ASU West: Humanities Dismal Failure

We received enrollment numbers for the humanities programs at ASU West in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. They are worse than terrible (pictured here). Look at those numbers. 1 major. I thought ASU was about sustainability; this isn’t sustainable.

These numbers are proof of the complete failure of the leadership and “advisory board” in SHArCS. Any normal organization would hold those leaders responsible. Not ASU West. We’ve had essentially the same advisory board for years watching the decline of the school and demonstrating their own incompetence.

Let me give you an example. At the beginning of the semester our school director charged each program with increasing enrollment. That’s not part of our job description but the school is too cheap to hire someone. Guess what the advisory board came up with? Seriously, guess. It’s dumber than that. They got groups of PhDs to stand in front of the library and hand out candy to adult students as they passed by to beg them to join a humanities major. Candy. Adult students. Begging.

I recommended we do something more developmentally relevant to this age group. Let’s have a “change my mind” sign. I was overruled because that might be offensive to someone. I also asked if we have any empirical data to show that handing out candy does anything. The director said no we don’t but we will do it anyway. I did my part and asked students if they’d like to argue about the meaning of life. I was much more popular than the candy.

Why hasn’t this advisory board been held accountable for their complete destruction of SHArCS? Why not have fresh people rotate in? You’re assuming merit has anything to do with who is appointed. This school in ASU doesn’t work that way and so therefore it can’t hold people responsible for failing. Whatever they do is just genius and everyone else is the problem. Especially the “whiteness.”

And that is my favorite part to watch: their ideas for improvement. Besides handing out candy to convince a pre-med biology student to be a humanities major instead, they actually believe doubling and tripling down on their political radicalism will do it. “Maybe if we had more Native American Land Acknowledgements, more talk about what kinds of sex we like, more blaming “whiteness,” more paying thousands of dollars for anti-racism and decolonizing speakers, and more signs on our office doors about how we don’t like the police, then the students and their parents will see our wisdom and climb over each other to sign up.” And they do this again and again. Never learning. Never being held responsible for abject failure. Never knowing they are a laughingstock.

SHArCS is a good laboratory microcosm of this social philosophy. DEI and virtue signaling are what matters, merit and outcomes do not. Parents, potential students, they can’t teach you anything they don’t know. If their advisory board fails so badly why would you think this would be a good place to study? “We’ll give them candy to make up for our lack of wisdom! They’ll never notice.” There are well run schools at ASU, SHArCS is not one of them.