Humanities professors are aghast at the suggestion science and technology degrees should be promoted, while colleges should charge more for useless ones that make it hard for graduates to find career-oriented and life-sustaining employment.

Thomas K. Lindsay of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation takes a look at the origin of the collapse of both traditional humanities programs and its impact on the country in Real Clear Policy:

A crusade by humanities professors against Florida governor Rick Scott may be, contrary to their intentions, another sign of the suicide of American education. Scott has proposed lowering tuition rates for students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects in order to bolster Florida’s economy. A petition begun by University of Florida professors labels this effort a “threat to the humanities” that would sacrifice education’s nobler purposes for mere job training.

This objection comes too late. For decades, a number of academics, Allan Bloom notably among them, have decried the 50-year dismantling of a required, common-core curriculum in the humanities, arguing that what makes higher education genuinely higher is its pursuit of two objectives that transcend job training. The first is civic education, which is indispensable because no nation can expect to be, in Jefferson’s words, “both ignorant and free.” The citizenry’s capacity for self-government is not a gift; it must relearned to be re-earned by every generation, which requires serious study of the moral, political, and philosophic foundations of our democratic republic.

Universities abdicated this crucial role 50 years ago. Few colleges require even one course in American government. The Department of Education finds only one-third of undergraduates today ever complete such a course. This is more than indifference; it is aversion. Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American colleges and Universities, finds “not just a neglect of but a resistance to college-level study of United States democratic principles.”

…The irony is gagging thick. Having abandoned the possibility of free minds and devoted, instead, to prosecuting the injustice of free markets, the humanities now find themselves indicted by the very market ethos they seek to destroy. Everyday folks may not know much about Socrates and Plato, but their common sense declares, “Whatever these majors are selling, we’re not buying anymore.” More ironic, these humanities professors are defending a house they themselves vandalized long ago.

We who have been contesting the universities’ war on intellectual and political liberty take no solace in “I told you so,” for the loss is not theirs alone. Serving hemlock to genuine learning, the humanities have set democracy on the course toward barbarism.