Peter Mandler

Recent claims about a "crisis of the humanities" have been overstated, warned Peter Mandler, a professor of modern cultural history at the University of Cambridge and president of the Royal Historical Society.

Mandler delivered a speech themed "The 'Crisis of the Humanities' in Comparative Perspective" to the Australian Historical Association a few days ago. He pointed out that in the past 50 or 60 years, there has been a move from elite to mass higher education.

It was not surprising that focus of higher education has shifted toward vocational training, he argued, "and the democratization of higher education necessarily broadened the portfolio of courses and thereby almost inevitably led to a serial decline in the share of degrees awarded in the traditional disciplines, both in the humanities and in the sciences."
 

Though treasury officials, industrialists and legislators have often presented science, technology, engineering and math as the subjects most essential to economic growth, the effect on students' choice of majors has been minimal, he said. "And the few occasions when humanities enrollments declined sharply were caused by other reasons."

He mentioned that the humanities have held up pretty well. "In Britain, even by the narrowest definition of the humanities, the absolute number of humanities students has increased fivefold since 1967, and by the broader definition almost tenfold. In the US, over a period of much slower expansion, their numbers have still doubled."
 

"Talk of a crisis triggered by a decline of a percentage point or two does seem like an over-reaction that is likely to contribute to rather than ameliorate the alleged problem," he said.

Wang Youran is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.