Beyond Profit: The Value of the Humanities

“When privileging science and math in the curriculum at the expense of the humanities, education sacrifices what is most essential: the important civic function of the humanities. As a result, we produce ‘a nation of employees, not citizens.'”

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from the author’s 2023 book Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education, which was released with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

In April of 2021, writing in the Washington Post, philosopher Cornel West and writer Jeremy Tate criticized the administrative decision to dissolve the classics department at Howard University, the only historically black college or university at the time with a classics department. Despite protests and efforts to save the department, in 2022, it was eliminated. It must be noted that as grim as this decision appears, limited instruction in classics continues within the university on an ad hoc basis.

We encounter an even more alarming situation when turning our attention to the recent activity at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam, where administrators are in the process of eliminating programs in the humanities. In October of 2023, the university announced that over the next three to four academic years, nine academic programs would be phased out. Of the nine, seven are courses and majors from the liberal arts, and they include undergraduate degrees in such fields as philosophy, art history, and theatre.

From these examples, it is clear that many universities favor academic disciplines that efficiently deliver a tangible and quantifiable education and are embracing a utilitarian or instrumental model for schooling. History professor Peter W. Fettner shares similar sentiments with both West and Tate and attributes the decline of the humanities to the trend of corporatizing the structure of the university. This, unfortunately, embraces the misguided assumption that the purpose of a “democratic” education can be understood in terms of vocationalism and instrumentalism. With this line of thought, higher education must encompass concrete, quantitative, and standardized markers for academic achievement, inextricably linked to economic productivity.