[Editor’s Note: I recently asked Neil and a few others to read Maureen Dowd’s column “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ with Real Frankensteins at Large” (NY Times, May 27), hoping to get some interesting thoughts on the subject of education and/or artificial intelligence (AI). Neil’s is the first response I am sharing.]
Maureen Dowd mocks students at Marymount University in Virginia for disappearing into their phones, watching wacky videos, and exchanging flippant, shorthand tweets and texts, and she suggests that’s why the trustees there voted unanimously to phase out majors such as English, history, art, philosophy, and sociology.
But Dowd doesn’t even mention the real reason Marymount College probably abandoned the humanities. How does she write her column without addressing the Critical Race Theory politicization of these subjects and the resulting nightmares for administrators, faculty, and students? Interest in the humanities wains in a climate of distrust.
Technology and science don’t suffer from this nonsense. They also provide real jobs for all that tuition. Besides, if we don’t solve climate change the outcome will pretty much put an end to the luxury of culture and human life.
Dowd writes that humanities studies have declined so much, she should have taken a Master’s degree in Algorithms instead of in English literature. Nonsense. How old is she, anyway? She’s had a presumably satisfying career as a columnist, however nonsensical many of her columns have been.
Here’s a thought. I recently read the autobiography of Ansel Adams, who grew up in San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake of 1906. He wasn’t much at school, never went to college, but in addition to becoming a great photographer, did a pretty good job of telling his story. Inspiring.
I also recently finished the autobiography of Roger Angel, Let Me Finish. He was the son and stepson of New Yorker giants Katherine White and E. B. White. He had all the advantages, including a Harvard education. He was a marvelous writer.
I am now reading the biography of Harold Ross, Genius in Disguise, by Thomas Kunkel. I knew that Ross was the founder, senior editor, and creator of the New Yorker magazine. What I didn’t know is that at 17 he left home to be an itinerant newspaper reporter at over 20 papers in a dozen cities until he wound up in New York at the age of 21. He did not go to college. His writing standards came from his mother, who was a normal school-educated school teacher who grew up in New England and wound up in Kansas City. She endowed Harold with a strong sense of how English should be written.
The point is that creative people will find their way, regardless of academic education. Dowd can’t see that either. She writes that she wishes
... she could adopt the attitude of Drew Lichtenberg, who has taught theater history at Catholic and Yale Universities. “We should hail the return of the arts and humanities to bohemian weirdos,” he said. “It began as something for which there were no career opportunities or money to be made, and thence it will return. Like Gertrude Stein’s circle in the Jazz Age. Or like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Symbolist poets in the fin de siècle.”She wishes she could, but apparently she can’t.
| Copyright © 2023 by Neil Hoffmann |
Neil, thank you so much for the reminder that “creative people will find their way, regardless of academic education.” Still, do you think it possible for childhood education in the United States to encourage and nourish more creative people?
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