The idea that the study of the humanities is unrigorous, or that humanities subjects are easier than social science or science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects, is for proponents of the humanities one of the most insulting ideas around. The reason is threefold: one, because this idea is pervasive and at the same time demonstrably false; two, because it presupposes that the people who study humanities fields are unintelligent, or not intelligent enough to study STEM fields (i.e. that those trained in STEM are smarter); three, it leads to the related idea that many of the finest products of the human mind are not things to be taken seriously in any systematic way--not things to be studied, nor things we can learn anything from, nor things that play any role in human progress.
When pressed to it, very few people, however adamant they are as detractors from the humanities, or as so-called pragmatists or futurists or techies or transhumanists or plain, self-avowed philistines, will admit to thinking that things like literature and visual art do not enrich humanity, or are not important. In fact, it's often those who despise the study of the humanities the most--who find it the most useless--who actually embody the greatest love of the various products, 'technological' and otherwise, of human creativity, or the creative mind in action.
The problem, rather, is this idea that to study such 'creative objects' is both unrigorous, involving little more than subjective opinion-forming, and, as such, unproductive, because many of the questions raised by literature, art, history, and certain types of philosophy are unfalsifiable questions (applying the scientific method). In simple terms, when people think that studying the humanities is easy, or that anyone who can form an opinion can also, by virtue of that, partake of humanities study at high levels, they question the study of it altogether. Why should some professor tell the average opinion-former how to read a text? The blame for the pervasiveness of this suite of misguided ideas, and all of the false and misleading notions that attend it, lies squarely with those of us in the humanities. It is our fault.
As I've mentioned before, we have long since been at fault for failing to participate actively in the political processes that result in funding allocation, and, more importantly, we have failed to engage the lay public in the work we do, as well as the value of our work. This is a difficult task, to be sure--it's a lot harder to explain value that isn't easily quantified, or consolidated in a consumer product--but we can do much better. But where we've been most negligent, and perhaps most meaningfully negligent, is in our most important task as humanities scholars: our teaching. And it is through our failure in teaching and evaluating students in humanities courses that we invite suspicion at best, and outright confirmation at worst, of the malicious ideas surrounding the 'unrigorousness' of our subjects.
As a friend of mine pointed out recently, students often drop out of STEM courses in order to take humanities courses that they believe are easier. I find it difficult to argue with that perception. Whereas a professor of mathematics has reasonable and easily expressed cause to give a student a lower grade if s/he completes a proof or solves a problem incorrectly, a professor of literature typically has a much harder time explaining to a student why they deserve a C instead of an A-. There's no question that the evaluative process in literary study is partly subjective. There is no way to 'prove,' in the scientific sense, a particular reading or insight from a literary text. Literary texts raise questions, in other words, that are not falsifiable. While the evaluative process for literary texts--the practice of literary criticism--is not wholly subjective, as many believe it to be--which is to say, it's not just an exercise in unrigorous opinion-forming--the subjective element of literary criticism most certainly opens doors, in the teaching and evaluation of students in literature and other humanities courses, for very uncomfortable grading scenarios. As a consequence, students of literature, for example, develop the view that they are being graded on entirely subjective grounds (including whether or not the professor likes them), and that a grade is something attributed to them, rather than something they have earned through the quality of their work. Professors of literature, under pressure from both their institutions and from students' hovering parents, who expect that after paying so much in tuition, their child 'deserves' a good grade, tend to evaluate students' work less rigorously, and then to assign higher grades than the student has actually earned.
In so doing, we fail to properly educate students in the rigors of humanities scholarship, as well as the crucial differences between an argument from opinion (or from logical fallacy) and an argument from evidence (and attendant reason). Along with ethical concerns, these are among the most important things that come out of rigorous study in the humanities (one could of course argue that STEM and social science courses teach this too; they do; but it is precisely the ambiguity found in the objects of humanities study, not found to such an extent in objects of scientific study, that make such objects ideal for doing the difficult work of separating good arguments from poor ones). Yet instead of engaging students in this difficult work, and being prepared to stand up for the very analytical methods we stand behind, we humanities scholars retreat to the bureaucracy of higher education, abandoning our duty while blaming other institutions for encouraging grade inflation.
The result, then, is both sustained grade inflation (which happens less in STEM subjects, where greater objectivity in problem solving produces greater objectivity and clarity in evaluation of students) and, accordingly, a sense that humanities courses are actually easier, mere opportunities to bolster one's GPA, or avoid learning the subject matter at hand as thoroughly as might be required to do well in a biology class.
Of course, the study of a literary text, for example, is extremely rigorous. Part of that rigor comes with the fact that, because there is no way of arriving scientifically at one distinct conclusion through testing or experimentation, one must be extra diligent in crafting a clear, logical, and plausible argument, and supporting it with sound textual evidence, historical evidence, evidence from secondary scholarship, all with attention to some degree of linguistic accuracy (one can't simply decide that the word 'car' is 'symbolic' of consumer culture, for example; or that 'to throw the ball' really maens 'to jump the fence,' at least not without building a logical and plausible argument for such a reading, such that if the reading isn't valid, the argument, however elegant, is unlikely to stand up, to peer review or otherwise). Naturally, while no humanities scholar can claim to have proven or falsified a literary question in the scientific sense, it is also the case that no literary scholar has ever had the luxury of relying solely on an empirical fact as a justification in itself, without erecting (usually in painstaking fashion) the scaffolding of an argument. How much easier it would be, many of us would say, were we able to simply point to something and say 'look, it's proven,' and move on.
Making sound arguments with strong evidence is much easier said than done in humanities study. If students were actually given the grades that they earn in humanities courses, it's likely that we would not think the study of the humanities is so easy, or so unrigorous. It's more likely that a normal skill or performance distribution would emerge, akin to those in STEM fields, where grades are more properly earned, and success or failure are more readily demonstrated and communicated. A nicely written but sophistic argument shouldn't garner a B+, nor should an incoherently expressed notion with incisive potential. An elaborate argument about Sophocles in an assignment on Shakespeare misses the point--to learn and argue something valid about Shakespeare--and yet in too many cases this type of slippage is rewarded in humanities courses. It's as if we're all going out of our way, idealistically, to see potential for progress and liberation everywhere, including in lousy or intentionally deceptive student work.
This is all to suggest that if teachers, professors, schools, and universities get serious about evaluating students properly in the humanities, without fear of the feeble arguments for 'a better grade' that students and parents too frequently launch without sufficient basis, we will not only be able to teach students better in these fields (and in their written and oral communication); we'll also do our part to work against the false impression that just because the evaluation of humanities work has been softer, the study of humanities objects themselves is somehow easier or less rigorous than that of other fields. This view lies at the heart of the so-called 'crisis in the humanities' today.
