For Journal #7: What assessments of the Humanities generally or of your particular major/minor area of study do you see being made in current media?  Find an article to summarize, comment on, and share with the class. Good sources could include papers of record like the New York Times, or magazines that publish longer articles for a general audience (The Atlantic, The Economist). Specialized publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed provide focus but wouldn’t necessarily represent the views you’ll encounter in the general public. Transcripts of interviews such as you might find on YouTube or articles from web-based publications are all viable.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking

I found an article from the New Yorker that was published in February 2019 titled, “The Decline of Historical Thinking”. Written by Eric Alternman, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, PhD of History, and writer for The Nations examines the downward trend of history majors and impacts it can have on our society. Specifically, Alternman finds that while this applies to students of all demographics from colleges and universities across the country, elite schools appear to be not as impacted. He discusses that while many smaller universities or those in rural regions are struggling to sustain their funding and enrollment numbers for their history departments– programs at top ivy league schools such as Yale, Columbia, and Princeton are only evolving. He proposes that the name and legacy of these institutions on degrees of students compensate for the “lack” of career certainty that surrounds the humanities and liberal arts. 

To support this, Alternman takes a macro perspective to the issue, highlighting that almost all humanity majors have experienced a decline in pursuance compared to STEM-based majors which have increased. He attributes multiple factors to this phenomenon, firstly tracing it back to the 2008 financial crisis and the insecurity it ingrained in households throughout the nation. To many, studying a major within the humanities, such as history, is a privilege due to the multitude of career pathways it could result in when comparing it to the concreteness of nursing or engineering. I agree with this as from my experience as a history major, I am asked “what do I plan on doing with that degree”. I am sure that this is not as frequent of a question as someone studying art might experience, however I credit that to most people’s limited perspective of what a history degree could be the foundation for. More often than not, I am placed under the label of a “future history teacher”, which while is a popular career path for many students studying history is not the only thing the degree leads to especially in today’s world. 

Alterman also discusses the trend of history teaching, using the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point as a case study to explore how government policies surrounding teaching impacts the rate of which students are pursuing history. At the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, the history department has been dealing with a decline of declared history majors which have resulted in the History department being on the chopping block in order to meet budget-cuts with the least amount of impact. It’s proposed that the general decline in teaching is a result of measures taken to limit the rights of teacher unions and benefits that are making teaching less appealing. There is also the issue of funding, as many individual funders chose to give money to programs that support STEM-initiatives over those that involve the humanities. 

I enjoyed reading this article and feel as if it did a good job contextualizing the issue of the decline in the study of history throughout the past decades. It made me think about UNE and the small history program we have here. I think that although the size of the history department is small it is still making efforts to evolve. Towards, the end of the article, Alterman proposes how the lack of historical thinking will affect the United States in the future, pointing out how history provides critical thinking an