No real classics in the last 40 years, students aren't majoring in HASS at all anymore.<p>At a high level HASS is more non-penetrable than any hard science where you can plug numbers in and test whether or not the equations they give you actually work.<p>Universities are now job training institutions where people go for credentials and get out, nothing more.<p>The students there don't join any of the extracurriculars or sports teams, they just get their STEM degrees and get out.<p>So HN, have the humanities and university system failed society?
> No real classics in the last 40 years<p>What's your definition of a classic? 40 years is a bit soon to tell if something is a classic, in my view. You need it to stand the test of multiple generations.<p>> students aren't majoring in HASS at all anymore.<p>Some are. Some aren't. In the past, some were, and some weren't. So... not much change.<p>> At a high level HASS is more non-penetrable than any hard science where you can plug numbers in and test whether or not the equations they give you actually work.<p>Yeah, that's because HASS <i>isn't</i> hard science, so it doesn't work like hard science. If you expect it to, that's your fault, not HASS's.<p>> Universities are now job training institutions where people go for credentials and get out, nothing more.<p>Some do. Some don't. Perhaps more do than used to.<p>> The students there don't join any of the extracurriculars or sports teams, they just get their STEM degrees and get out.<p>Some do. Some don't. Same as before.<p>> So HN, have the humanities and university system failed society?<p>You really sound like you came here with your own view (and an axe to grind), and you want HN to endorse it.<p>The humanities have in fact failed society, but not at all in the way you describe. People not going to extracurriculars has <i>nothing</i> to do with whether the humanities have failed society. (Extracurriculars aren't the humanities, and college students aren't society.)<p>First, the humanities have failed society by being hijacked. All the various flavors of Critical Theory have hijacked the humanities. They largely aren't the humanities any more; they're cheerleaders (and indoctrinators) for a particular narrow subset of views. They should be thinking and teaching much more broadly than that.<p>Second, the humanities seemingly forgot how to speak to the broader society, or else forgot the value of doing so. They speak (so far as I have seen) to each other, and to humanities students, but they speak little to the broader society. (Though it could be that, when they do so, I don't recognize it as "humanities", which would mean that they are in fact doing it well rather than badly...)
AFAIK the corrosive factor is the application of the primacy of group identity first and abandonment of science. Embracing stories and feelings while ignoring reproducible findings and falsifiable hypothesis.
I don't think any individual on this forum has enough information to answer this question without generalising from a sample size that is too small.<p>> The students there don't join any of the extracurriculars or sports teams<p>Really? Is this a broad trend? I thought this was is an acute 2020 symptom of epidemiology and epistemology.
New fields in humanities usually come in the form of "studies" majors, which have low applicative and monetary value compared to STEM fields.
How could they fail society? They have no formal expectations and it seems they are meeting what informal ones currently exist.<p>Not to mention they are comprised of society - is society failing itself a better question. I think in some ways we are failing, but identifying the true root causes will be difficult.