THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Is it time to defund the humanities?

Is it time to defund the humanities?

As I have often pointed out, I am a big fan of much in the humanities but I don't see it as deserving of taxpayer subsidy

My own first degree was an Arts degree but I think the argument in favour of Humanities involvement in education is greatly over-egged. I am not at all sure that any arts and humanities courses should be publicly funded. There is very little evidence that they do any good. All we get are high flown assertions to that effect

I myself greatly enjoyed my studies of Homer, Thucydides, Chaucer, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven etc. and still do -- but I can't see that I needed to go to university to acquire that familiarity

Much of the cost of running our universities and other centres of higher education is borne by government, meaning the taxpayer. Therefore, to reciprocate, one of the main responsibilities of these institutions should be to produce graduates who meet the needs of society. This is not to suggest that we should exclude the ‘follow your dreams’ brigade from higher education. But funding, facilities and priority should be given to subjects that will contribute more to our national prosperity and societal requirements. These subjects would include engineering, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, physics and other sciences intended to improve our skill deficiencies, our industrial productivity and to encourage more entrepreneurs. To improve our public services, we need to expand training in medicine, dentistry, nursing, other healthcare professions as well as social work of different kinds.

The state should consider reducing university funding for the arts and humanities. Would our society suffer by having fewer graduates in English, history, geography, modern languages and other subjects, or would it prosper by redirecting that university funding to more beneficial subjects? Many readers will be enraged by that suggestion and I will be accused of being an intellectual philistine attempting another form of social engineering. On the contrary though, this is merely being pragmatic. As a nation, we should cut our cloth to suit our need.

A case in point is the cap on medical student places of 7,500 annually which has been static for almost a decade with the exception of A level grade inflation in 2020 and 2021. This number of training slots is totally inadequate for the needs of the NHS. To plug the gap, the General Medical Council registered 53,296 doctors from abroad between 2016 and 2021. The cap exists because of the costs of training doctors. There is no additional funding available but that could change if places for less essential subjects were reduced.

It is not to insult the humanities or other subjects to point out the problem we have in this country with ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. The term was even expressed by Margaret Hodge when Minister of State for Universities in the Tony Blair Labour government. She described it as ‘a degree where the content is not as rigorous as one would expect and where the degree itself may not have huge relevance in the labour market.’ That was 20 years ago and priorities have not changed. If anything more non-academic modules have been introduced.

Dame Margaret’s comment would have annoyed her boss who in 1999 had expressed a target of 50 per cent of school leavers going to university, a target recently increased to 70 per cent by the Tony Blair Foundation. That ambition would guarantee the creation of more unsuitable subjects especially for less able students who would be laden with debt from tuition fees. Why does Tony Blair not listen to his son Euan and voices from industry who advocate more apprenticeships?

By reducing funding for the humanities, students would begin to not think of university life as a goal in itself or as being a means of finding independence and liberation from parental influences. Instead the primary consideration would be the utility of their subject. There are of course, exceptions to this rule at the moment. The brightest students from the best universities studying the most esoteric subject may effortlessly move into finance, management consultancy or the law. There will also be scientists who fail in the job market. But it is the average student from the average university gaining the average BA degree who will have the most difficulty finding relevant employment. It is for them that this article is written. They should not suffer because of misguided career advice and a flawed state university funding policy.

The problem may be self-limiting as universities push for tuition fees to be increased closer to the £24,000 per year paid by foreign students. Prospective university students whose chosen subject has little relevance to the job market may be reluctant to take the excessive debt gamble. A glance at tables linking degrees to graduate entry salaries or to the chances of getting a job with that degree would be a wise move for most young people.

Part of the problem is that the decision on approximate career paths must be taken while selecting A level subjects. That is how we have arranged our higher education. At that age, students may be more attracted to softer subjects in preference to the greater discipline and demands of science subjects. That truth delegates greater responsibility to schools and to realistic career advice. Schools have the responsibility to guide students to good jobs.

I’m not suggesting that schools should indoctrinate students into science subjects but the advantages, importance and greater challenges of the broad range of studies defined by the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) should be explained. Science and mathematics teachers could be encouraged to make the case to counterbalance the preference some pupils at that age have for softer subjects. They could be paid more than other teachers given the greater relevance of their subjects. And the state should itself reduce funding and therefore the number of humanity places available so that only the most rigorous and successful courses continue.

Science and technology look forward to a progressive future while English and history look back into the past and at best, attempt reinterpretation and revision. These subjects can be learnt alongside STEM subjects. And in my experience, many scientists are also hungry culture vultures – there’s no reason students can’t enjoy the arts outside of a university degree.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/is-it-time-to-defund-the-humanities/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Is it time to defund the humanities?

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