Fewer and fewer students choose to major in the humanities — why?
In today’s Martin Center article, English professor Rob Jenkins argues that it’s mainly because the faculty have chosen to turn their fields into exercises in abstruse academic gibberish.
Jenkins points to the rise of deconstructionism. He writes, “Sure, scholars might disagree about what a writer means; in such disputes lie all the fun of reading and discussing texts. But that doesn’t mean the writer didn’t mean anything, or that a work can mean whatever someone wants it to mean. Such thinking was utterly foreign to me. Nor did I see the point. If a work of literature doesn’t really mean anything, or if it only means whatever you think it means, what is the value in studying it?”
Such theorizing did plenty of damage, but the blatant politicization of courses drives even more students away. “Any art,” Jenkins writes, “that promotes Marxism—including its most recent iteration, ‘Critical Race Theory’—is therefore ‘good’ art, while those works that ‘fail’ in that regard are necessarily ‘bad.’ By extension, artists who represent the supposed ‘oppressors’—namely, white males—are rejected en masse, regardless of their ability or accomplishments.”
Only the truly “woke” want to engage in such studies. Most students have gone elsewhere.