Cultural critic William Deresiewicz thinks it is getting harder and harder for people to find humanities-based learning in the modern academy. He offers some alternatives.–places were one can read deeply and engage ideas in such a way that might nourish the soul. Here is a taste of his piece:
Again, I see the logic, it is just what many students want, but what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends. Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.
And that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense. That they hadn’t been touched. That they hadn’t been changed. That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.
I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.) They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for. Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”
That student’s name was Matthew Strother. It was through Matthew—he was in his early thirties by this point, and still seeking—that I learned about perhaps the two most prominent initiatives to have sprung up off-campus of late in response to the hunger for serious study. The first is the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 2012 and now offers dozens of courses a year both in person and online. Its seminars meet three hours a week for four weeks. Recent offerings include classes on Melville’s The Confidence Man, Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, fairy tales, and Mesopotamia. With its leftist commitments, BISR also runs courses in critical theory and the social sciences: Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, “Racial Capitalism,” “The Politics of Pregnancy.”
The second initiative Matthew alerted me to is the Catherine Project, which launched in 2020. Its vibe is very different from BISR’s. BISR was founded by a group of Columbia doctoral students. The Catherine Project was founded by Zena Hitz, a teacher at the St. John’s great books college in Annapolis, a Catholic convert, and, for three years, a resident of Madonna House, a monastic community in eastern Ontario. BISR is named for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, birthplace in the 1930s of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social thought. The Catherine Project is named for Catherine of Alexandria, an early Christian martyr, and Catherine Doherty, Madonna House’s founder.
BISR is explicitly political as well as educational; its Praxis program offers workshops and other resources to labor unions and nonprofits. The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).
Add to these the Zephyr Institute, founded in 2014, which runs humanities-based programs in Silicon Valley. Add the Hertog Foundation’s humanities program, which since 2020 has conducted online seminars for mixed groups of undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals. Add the reading groups and salons that have been proliferating both in-person and online. And many more initiatives, no doubt, that I have yet to learn of.
A number of factors play into this upsurge. One, of course, is the internet, as both a medium of study and a means to publicize offline opportunities. Another is the sense that academic humanities departments have long been inimical to humanistic inquiry—a major reason college students have felt cheated of it—as opposed to political tub-thumping. A former student who did an MFA in fiction at a major public university remarked that while the program’s writing instruction was only so-so, at least the workshops afforded the chance to really read, unlike what went on in what he called the institution’s “clownish” English department.
A third is less obvious. The long-term crisis in academic employment—the shift to adjunct labor, the glut of PhDs—has created a large pool of qualified instructors only loosely attached to, or entirely detached from, the academy. BISR’s faculty, almost all of whom have doctoral degrees, include not only adjuncts (and appointed professors), but book editors, full-time writers, a university librarian, an archaeologist, and a psychoanalyst-in-training. As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story.Â
Read the entire piece here.