“What are you going to do with that degree?” A question often asked whenever the answer to what you’re studying isn’t STEM related. The question, although laced with judgement, is fair when you consider the current academic situation we find ourselves in.
The humanities have been abandoned, and although that may sound rash, it’s our reality. Cuts to funding imposed nationally affect professionals and academics, which impacts research, which impacts findings. Those findings impact the world, but no one wants to see it like that. Instead, they link the humanities to aesthetics and pleasure. However, the devaluation of humanities is evidently parallel to the decline of quality of life in our society.
According to The Prindle Institute for Ethics, the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports the field, has been forced to terminate over 1,000 grants and 65% to 85% of its staff since Donald Trump took over office earlier this year. These decisions impact education, preservation, and “research in the arts and letters.”
The precarity of the academic development of the field also limits its professional practice. When our studies are limited, it’s hard to overcome uncertainty while entering the professional world.
Beyond an individualistic impact, the defunding and abandonment of the humanities damages society as a whole. It declines into our current panorama: a new wave of conservatism that ends in the battle for human rights. It results in the intent to redefine what it is to be “human”; one that fits the criteria of those who govern us.
The limits implemented by this new scenario not only blur the importance of the humanities, it masks the real impact of the discoveries made in the field. It creates a domino effect that explains our decline into now.
Now, what exactly encompasses the humanities? According to Britannica, they are considered “those branches of knowledge that concern themselves with human beings and their culture or with analytic and critical methods of inquiry derived from an appreciation of human values and of the unique ability of the human spirit to express itself.” These branches of knowledge include the study of languages, literature, the arts, history, and philosophy.
How are we to communicate without languages? How are we to develop critical thinking and analytical processes without literature? How are we meant to interpret our existence and all that surrounds us without the arts and philosophy? And, most importantly, how are we meant to learn from our past mistakes without history?
It’s often said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” As a journalism student, when we’re shown newspapers during fascist times, they don’t simply rhyme with today’s content — they’re almost identical.
Now, none of this is to say that other fields don’t matter. Science is essential to our survival, and the rest for our livelihood. However, the same importance should be given to each field. Instead of redirecting all of our efforts into which area of study makes the most money, we should reconsider the true meaning of “working to live.”
Each field compliments the other. Our greatest engineers were also our greatest artists. Science and arts go together like ocean water and sand do. They are completely different, but one could not exist without the other. In losing the humanities, we lose ourselves.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society