Another report says that study of the humanities is in decline.

The report comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength. Requested by a bipartisan group of legislators and scheduled to be distributed to every member of Congress, it is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.

Of course, one of the early attacks on the humanities as lacking in utility and therefore unimportant was led by…Harvard, in the form of Larry Summers. Who is again being talked about as a replacement for Ben Bernanke, BTW.

Meanwhile, Matthew O’Brien writes in the Atlantic about how higher education is failing low-income students, despite the best efforts of places like Harvard (and Harvard deserves many plaudits for this) to support those students financially.

Aside from magnate [sic] school kids, [low-income students] mostly don’t have parents or teachers or counselors with much experience applying to selective colleges. Nor do many know, despite the best efforts of the schools to inform them otherwise, that the most selective colleges have very generous financial aid packages that can take tuition all the way down to zero. Indeed, Harvard is pretty much free, including room and board, for students whose parents make $65,000 or less.

Meanwhile down in New York, NYU is giving faculty stars low-to-no interest loans so that they can buy summer homes—like the one owned by NYU president John Sexton, who recently received a vote of no-confidence from his faculty.

And universities like Harvard and MIT are promoting a massive expansion in online education, which seems far more about university profit and professorial ego/profit than it does about conducting high quality teaching or educational philanthropy. Although some professors are apparently fired up about the “trove of data” they’re obtaining from the six-figure enrollments in these courses (number of students who finish them: 7), which starts to raise some interesting privacy issues. How long will it be before professors start turning this data to commercial use—just another way in which MOOCs are commoditizing students?

There are so many interesting and challenging issues packed into just these few items. I wish we’d hear more about them from some of the most august figures in higher education, including Drew Faust.