In 2023, I attended an annual conference on the humanities. In a conversation over lunch, a program manager for a state humanities council, whose job is to review grant applications for humanities projects in their state, asked me what I did. After I replied that I was a philosophy professor, she responded, “Oh, I didn’t know that philosophy was a humanities [discipline].”

That’s Claire Katz, professor of philosophy and associate provost at Texas A & M, in a recent article for Public Humanities, “Stolen Valor: How the Humanities ‘@ Work’ Are Hidden in Plain Sight“.

The article discusses the general lack of understanding of what the humanities are, what they do, and why they’re valuable, and focuses on something that may be both a cause and effect of this situation: the attempt to present and teach the particular skills that emerge from a humanities education without actually providing the humanities education.

Before turning directly to higher education, Katz looks at two contrasting examples of how the business world acknowledged the value of the humanities: a laudable program run by Bell Telephone in the 1950s, and the “gimmicky” Shakespeare-themed leadership seminars run by Kenneth and Carol Adelman for the past 25 years or so that “trade not only on the prestige of a humanities education… but also on the very old-fashioned role of the humanities in cultivating an effective leader.”

Of the latter, Katz writes:

They have taken what would be part of a classical liberal arts education that an individual could receive as part of their college education and they have repackaged it as a dumbed down yet very expensive program for developing effective leaders… In other words, the college education in the humanities, which was effective at training leaders but is now viewed as valueless in the university, has been replaced with the million-dollar business offering training workshops, which do not even rise to the level of being described as a diluted humanities education, to which companies pay a hefty fee to send their executives-in-training.

But the problem is not just this counterfeiting of the humanities by the business world. There is a parallel problem inside institutions of higher education, with various forms of “humanities across the curriculum” programs that have developed over the past 40 years:

Examining the university, we can see how the skills that have been separated from the humanities are included in the learning outcomes of most of the non-humanities disciplines. Never having been taught the connection these skills have to a humanities education, faculty in the academic community integrate the humanities skills into their courses or leadership programs (e.g., critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and appreciating different perspectives) without giving explicit credit to the humanities, in part because they simply do not know to do so. As a result, the connection between these skills and the humanities from which they are derived is buried. Moreover, the distinctive way that these skills develop through humanities courses remains unknown.

We might look to the “X across the curriculum” programs, which proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as a source for this trend on our campuses. These programs, which included Writing Across the Curriculum, Ethics Across the Curriculum, and Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum, emerged out of the view that the teaching of certain skills should not be shouldered by a single discipline but rather it should be shared across the campus…

Believing that the acquisition of these skills would be reinforced if they were learned in courses across the disciplines, the proponents of the “across the disciplines” programs were admirable in their dedication to introduce these skills across the university… Unfortunately, multiple unforeseen problems emerged. Critical thinking was not uniformly defined, faculty teaching writing in their courses were themselves not confident writers, and the ethics courses that were discipline-specific were narrow in focus, in addition to not having agreement about how ethics should be defined or what the outcome of the course should be. Additionally, the “across the disciplines” approach gave rise to a sense that one need not have scholarly expertise to teach ethics, for example.

Although the proponents of the X across the curriculum programs would insist that these programs are intended to enhance or supplement a humanities education rather than replace it, the effect seems to have been the reverse.

Focusing on her home discipline of philosophy, Katz writes:

This approach excised, for example, the teaching of critical thinking from the discipline of philosophy and philosophical argument so that critical thinking was viewed as a discrete skill rather than one that is embedded in a robust humanities education where students would engage in close readings of a text, provide evidence for an interpretation, consider alternative perspectives, and analyze arguments. Severed from philosophy (not to mention rhetoric and literature), the critical thinking engaged in these other disciplines is absent of perspective taking, careful listening, and analytical thinking. This one-dimensional approach to critical thinking, especially in fields like engineering, became narrowly focused on problem-solving rather than on learning to formulate questions and identify problems. Taught in this way, critical thinking is not associated with the humanities or the role the humanities play in the cultivation of judgment. Severed from the humanities, critical thinking cannot realize its full power.

In short, “siphoning off the skills associated with a humanities education and then claiming the development of those skills as part of one’s discipline shortchanges the humanities, the other disciplines, and our students.”

The article is open-access. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Discussion welcome.