 Again, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great guest on a very, very important topic with a sweet book, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. For the past eight years, we've been touching on the humanities off and on, and I have to confess I try to be as objective as possible, but the humanities is where my PhD is. That's where I taught for years and three different institutions, and I'm always happy to talk about the humanities. But this is a time when humanity's enrollment is declining. This is a time when humanity's reputation is often contested or troubled. We've been talking about a crisis in the humanities for a generation now, and the crisis certainly seems to be the mode we're in. Our guest today is a lifelong teacher in literature, especially in Shakespeare. She's the author of a new book, Immeasurable Outcomes, that I can't recommend to you highly enough. You can find a link to it in the bottom left of the screen. There's a kind of tan-colored button with a link to it. And the book does two things. It's partly a memoir of her life in academia of being a student and then being a teacher, which includes an incredibly moving and vivid, very accessible and also very funny portrayal of teaching a Shakespeare seminar at a small liberal arts college. And at the same time, it's a passionate, deeply informed argument in favor of the humanities and the liberal arts, arguing that we're not valuing them highly enough in part because our mechanisms of value are all wrong. Now, there's a lot more to talk about, and I'm just going to get out of the way and bring our guest up on stage. Let me just welcome Professor Gail Greene. Hello. Hello. Good to see you. Oh, it's great to see you. Thank you for coming. I'm glad that stuff works. Well, it all works fine right now. And thank you for joining us. First of all, I should ask, where are you today? I'm in Mendocino, California, which is up on the coast high, you know, north of San Francisco. And I'm sure so many people in our audience would gladly take your place if they needed to. Well, spring finally came. Oh good. Well, you know, I told you before, Professor Greene, that the way we ask people to introduce themselves in this program is by talking about the present and the near future. What are you thinking about? What are you working on? And what are the big ideas in your mind for, say, the rest of 2023? Right. Well, right. At the moment, I've just finished an article that I'm going to try to place. It's about the STEM craze and the way it's run the humanities out of town, essentially. It has kind of a PR of an industry that wants a large pool of qualified and not very demanding workers. I mean, it really has been a somewhat sinister creation. I mean, industry does not really need, especially now it doesn't, when it doesn't know what it needs, the tech industry with AI has been so upset. So all these, you know, the STEM people we were supposed to be creating at colleges and universities got remade in order to create Thank You, Obama, you know, was really a hype. It was bogus. And so that's an article. But what I really want to do, what I really want to talk about next, because I always think people should write about what they think about most, you know, what's most burning urgency to them. At the moment, I think I'm going to write about aging. Because I don't think it's been done in a way that it's very difficult to do it because no two people age the same way. So again, it's going to be memoir, but that fans out to be about issues. I like that form of writing because I think you need to kind of ground your perceptions in a concrete specific human being and situation. And that, you know, is most persuasive. Even stories coming from literature, I believe in stories. So that's going to be the next. Well, that sounds great. I would love to read that. Well, it's, you know, there's two narratives. There's this celebratory, oh, it gets better and better as you age. And then there's the narrative of decline. And as usual, you know, truth is somewhere in between those things. Some ways it gets better. In some ways it's pretty, you know, it's not for sissies. As I said that Dorothy Parker, old age is not for sissies. Anyway, so that's going to, yeah, it's going to be the next one. And as I say, it'll be the same kind of writing, you know, personal, rather than personal and then moving into the, I don't know, it fascinates me. I mean, change hers. I mean, we're not the same people. I'm not the same person, you know, and I look back and you think, how did that happen? Who was that person? What was she thinking? And how can I be? How can it be me? Is it me? Anyway, questions like that. That sounds lovely. And I think you'll have a lot of people here who'll be happy to read this. When your article comes out on STEM, please let me know so I can find it and share it. Friends, if you're new to the Future Transform, what I'm about to do is my habitual thing where I ask our good guest a couple of bone-headed, shambling questions to ask them about their work. And I'm going to do that for a couple of minutes, but then I want to get out of the way and let you ask your questions and you raise your ideas. So as we start talking, please keep in mind what you're interested in and what you're thinking about. My first question to ask, based on this book, which I just enjoyed tremendously, by the way, I just kept, you know, just smiling and nodding and occasionally just laughing to myself at some of the great stories. My question is what you described is a powerful, powerful experience in the humanities, especially the liberal arts environment and the seminar environment. You talk about something which is a cross between performance, deep knowledge exploration, self-discovery, community formation. I mean, it's really a triumph. And I guess my question for you is, why don't we value that? And by we, I mean academics, but also all of society, because American society loves a lot of these things. We are bound up to narratives of self-development, self-exploration. We clearly love theater and stories. And this sounds like the kind of thing that's the acme of American higher education. Why aren't we celebrating this all the time? Why are we trying to get rid of it? That's not a short story. I mean, it's got to do with a decline in fall of, well, I grew up in the golden age of education. And I think it's rightly called that. It's not, wasn't the golden age for everybody, that's for sure. But there was a middle class in those days. And there was a pretty large, you know, middle class. And I was part of it. And, you know, the master plan, the UC master plan, you know, people I knew, you know, the GI bill, the Truman commission, I mean, there was all the support for mass education, of which the liberal arts was the cornerstone. It was actually the basis. You know, I mean, there were, general education was a requirement engineers had to have taken a course in something else, you know, not just narrowly sought it and detect. It made this country very powerful. I mean, it was the basis of the power and prominence of this country, you want to make America great again, look to its educational system. I mean, people don't know that, of course, but that really is, I mean, it's like they're trying to destroy it. One in, I think it was like one in five majored in the middle arts, in the middle arts, in the liberal arts when I was in school. And it's like one in 20. Last I looked, it's probably worse than that, because I didn't have it looked for a while. Anyway, you know, what happened was Reagan, the Koch brothers, the detraction, the constant detraction of education that came out of this very elaborate network that was stealthy, that was behind the scenes. We didn't even know what was happening. It was undermining belief in public education and resources in public resources. It was a privatization ploy. Bush came along and no child left behind and this got hold of, I'm going fast. I mean, there's really a lot to think about this. But it was a hollowing out of the pub of any kind of belief in public, you know, resources, but also in anything that wasn't just obviously an immediately utilitarian return on investment dollars in dollars out of Bill Gates message. And he's, boy, he's, he's sending that around Congress right now, as the higher education act, maybe, maybe reauthorized quite soon. And Gates's lobbying group out there, and it's all about return on investment starting salary, we, you know, repaying student loan, social mobility. It's been redefined. It's not that the purpose has been shifted. It's been utterly redefined. So we've really lost sight of the humanistic of the development of human beings, which is, you know, back in the day, the United Nations said the purpose of education is the development of a human being. The Truman Commission said this. Brown said this, Governor Brown of California, the great UC master plan, which was really a kind of wonderful idealistic, you know, we're going to educate everybody, anybody who wants an education can have to go through Berkeley. You know, I was one of those people. I mean, you know, anyway, people are really very confused about education now. You say people, why wouldn't they want this? I think really they would want it if they knew this was at stake, but they don't. There's so much misinformation in the air, because education has been seized hold of by corporate America, which is not, which wants workers, they don't want fully educated human beings. So they have the corporate press, they have, you know, they have power. I mean, Bill Gates speaks in his words are heard around the world. You look at Bill Gates, you know, YouTube thing and look at the viewers it's had. Look at this, your YouTube presentations, they're not quite up there. They don't rival. These people have they have the press, they have the pulpit and, and the misinformation when I started reading around in this area, I just thought, you can't believe anything you read. It's just like, wait a minute, who are they interviewing here? They're interviewing some business guy who hasn't set foot in a school room. He's never taught hasn't even been to school, you know, actually in a public school ever probably. And they're those are the people who get interviewed in the press and their business and they probably get business interests and business interests are not the development of the human being because human beings are idiosyncratic, they're particular, they're troublesome, you know, and they're critical. You know, I mean, that's what occasion does people it turns out, you know, people who criticize who look at the society and say, Hey, wait a minute, where did all the wealth go? You know, why is it concentrated in those very, very few people? And is that really fair to the rest of us? And so that's inconvenient. Those are inconvenient truths. So anyway, that's a long answer to why this has gotten lost. That's an that's an excellent answer that. And by the way, friends, if you're if you're new to Professor Green, that's she writes like this, this a torrid of ideas that's incredibly concise and very, very rich. So I can't recommend the book hardly enough. Thank you for that for that answer that that there's a full answer. I guess my my my second question is, what does how come academics aren't doing this enough? I mean, how come, you know, roughly a third of higher education faculty are in the humanities and arts? I mean, how come we're not getting our story out there? And how come so many both administrators and faculty are not they're joining this mission that you described to reduce liberal education? How come they're not supporting? I mean, they're within higher education. They should know about how this works. How come they're not fighting for us? Well, you know, frogs and boiling water and all that sort of thing. I mean, I think this change has been really insidious. And people have internalized. I mean, one of the things one of the reasons I started writing this book was when the outcomes assessment team hid Scripps College. Now Scripps College is a wonderful liberal arts. It's got a teaching faculty. I mean, we really care about our students. We do a good job, you know, and suddenly we're like, wait a minute, who are we accountable to? Who are we answerable to? Oh, that's right. They hired somebody. She's like 23 years old. That's okay. She's never been in a classroom. You know, she's suddenly supervising us. Now, academics are used to evaluating ourselves. We do that all the time. We assess ourselves. I mean, we assess our students. I mean, we're assessing machines. We write letters of recommendation. We give them grades. We sit on committees where we judge other faculty. We do book reviews and we review manuscripts. So we're assessing all the time. So I think when this demand for assessment came in, it was like, oh, well, you know, we already do that. So what's a little more assessment and it'll get admin off our backs. And that's, that's cool. And so we let it slip in. And it was an entering wedge, I think, for a kind of control surveillance. The thing is, we didn't need it. We were not broken. We didn't need fixing. Assessment came, it was a political and it was a sinister move. It came out of two administrations. Ronald Reagan's was first, 1983, a nation at risk, which talks about how K-12 was putting the nation at risk. You know, those little kids, you know, the teachers, I mean, big risk. And then in Bush's administration, 2006, the Spellings Report, which did the same for higher education saying, oh, you know, big risk here. And what we need is assessment. We need, you know, we need accountability from the educational, you know, from educational institutions. But the thing is, we were doing our jobs. We were fine. I mean, K-12 had a big problem that came from the wealth gap and had from an underclass of kids that, you know, I mean, I don't know how those teachers deal with them. They just have a terrible time. They take over, you know, I mean, kids who are just so messed up. And suddenly this is all, okay, I'm digressing. I'll get back to higher education. But so we deal with human beings. I mean, suddenly we were told we had to numerically account for our student learning outcomes. Well, our outcomes, the outcomes of our teaching are actually humans. And it's very difficult to measure a human being. I mean, it's been tried in kind of sinister ways. But to look at our student learning outcomes, you have to look at the kinds of lives our graduates lead. And frankly, small liberal arts colleges do really well that way. Because we tend to graduate a higher proportion of people who are civically engaged, you know, really engaged with their communities and go into work. They go into the law. It tends to be environmental law, labor law. We have a much better record than Harvard and Yale. If you look at them, I mean, I turn a lot of consultants and financial and a lot of tech, you know, they're going for the big bucks. I mean, I think small liberal arts colleges do something really right in turning out the kind of human being who actually, you know, make society better. But that's not, that's difficult to measure, you know, and everybody wants short term and numbers and data, data, data, data, we have to have data. Well, how do you do data on a graduate? Then you follow them through life. And I did that in my book because I was in touch with a lot of former students. And it was really interesting because they did say, you know, quite wonderful things about, well, it kind of, it kind of proved the generalizations I've been reading, you know. I thought it said very nicely. Yeah, yeah, they just, I have some wonderful quotes I could relate or if anybody wants to hear. Well, thank you. That's, that's a great, great answer. It's my, it's my persnickety question. That's true. And friends, let me, let me stop interrogating our guest. Let me turn the mic over to you. What questions do you have about this, about the history that led us to this point, about the pressure for data, about the shape of liberal arts? We have one question, Gail, that came in in the chat. Let me just read this out loud. This is from Sharon Elker. She says, thanks to Gail for her wonderful book. Even if you feel as if I could finally understand the context of what was happening in English departments across America. My quit, my question is, how could academics start to intervene and change the narrative? Yeah, that's really a good question. I mean, it's a big question. I mean, how do we seize control of something that's been seized, you know, control from us? I think, and it's a bit, it requires, it's going to require reprioritization, you know, so that so that schools are organized around teaching with teaching as the priority with human contact. Because people need people. I mean, they need small classes work. Bill Gates tells us that, you know, Gates, who describes, who designs these amazing kinds of assembly line systems for other people's children, when he describes the school he went to, Lakeside in Seattle. Classes were small. It was great. You got to know your professors when you got to know them. It really motivates you to learn. And I'm thinking, oh my God, you know, but that's okay. That's him and his own. But for other people's children, that's the same line, you know, we can do that with computerization, you know, online. Anyway, so we know what works. I mean, look at where rich people send their kids. That's what that's what work. And you could organize, you know, actually a professor and 12 students is not really that's pretty economical compared to the grants that science science is compared to the athletic department salaries compared to the huge bureaucracy, you know, very, very top heavy administrative bureaucracies that most places are strangled with. I mean, this is such a modest request, you know, you've got 12 students around the seminar table, you do have to pay the pay the professor. That's that's true. But the salaries in humanity spend much lower than than, you know, in other areas. So even that's not a big big deal. And you can even do without the seminar table, you know, you can just see it's a very modest enterprise, which indicates that the animosity against it really is ideological more than economic, we can, we can afford the humanities, we can afford them, but we just don't want, I mean, we we being the governing powers. I don't know, I mean, you know, faculty lost power. So, you know, death by a million cuts, how we get it back, I don't know, at this point, I mean, I wish I had an answer for this question. But I do think part of it starts in, you know, resisting, you know, speaking out. And I mean, when I when I was appalled at the student learning outcomes thing at Scripps, I went out on a limb a couple of times, and I kind of look back and there really wasn't anybody behind me, you know, and it was kind of cool. People have gotten used to an assessment culture. Well, I think that that has to be said to be bogus. I mean, this is not, you know, it's coming from without. It's not peer review. It's deep, right, professionalized us. And that has been the whole point, of course, because a profession looks out for itself. I mean, it's, it's accountable to itself. It's not accountable to public, you know, government surveillance. So I think, I think organization, I think faculty are, well, I mean, unions are forming. There are strikes. There is some sign of faculty exerting power. I think we finally realize, you know, how much we've lost and how much we can lose. I mean, if you look at the UK, it can get worse. And look at what DeSantis is trying to, I mean, talk about the control of government, of education government. I mean, traction has been, he's got traction because of these movements I've been talking about, you know, I mean, that's anyway. I wish I had more specific, I think alumni offices should, should weigh in there. I think, I think we should be tracking. I do think we should, we should be assessing ourselves, you know, but we should do it in the way that we look at the kinds of students we, you know, the kinds of benefits they get from an education, the kinds of lives they live and what they do for society. That's, and alumni offices could be much more helpful. They are some places. They are not in enough places. Well, that's, that's, that's a very thoughtful answer. I appreciate you bringing to bear all kinds of parts of that towards an answer. Sharon, thank you for a very, very good question. We have a, I think a related question that came up from our friend Carl Hackeraynan, and let me just put this on the screen so everyone can see it. Carl asks, speaking of aging, isn't there a role for senior citizens, particularly grandparents, to advocate a liberal arts education both in their families as organizers in the public sphere? I think that's kind of, kind of a wonderful observation. Absolutely. You know, I mean, we're, the old folks, you know, I think the old folks really have a responsibility to tell, tell, you know, to write about what, because we're the ones who remember how things were on what has been lost. I mean, when you see, I mean, younger faculty, they come in, they grown up in assessment culture. They're used to this. I mean, that's what, I mean, the way the, the assessment was brushed off, you know, oh, it's just a little thing. It's just, it's no, it's a joke. It's not a joke. I kept saying it's not a joke. There's academic freedom, is it at stake? You know, 10 years at stake. I mean, this is like somebody taking hold of education who has no business in education. Yes, I think we should tell our stories. I think we should, you know, I think everybody should teach, you know, even if they're not a teacher, teach. I mean, you just, you take what you know, what you remember, what's valuable in your life, and you, you communicate it. Grand, grandkids, you know, any younger people you can find. Yeah, and I hope, you know, I really want, I mean, one of the things I'd like to do in my book is to show that, you know, we should be listened to because memory is really important. I mean, people talk about cultural amnesia. We really do have it. And we, and one of the things, we do not remember what, you know, the status that the profession had in the middle of the last century. I mean, how important professors were and how, you know, how we were looked up to. I mean, we were supposed to, we were educators. We were entrusted with that education was a public trust trust. I mean, what happened to social trust in this time? And you have a good account of that. And friends, if you haven't read the book yet, chapters two and three roughly have great accounts of, of your experience in the 60s and 70s, especially your first year teaching, which, which was really heartfelt in New York. Yeah, growing on the golden age of education. I mean, you just, I mean, my, my education at Berkeley was free. My public school was terrific. It was just a middle class kind of a semi rural, semi suburban. I mean, it just wasn't questioned. You know, the value of education was not questioned. Now it's despised. I mean, you know, if you're an egghead, you're a liberal, you're pointy headed. I mean, it's been so politicized. So run into the mud. Well, first of all, if you're, if you're new to the forum, that was an example of one of those Q&A box questions. So you could definitely follow Carl and Carl. Thank you for as usual. A great question. By the way, for both Carl and for you, Gail, there's a really good book by Ashton Applewaite called This Chair Rocks. Good guy. I recommend everybody. Yeah, this is, please go ahead. Please go ahead. Well, it's interesting. I mean, isn't one of my, she's a younger woman and she's really good and she's really funny, but she hasn't been there, you know, and this is what feminists used to call the authority of experience. I mean, you sort of have to be there. This is what I felt writing my book. You know, the people who are talking about education, so many of them have not been there. They haven't been in the classroom. They don't know that there's actually students in that classroom. And those students are individual human beings and you've got to work with them and you've got to come to where they are. They tell us about best practices. Excuse me. Best practices are the practices a teacher, a professor at any moment can get to work best. That's all there is. I mean, there's not a general, there's not a general rule about that. Anyway, I, so I really do believe that the authority of experience and in reading about aging, it seems to me, it seems to me that the most convincing writing really is done by older people. There are two exceptions. One of them wrote King Lear when he was 37 or 38. The other one produced Wild Strawberries when he was about that same age. Really? I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, wonderful. It's the best film about age. But he had, he had assistants and an aged actor, not short-strom who had been, you know, a great director himself. And Bergman says it wasn't my film, it was his film. And he was 70, 79 when he made it. Go and see it again. Oh, we have to. We have to. Thank you. Thank you for that. We have another question from our dear friend and former guest, Tom Haymes, who comes back to your point about preparing for corporate life. And says, does corporate America know what makes a successful worker? And how can we educate them on what makes for a successful professional? Yeah, boy, that's also a good one because I think, thinking short-term, as corporate America often does, they want convenient workers. They want, you know, what, what is that? Macquarie's term, butts with jobs, you know, butts in the seats. Yes, yes, yes, jobs. That's dehuman. That's what I mean by the dehumanization of education and why humanity needs to rehumanize it. What they really need is is critical thinkers, is people who will step back and see the big picture. And that's where breakthroughs come from. That's where the innovation they talk so much about, you know, seem to understand that that does come from a fully developed mind who can look at the big picture, who can make connections, connect one thing with another thing, you know, the very kind of mind that we're trying to produce with a good educational system. They want, I mean, in the short term, they want obedience, they want compliance, and they also want people who will work for less, which is why you got the market with coders, you know, you turn out, that's Bill Gates's big, I'm not, I'm not real fan of Bill Gates, as you can tell. But his, you know, we should teach coding in high school, we should teach it in college. Obama agrees because Obama's education department was controlled by the Gates Foundation. You should, we should provide workers day ready on, you know, job ready on day one is what he said. So you slot them, you train them, you don't develop them. And that's what they think they want, because they can, they will work for less. But actually, I think, well, you know, somebody like Steve Jobs wouldn't, you know, I mean, he's somebody who understood the value of the humanity. I mean, I think that bigger thinkers can think bigger about this and can realize that they want, if they really want innovation. Yeah, that's the way to get it. Yeah, I think. Of course, I'm just thinking. Yeah, never mind. Oh, it's okay. Thank you for the answer. Tom, as always, thank you for a very deft question. Tom teaches civics and political science and government at community colleges in Texas. Definitely a lifelong teacher there. Lisa Durf in the chat has this beautiful aphorism. She says professional workers are short term, successful ethical humans are long term. There you go. Yeah, I like that. Well, let me bring up, somebody has a video question. And this is Professor Glennon Matthews. And let me see if I can get her up on stage. Okay. Hello, Bill. Hi. I had a couple of comments. I can't agree more with everything you've been saying. I just keep thinking about my own connection. I'm a historian by profoundly connected with English literature. Dickens had so much wonderful stuff to say about this in hard times. He said about, you know, that you, you want to stamp out fancy because you want, you know, Mr. Chokam Child is trying to get these stamped out of Sissy Ju. But then the other thing I want to say is that what in the conversations about the value of humanities, and you're going to write about old age, I'm at the point in life now where my body is, you know, full of arthritis. There are so many things I love to do that I can't do, but I can read. And the lifelong store of reading and capacity to reread. And I'm probably going to cry when I talk about this, but my journey with sonnet 73. The first time I read that time of year thou mayst in me behold, when yellow leaves etc. I was young and I thought it was beautiful. And a lifetime of encounter with that sonnet. And now the yellow leaves are there mean so much to me. It's that my education produced. That's beautifully said. And, you know, it's true, you need the inside of your mind to be a place that you can live, you know, especially as you as you get older, but at any time. And I had alums, you know, I mean, since I've been at Scripps for so long, some of these alums are catching up with me in age almost. They have grandkids, you know, who've said to me things like I never would have gotten through, you know, my second cancer without these books. I never would have gotten through my daughter's death without these books. I mean, that really up against, you know, horrible life situations, they turn back to literature. And you know, someone would say, I see what you mean now. That's really one of the nicest things a teacher can hear. But, and you're so right to bring in dickens. I mean, God, this was hard times, you know, facts stick to the facts, facts is all we want. You could just super impose hard times onto what, you know, K-12 race to the top, the common core, just stifling the imagination, you know, you just want the facts. You don't want to look at the context. Don't tell me what it means to you, what you think about it, what it makes you feel. I don't want to know that. I just want to know, name the parts. You know, what are the figure to the language? What is the metaphor? What is the main point? And it's boring kids to death. And right now, we're having a terrible problem of disengagement, especially since the pandemic, which has really sent kids out over the edge. I mean, they're just not coming back and connecting with education. But that was happening before the pandemic. I mean, kids were just turning off, tuning out. What does this have to do with me? And, you know, they showed because it doesn't have anything to do with them. And that's been, you know, a terrible thing done to K-12. And of course, it affects higher education. People don't realize how much K-12, what happens in K-12 affects us because they've cut out the arts and humanities. No child was behind George Bush's gift to the world. Which was backed by all kinds of, you know, business industries and opened up the market of K-12. I mean, as a market, I mean, testing companies and assessment offices, all this stuff rushed in. It just carved it up, you know, and dehumanized it. I mean, and until these kids, they don't, I mean, arts and literature had to go. Arts and humanities had to go because they weren't on the test. And it was all about test scores. And schools lived or died in cases of test scores. So arts and humanities dropped out of the picture. Kids get to college. They wouldn't know liberal art if it smacked them in the face. You know, they never had a history course. They never had a literature course that they like, you know. And so we wonder why they're not enrolling in our classes today. K-12 is our feeder. K-12 is our pipeline. And it's been utterly corrupted. So that's happened, too. But thank you for that comment. I mean, it's really true that you know, books are your friends, your lifelong friends. Indeed. Later life. Thank you very much, Professor Matthews, for a great question. Thank you. Thank you. In the chat, Sara Segregorio, who's a grad student in New Jersey, says individual K-12 teachers are trying to work against it, but they are so overwhelmed, the constraint by local and state politics. We have more questions coming in all over the place. And by the way, if you please do feel free to ask questions, you can tell that we're a very friendly place and we're happy to hear from you. And there's a one that comes from Eric, the great last name, Eric Alexander. And Eric asks this question, kind of two cultures question, is that what are the other? Can STEM be infused with liberal arts? Yes. I mean, it was the liberal arts and sciences, remember? I mean, and we still have liberal arts and sciences buildings and colleges in places. I mean, it's not, it is certainly not one or the other. I mean, the natural sciences were and should still be part of liberal arts. I mean, it's a, you know, you're looking at the world. I mean, liberal arts are you know, it goes back to, you know, Plato. The art, Cicero actually, who said it clearly, the arts make man free. Their skills of living in the world, they're practically skills, you know, they're not artsy fartsy off there in a corner. And of course, the natural world is part of that, understanding the natural world. I mean, what a lot of STEM is now, of course, is applied sciences. And that's, that's harder to infuse with the liberal arts. But, you know, I just said before, engineers really ought to know about the world so they understand the impact of a dam on the valley, you know, or an architect understands the impact of a housing development on a neighborhood or a doctor knows how to do something more than read the numbers off of tests, you know, which more and more doctors, you know, I mean, I mean, there's this whole field of narrative medicine now, because people sort of caught on the fact that doctors shouldn't know how to listen and relate to the person and the person is not is more than a bunch of numbers. All that's changed since in my life, too, because my father was a doctor. And he was an old style doctor, you know, who would sit with a woman all night until she delivered the baby or until the patient died, you know, that kind of, they don't make that kind of doctor anymore. But they didn't read numbers, they listened to people, they actually touched people, which is a terrible aversion to at least in my health care system, the lump, and they give you a test and read the numbers, they don't touch the lump. I'm not kidding. But, but so it's all it's all been, you know, it's all about data. It's all about sort of numerical measurements. No, there shouldn't be an either or there definitely should not be an either or but it there is a tendency to to drive them apart and and say that all we need is skills, you know, and the rest doesn't matter. Gail, first of all, thank you for the for the really, really good answer. And, and Eric, at Emerson College, Eric, thank you for the really, really good question. The chat, by the way, has just been overflowing, Gail, and I can send you a copy of the email, because you have a whole bunch of fans. Lisa Durf says that her Latin teacher would hug you. So just so we have that. We have a couple of questions from our friends in San Diego, Peter Berman. I can't this is from Chad, I can't flash this on the screen, but I can read it to you. He says, thank you, Professor Green for this wonderful book. However, I think two essential items are missing. First, the rise in tuition will be accompanying rise in student loads, and how most humanities scholars do not speak to the larger culture. I was wondering if you could if you could respond to those. The question about rising tuition in student loads, I think he means student loans rather than loads, but I could be wrong. Peter, crepe if I'm wrong. And then about humanities speaking to the larger culture. Yeah, both those things are true. I'll try to defend colleges for rising costs. Our funding has been so terribly slashed. I'm talking about the, you know, the public schools, the large universities. I mean, okay, so Berkeley, I think it was about 70% funded by the state in the 70s. And now it's about 9%. You know, these are real cuts. And, and it's across the board like this. There's a very good documentary called Starving the Beast, which hard to get a hold of, but no, I think Amazon has it now. And you can anyway, that looks at this, this defunding, of course, that's what makes, you know, student debt go up because students, you know, I mean, the burden of payment of the price is moved from the state from the society onto the individual. And that was sustainable for a long while. I think 2008 kind of tipped it over the edge. And all these sort of anti education voices kind of moved in at that point and say, look, they're screwing you. They're just, you know, robbing you blind, you know, what do you get for this? So that's, that's where a lot of that came from. The other thing is, it's a consumer society, you know, so kids are, their expectations are pumped up. They want, they want, you know, you know, really nice dorms and, you know, facility, the facility racket has got ratcheted way up. And I think colleges need to go back on that after work. You know, we're going to give you small classes. You're going to be taught by professors, not adjuncts. But if you want fine dining, you can go and find it somewhere else. You know, we're not about, we're not about that. And I don't think they've been good enough, you know, because they want, they need students. And so it's understandable that part has been ratcheted up. And that has to be turned down, damped down. As far as humanity is not speaking to the broader culture, the way the larger, how much humanity scholars do not speak to the larger culture. This is very sad and very true. I mean, I, that happened sometime when theory sort of took over. And suddenly, I think that, I mean, when I went to school, it was about reading literature and understanding why literature was important to my life was really crucial. I was always reading to find out ways of being. I mean, sometimes it was not very helpful. A lot of suicidal women in 19th century novels didn't help a lot. But it was, it was important. It was really crucially involved in my life. And at some point that changed with, I think it was an attempt to make ourselves over as the sciences to prove that we were theoretically sophisticated, you know, that we had a system to play hardball with the big boys. And I think it was very disastrous because what we ended up doing was talking to ourselves. I was a feminist scholar. I started out, you know, a really strong streak, did a volume about Shakespeare called the woman's part. And then I found that feminist criticism was becoming extremely convoluted and extremely far from anything I cared about. And there was also a lot of infighting, you know, my position is more theoretically correct in your position. And that's what the discourse became. And that's why I stopped. I started writing about other things at that point, because I didn't want to continue, continue on in that vein. And I think we have been talking to ourselves way too much. And we think we have sort of abdicated our responsibility that way. And that maybe if we get scared enough, we will kind of like, figure out a way to become clear and to talk public intellectual, whatever. There is now some, I mean, when I left the field and started writing about radiation epidemiology, which is a biography I wrote, there was a considerable amount of skepticism about that. And I had a tolerant college, they let me do it, they didn't insist that I write another article about the winter's tale. But I think people have had trouble doing that. Now I think there's more respect for it, you know, take what you know and try to communicate it to the public, explain why it's important and why you should know it, why your kids should know it. I think that's becoming stronger. I really hope it is. Because we've just, you know, cut ourselves off, much of, much of. And it's, you know, it can be parodied quite easily. It is parodied. We've made ourselves, I've read one quite respectable scholar said the humanities has made itself a laughing stock. And I couldn't entirely disagree with that. I mean, there's, there's grounds for that. Long tradition of the campus novel, just, you know, next to humanities, the goofier goofier. Exactly. Peter, thank you. Thank you for the question. And I hope I didn't mangle it too badly. And please feel free to follow up it if you'd like to. And thank you. Thank you, Gil, for, for that really, really excellent answer. Friends, we have only about six minutes left. And I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask, I had to share their thoughts. So please, please don't be shy. We have a question from Indiana, from our good friend Ed Finn. So let me put this up on the screen. Hang on one second. So it says, is there a middle ground between the humanities, everybody else, as someone who teaches, who values the humanities and does believe in quality assessment, where do we fit in what sounds like us versus them? And Ed, if you want to join us on stage, just let me know. I'd be happy to be able to go up. Middle ground. I think that when you're talking about power and control, the middle ground is, it kind of is us of them. I mean, we either call the shots, we, we decide that this tenure line will not be terminated because tenure is terribly important to academic freedom and to the production of knowledge, I mean, which is not respected and it's not understood. And when it comes to, you know, decision about a tenure line, it's up to them. I mean, neither the faculty makes that decision or the administration makes it. So I'm not, I don't know, there hasn't been much compromise. I mean, it's been a coup, it's been a takeover and faculty are on the losing side. So I really, I'd like to say something nice about that that, oh yes, we can find a middle ground, but we have been taken over, we have just been swamped. And I do think it, I will say something positive about, you know, small liberal arts colleges, the faculty do have more input into the running of the institution. I mean, a lot of the criticisms of higher education, a lot of them are aimed at the big research institutions where the battle is just, I mean, look at Scott Walker in Wisconsin and just weep because that was the writing on the wall for education. You know, we're not going to be concerned with the pursuit of truth or the betterment of society or the individual fulfillment. We want workforce in this state. That was Scott Walker at University of Wisconsin, one of the great universities in this country. And you know, he got it. I mean, he whittled away tenure. I mean, he, you know, he's now, and look at what DeSantis is doing to Florida. Look at, you know, many of the southern states. They're just the best. Starving the beast will tell you the commentary I mentioned. So I'm afraid in terms of control and power, it is kind of also them. Well, in the, in the, in the chat, John Walker, sorry, John Hollenbeck says, we're recovering from Walker but barely. He also has a question to share. I'll put this up. This may be your last question for the day. Quote, the trouble with academic politics is they're about such small things, unquote. Somehow the humanities needs to return to big things. Can it rival coding in the NBA? If so, how? So, right. Big things. I mean, the humanist questions, you know, the, you know, how do we live? How do we spend our lives? What kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of, you know, our lives? I mean, those are sent. I mean, that's what literature brings up. That's what history brings up as a philosophy. And, and partly, yeah, we do have to keep our eye on that or get our eye back on it. We can certainly rival the NBA. The NBA, actually, when you look at long-term salaries, returns, you know, business is not real high up there. It's not, I don't have these figures. I could get them for you. I could, but they are a couple thousand dollars off from an English major. I mean, yeah, we can rival the NBA easily, but we have to get, and kids are much more interested in English than they are in NBA, so a lot of them are. I mean, that's the horrible thing about their way education has been going. The students feel pressured to go into positions, into subjects that will get them, you know, six-figure salaries when they graduate and stuff like that. Often they're not interested in these subjects and often they're not very good at them because you tend not to be good at something you're not terribly interested in. So already, you're kind of like bent out of shape and you're off, you know, and in terms of tech, you've got to be really good to get those six-figure salaries. I mean, there's a lot of unemployed tech people. There really are, and there are going to be a lot more with AI. So, I mean, we can, and if you look at mid-career salaries in the humanities, they stand up. I mean, they gain ground and humanities people tend to get more interested in jobs and more satisfying jobs. Yeah, we can rival them, but we have to, we have to get our act together and we have to see why, you know, and we're not very good at that, I'm afraid. Well, we should be good at telling the stories because we are all about stories. Yeah, yeah. We have a great question that came in or a comment from Sarah Sangregorio, and she wants to know, I just had it, I just managed to drop it. Please put this on the screen here. I guess this is kind of repeating where we're thinking here. What is the way forward during these conversations early career academics like me don't feel much hope or feel empowered or have institutional power to make changes? What can we say to Sarah to keep her going? Good. First of all, get your tenure. Get safe before you speak out. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say, but also organize. I think I'm a great believer in unions. Academics have not been good about that because we don't consider ourselves workers, you know. We are workers, but we haven't considered ourselves that. CUNY had a good union. I mean, that was really quite wonderful. When I was an adjunct there, I got a living wage because they had a union. And yeah, I don't know what to say to you. I mean, this is a poignant question because I see younger faculty coming in feeling afraid, feeling that they have to really play the game. And you do for a while, but I think at some point you can you can cut loose and organize and speak out. Sorry, very general. Well, Sarah is coming from New Jersey, which has a strong union tradition there. And so that's one really good thing to point out. But if I can just add, another great thing to do is to have these kind of conversations. I just love that we have early career person asking, retired professor like yourself and pooling all these thoughts and ideas. I think that's fantastic. And it's so fantastic. I have to stop it because we're right at the end of the hour. Professor Green, what a pleasure it has been talking about. Yeah, thank you, Brian. I love that I'm on a program called Future Trends because my solutions are so old fashioned. They're just teaching person to person, small classes. Thank you. My pleasure. And sometimes the best way forward is through our memory. Please take care. And let me know when that STEM article is out and so we can share it with the world. Okay, thank you. Thank you. But don't go away yet, friends. Let me just put out where we're going today. And for the next few weeks, if you'd like to keep talking about these crucial issues, please, you can hit me up on Twitter or Mastodon. Just use that hashtag FTTE. If you'd like to go into our previous sessions where we've talked about these questions, institutional change and cultural change, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you'd like to look at our sessions coming up, just head to the Future Trends forum website. We have sessions on a wide range of topics, including AI, which people are interested in. And above all, thank you all for talking with us. What a delight. Your questions, your thoughts, your experiences. It's, as always, an honor and a pleasure to have a chance to think together with you for these hours. In the meantime, please enjoy June, wherever you are. I hope it is warm enough, but not too warm. And I hope you're all safe and sound. We'll talk to you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.