The Dean Dad is annoyed with the New York Times, for an article about how the recession is affecting the humanities. The whole piece is worth a read, but he singles out a quote from the former president of my alma mater:
Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.
As the Dean Dad notes, this doesn’t really fit with the narrative of dropping enrollments. There’s another problem with this, though, which is that courses are not uniformly appealing to students. Or, put another way, when they say that 25% of students were unable to get into a humanities course, they may literally mean that 25% of students were unable to get into a humanities course.
This is a problem that shows up locally with general education science. All students are required to take two science classes for graduation, and to better track enrollments, we’ve moved to a central registration system for “Gen Ed” science classes aimed at non-science majors. And what we’ve found is that there are huge disparities in the number of students trying to get into various courses. Hundreds of students will attempt to register for Gen Ed biology classes (“Sex and Sexuality” was a perennial favorite), but Gen Ed astronomy will have empty slots on the first day of class.
Some of these same students will then complain, as spring-term seniors, that they tried to meet the requirement, but were unable to get into any Gen Ed science classes. What they really mean is that they were unable to get into any of the sections of the one Gen Ed science class that they wanted to take. There were spots available in Gen Ed astronomy, but it has a reputation of being difficult and requiring some math, so they weren’t willing to take it.
(I have zero sympathy for these students, by the way. Until and unless they start offering humanities classes targeted at science majors– “Poetry for Physicists,” in which you only read poems that rhyme, and have really obvious symbolism– I don’t want to hear about how unreasonably difficult it is to force non-science majors to take classes that might challenge them a little bit.)
So, there is a way for both the Times‘s preferred narrative and Frank Oakley’s anecdote to be true. It’s entirely possible that large number of students find themselves closed out of particular humanities classes– “History of Western Europe” aka “History 200: It Looks Like I Took It in High School,” for example– while demand for the humanities in general– history classes involving Europe, Asia, or Africa– could be low.