be standing around hectoring strangers --or perhaps doing some actual good like union organizing.
I spent most of my career working at small colleges, so even though I am a Math Guy, I often knew most of the faculty across campus at some level. I had many colleagues in the various "studies" disciplines under discussion here who were smart, thoughtful, and nuanced in their positions (i.e., not "kinda nuts"), and I appreciated the insights they provided by looking at issues from a different angle. I learned a lot from them. I also had a much smaller number colleagues who seemed to use jargon as a weapon, and whose principal goal seemed to be to scold the rest of us about our various failings. These people were annoying.
That mix is a lot like what you'll find in *any* area of academia. The difference is that if someone in a math department says something dumb or intemperate, it's unlikely to end up on Fox News.
Without taking any view on their content, the number of degrees granted is not likely to be the most effective metric of influence.
Number of students taking courses in such (sans degree) is likely more realistic as a metric of reach and at least potential influence.
Among other things, this is a strawman of an argument:
"These disciplines may or may not be credits to the academy, but after 50 years they account for a minuscule portion of degrees and they aren't growing. If this is a threat to the nation, or to Western civilization, I have a hard time seeing it. Just because they're loud and kinda nuts doesn't mean we have to pay so much damn attention to them."
Off the top of my head I'm unaware of anyone arguing that the number of degrees awarded in "Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies at the university level" poses a threat. So, who is Kevin arguing against here?
There are several aspects of modern American universities which do, however, pose a threat. The emphasis on safe spaces instead of critical (and potentially jarring) thought processes, the prioritizing of social justice over academic freedom, and the "canceling" of anyone who speaks out against these emerging trends are all far more pertinent and chilling topics to consider when addressing problems in higher education.
And these problems are now defining characteristics of our schools. That's why nonpartisan organizations like FIRE have begun tracking the growing number of students, teachers, and even administrators who claim to censor themselves. And these academics censor themselves not just because they may be hesitant to argue with a mob but also because they fear very real-life consequences (loss of a job, physical harm) if they dare express any wrongthink.
These problems are not abstract. Nor are examples hard to find. Look at state-wide regulations in effect for all of California's Community Colleges. An issue that should be attracting nation-wide outrage has thus far produced one article that I know of in all of Liberal Media: "At stake: the First Amendment rights and academic freedom of 61,000 professors who teach 1.9 million students"
And in that Atlantic article we can read that the Blue and Democratic state of California now compels speech from its professors and extorts them to profess anti-racism on the threat of otherwise losing tenure. I ask you: where the hell is the damn outrage? If this were happening in a Republican state, the Liberal media would be providing round-the-clock condemnations.
Again from the Atlantic: "A public system of higher education cannot compel faculty members to 'promote' or 'advocate for' ideas with which they disagree, to 'articulate the importance' of approaches they deem overrated, or to describe the impact of something that they see as ineffectual. If you’re a progressive, imagine Governor Ron DeSantis passing a law requiring Florida college professors to be evaluated for hiring and tenure based on whether they promote, advocate for, and articulate the importance of color blindness and the positive impact of anti-communism. That leftists are pushing California’s rules does not make them less authoritarian."
These are the problems: a Leftist control of higher education that leads to narrow-minded censorship, dangerous groupthink, and, last but not least, an astonishing drop in the actual quality of education.
That is what I'm against. Regarding the bizarre premise of this post, however? I couldn't care less how many degrees are awarded in ethnic studies. Nor does anyone else. Nor does it have anything to do with the actual issues that desperately need to be addressed. So stop with the silly strawman arguments.