Thoughts on this op-ed in Chronicle of Higher Education?

[EliEverIsAHero]

The author is quite scathing toward what he argues is the "Business School-ification" of the Humanities. 

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-hu...humanities

[Charles Fout]

The author is quite scathing toward what he argues is the "Business School-ification" of the Humanities. 

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-hu...humanities

1. It was annoying that I had to establish an account to read the article.As you may well know, my bogus University and my bogus academic titles only exist on April 1.

2. For what is the author advocating? I was hoping he would clarify in the final paragraph:

"It is time for committed humanists to get over the idea that these same institutions offer the only setting in which humanistic inquiry might be collectively pursued. This does not mean we want to replace them, or that we must, individually, abandon them. Many of us will remain insider-outsiders, perhaps for the rest of our careers. But it is time now, at least, to begin building parallel institutions that can exert some real pressure, that can let the universities know just how deeply they’ve failed, by modeling a truer and more beautiful alternative."

Really?

What "truer and more beautiful" alternative is he on about?

[SteveFoerster]

The author is so tediously pompous that I almost didn't make it to the end, but I'm glad I did because he eventually says something useful: those interested in the humanities don't have to cooperate through a crumbling higher education infrastructure, they can use the Internet to build their own small scale schools and networks.

[MichaelGates]

I think my reaction to the article can be found in the Humanities themselves.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks" i
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 2)

[LevelUP]

Many colleges and students have shifted attention toward business, STEM, and some social science fields because those majors are seen as more practical, more measurable, and more directly tied to jobs. 

History teaching can become distorted when it reduces the past to a simple moral script of oppressors and victims. That can flatten complexity, ignore historical context, and stop students from understanding how people at the time actually thought, lived, and justified their choices.

AI has not created the crisis in the humanities so much as revealed it.

[wow]

History teaching can become distorted when it reduces the past to a simple moral script of oppressors and victims. That can flatten complexity, ignore historical context, and stop students from understanding how people at the time actually thought, lived, and justified their choices.

The problem is that the loudest voices trying to change this seem to want to turn history into a story about heroes and bad guys, which creates the same flattening issues. Reducing history into moral or inspirational lessons is to misunderstand it.

[EliEverIsAHero]

History teaching can become distorted when it reduces the past to a simple moral script of oppressors and victims. That can flatten complexity, ignore historical context, and stop students from understanding how people at the time actually thought, lived, and justified their choices.

The problem is that the loudest voices trying to change this seem to want to turn history into a story about heroes and bad guys, which creates the same flattening issues. Reducing history into moral or inspirational lessons is to misunderstand it.

Anecdotally, the best History classes I ever took in undergrad and during my first Master's degree dealt with Maoist China and Soviet Central Asia; not stories of heroes and villains or villainous oppressors and dignified oppressed, as it were, though one can try to awkwardly fit that lens with a good deal of effort. Instead, what I got was a narrative, presented with a touch of dark sarcasm, about people trying to fix things and only breaking them further. A motif I found generalizable to much of the world around me at the time (2010s).