Teach Me What it is to Be Alive: The Fate of the Humanities

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The humanities, the study of human society and culture, look into the deepest parts of the soul. They not only allow humans to construct ethical frameworks and foundations for decision-making, but also expand the scope of a single person’s capacity to experience. 

Humans have been storytellers since the beginning of time. The humanities bridge the gap between readers and authors across cultures, oceans, and centuries. Novels and poetry expose the reader to the intangibility of another’s emotional landscape, and make it suddenly real and lifelike. We live in a world where we are increasingly disconnected from each other, especially on an emotional level. When the whole world feels like a race to be won, the study of the humanities is falling behind. 

At universities across America, enrollment rates of humanities majors have steeply decreased. In fact, from 2012 to 2022, humanities departments have suffered a loss of almost one-third of their undergraduate student population, falling from 13.1% to 8.8%. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has also decreased the perceived importance of these subjects—English, philosophy, etc. However, by producing an AI summary of a professor’s barely intelligible selection of Hegel, or shaving time off writing a twelve-page critique on Wuthering Heights, are we accidentally bypassing a privileged opportunity to better understand our own humanity? 

Fordham has an academic culture that fosters support for the Humanities. Students of every major have the opportunity to thoughtfully engage with our university’s unique, yet occasionally painful, core curriculum. I believe that this is something one should take advantage of. 

To understand why enrollment in the humanities is decreasing, I will first examine how higher education has been altered in recent decades. Thankfully, higher education is no longer gatekept from women and ethnic minorities as it was when universities were first established. However, higher education still represents a life that remains largely out of reach for low-income communities. The privatization of universities has only added to the economic strain that is felt by many families and degree-seeking individuals. Fordham University itself, although providing 281 million dollars in aid last year alone, is extremely costly and unrealistic for a majority of the United States’ population. 

The exorbitant cost of college tuition is increasingly being viewed as an investment in a lucrative career. This being the case, it is perhaps natural that the value of a liberal arts education has fallen in the eyes of many. While it may be true that Art History or Philosophy majors are not associated with high-paying fields like Finance or Business majors are, it is a grave mistake to devalue the skills learned in these disciplines. The analytical thinking demanded specifically by humanities is invaluable, not just to the job market, but also to our understanding of the world as well. 

Being well educated has always been a luxury, and this poses a serious issue. When the sole goal of attaining higher education becomes a higher networth, the very nature of education loses sight of its origins. Early philosophers believed that education was about Eudaimonia, the search for an understanding and love of what is good. Amidst so much inequality and economic struggle, is learning for the sake of what is good no longer viable? 

When I spoke with Lynne Beckenstein, an English lecturer here at Fordham University, she was more hopeful. She discusses the value of an education that combines the humanities with other disciplines, because a student’s “knowledge of their area or specialization can only be enriched by getting all these other skills and encountering these other ways of thinking.” 

In terms of the future of humanities amidst the growth of AI platforms, Professor Beckenstein believes that the abundance of AI-generated content will actually cause many to grow a newfound appreciation for human inflection and voice. As she says, “part of it is the knowledge that you are connecting with someone else.” 

I concede that our Core Curriculum at Fordham University has its flaws. If the liberal arts are to teach us truths about ourselves, I believe that, for example, female philosophers such as Weil or Wollstonecraft should be required reading, which is not currently the case. Fordham’s core currently consists of philosophy, theology, history, literature, and foreign languages, providing a comprehensive—though perhaps Westernized—foundation in those topics. Despite this, global history and the languages prove to be important spaces for culturally diverse dialogues that students may not be exposed to elsewhere. 

As the Manhattan Institute points out, a core curriculum makes students “well-rounded thinkers capable of tackling complex moral, social, and technological problems.” The liberal arts education Fordham offers is incredibly valuable at a time when some schools, such as Ohio State, are being forced to cut English and other humanities majors from its offered programs as another effect of financial strain on higher education. 

As society advances, ethical issues become increasingly difficult to parse in every field, and we should be able to look to our higher education to give us the foundation we need to address these issues. While I can’t definitively say what the future holds, I believe that the minute we become uninterested in our common experience and humanity, we write our own end. 

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This article was edited by Brianna Leathem-Brazzini and Adam Sharqawe.