Over at Inside Higher Ed, my Union colleague Christine Henseler has a piece arguing that colleges and universities should strive to attract more men into the “humanities” disciplines, to correct the gender imbalance there as well as the opposite imbalance in STEM fields that gets so much attention. I find this an interesting idea, in a lot of ways, and it connects a bit to stuff I’ve said repeatedly on Twitter in recent years.
I’d like to see this get taken seriously, in the same way that the push to recruit more women into STEM fields has. I would note, though, that in the same way that recruiting women into STEM fields has required not just marketing but self-examination, any serious push to draw more male students into humanities majors will also require a multi-faceted approach. This would necessarily include looking carefully at whether there are features of the scholarship and particularly the pedagogy of these fields that actively push male students away.
I’m not confident that this will happen, but I think it needs to. Simply attributing the lack of male students in these fields to “toxic masculinity” training them to be averse to exploring feelings seems like the mirror image of the claim that “women are naturally more interested in living things” that’s often made to justify the surplus of men in physical sciences. It’s a cop-out that pushes the problem off to vast, implacable societal forces and away from the responsibility of faculty to meet students where they are.
This also connects to a common complaint among current and former science majors, namely that while STEM departments work very hard to create special courses catering to non-majors (selecting special topics and building conceptual curricula that present the subject matter with minimal math), students majoring in STEM fields are expected to take regular major-sequence courses in the non-STEM fields. For a long time I wrote this off as merely whining, and in fact once pseudonymously argued in Inside Higher Ed that the right answer was to work to eliminate “Physics for Poets” courses. More recently, I’ve started to think there’s something to these complaints that ought to be taken more seriously– that maybe we should instead work on creating “Poetry for Physicists” courses that engage STEM majors in ways that they might find more congenial than bog standard English 101.
I’ve talked about this before, and probably will do so more in the future. I have to go teach a writing class, though, so for the moment I’ll just leave it there. I did want to give Henseler’s piece what signal-boost I can, though, because I think it’s an angle worth exploring.
I think there is a difference between STEM classes and humanities classes (regardless of what sex you are), which is: money. Not to be too crass, but a lot of the students who are in STEM majors are there not because they are so tremendously interested in science, but because they have been told that that’s the best way to get a good-paying job.
In college I remember having a discussion about the “physics for poets” vs “poetry for physicists” dichotomy with an English-major friend of mine. Another way to think about it: all the required humanities classes are “easy,” at least for the serious aspiring humanities scholar. It’d be like making aspiring physicists start with “physics for poets.” So it’s really the serious humanities students who are getting cheated, not the physicists.
Second: the introduction to music class I took to satisfy the arts requirement really was a “physics for poets” equivalent in the humanities. Being a regular classical music listener, and having had a few years of piano lessons, it was completely trivial in a way that “physics for poets” would be trivial to physics majors.
Third: I argue that the contemporary humanities curriculum and focus is largely still a reflection of what upper-class families in the 19th century considered essential to becoming a cultured elite. Most bemoaning of the status of humanities ignores what I think is this elephant in the room. This piece can be read as reinforcing the idea that higher education is primarily about acculturation, with phrases like “their general spectrum of expression and ideas becomes rigid and stunted, thus limiting and endangering society as a whole.”
Fourth: I don’t see how women earning 61% of masters and 54% of doctoral degrees in the humanities supports the argument that there aren’t enough men. And the percentage of female humanities teachers is the same as the overall percentage of female primary and secondary teachers: this isn’t about the humanities, it’s about teachers. And symphony orchestras are (still?) about 2/3 men. And if you consider music more broadly, there is no shortage of men in the music performance careers that don’t need to wend through college first. And I think overall the arts are roughly evenly split, between men and women.
Fifth. to “encourage boys and men to pursue professional careers in the arts and humanities”. What careers? Which is to say, making a living in the arts and humanities is even more a matter of expert performance than the sciences, to make reference to my earlier comments here. Why encourage anyone to try to make a living as a novelist or bassoonist or sculptor, who isn’t obsessed with it to begin with? There are many more aspirants than jobs to begin with.
Sixth. Which brings me back to the (implicit) point about acculturation. Even if they don’t become professional artists, we’re supposed to believe that exposure to the arts and humanities is uniquely suited to making people better. You can look at regrettable decisions by non-humanities leaders and, with enough hindsight bias, decide that more humanities would have led to a better outcome. But this sort of claim really needs more evidence, not just a repackaging of early 20th century educational aspirations.