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Do the Humanities Have a Future? Strategies for Sustaining the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century
Symposium Overview
On Saturday, May 22, 2010, Antioch College’s Arthur E. Morgan Fellows hosted the fifth in a series of symposia focusing on issues in higher education and society. The topic of this event was: "Do the Humanities Have a Future? Strategies for Sustaining the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century".
How can we persuasively advocate for the importance of philosophy, literature, history, and foreign languages in the globalized world of contemporary higher education? What should a compelling new vision of the Humanities look like? As William Chace recently notes in The American Scholar, the numbers of Humanities majors dropped from 30 percent to less than 16 percent in a single generation, and are now below 8 percent. Job openings in Humanities disciplines have plummeted to all-time lows. Resource-strapped administrators increasingly view the Humanities as luxuries, while vocational fields (business, engineering, health professions) receive ever-greater support. If the downward spiral continues, the Humanities may virtually die out in U.S. higher education.
Panelists:
- Frank Donoghue, The Ohio State University Department of English and author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
- Judy Wu, The Ohio State University Department of History, Women's Studies, and Asian-American Studies
- Rebecca Wanzo, The Ohio State University Department of English and Women's Studies
- Jim Malarkey, Chair of Humanities and General Education, Antioch University McGregor
- Shawn Casey, Doctoral Candidate in English and Literacy Studies at The Ohio State University
- Jean Gregorek, Arthur E. Morgan Fellow and former Associate Professor of Literature, Antioch College.