Glad the author gave a shout-out to the positive experience that is an undergraduate degree in the humanities (I did that myself), but I would add a word of caution along with his others:
Literature departments are maintaining themselves on "Creative Writing" programs aimed at every Harry Potter and YA fiction fan in the world. As such, a lot of unwitting kids think they can go to a trade school in how to be a literary millionaire/billionaire.
That is not the case, and an undergrad writing program won't do anything other than cause you to miss what might make you a good writer, namely all of those other humanities classes that people who think they're in a writing vocational program don't care about. You know... the Shakespeare courses, the PHIL courses, the culture-specific courses, the weirdo Psych courses about Freud, the criticism courses, etc.
Seems to me that there is essentially no evidence that following any given course of study materially increases your likelihood of being a successful author. Neither creative writing courses nor the humanities courses you advocate are known to help with that outcome.
The other humanities courses give you a glimpse of what you don't know. It's a bit of a Dunning-Krugger scenario. You can't know what you've never heard of, and can't begin to self-teach yourself a thing if you don't even know it exists.
Or, perhaps another way of saying it is: I think it's safe to say that no one in the 21st century has heard of "The Seven Types of Ambiguity" outside of an academic setting.
Without a frame of reference to start from, I don't know how anyone would progress past a sort of floundering beginner stage of writing ability.
It should not be left out that these humanities courses at the latter end of the undergrad level and into grad school are not 200 people sitting in front of a lecturer in an auditorium, either. They're more like a moderated philosophical discussion with the professor guiding the discourse among a dozen to 20 people. If you get nothing else from them, you get "how to analyze a thing, present your opinion of it, and defend that opinion to others." If you aim to convince others that your words have some sort of meaning of worth to them, that's a pretty obvious basic qualification.
Creative Writing is a mixed bag. At least at the postgraduate level, a lot of programs do, at first blush, seem to be revenue hubs first and useful training second. Those, of course, you don't want.
But there are good ones out there, and I would say the good ones are candid from the start that you're highly unlikely to write a bestseller as a new author (or ever) and they actively disabuse applicants and students of unhelpful ideas like that.
I did one recently and I'd say the quasi-apprenticeship model described in the source post is pretty accurate. The overall purpose is professional polishing - the degree acts as your calling card. The program isn't meant to teach you how to write, since admission is essentially premised on being able to write at or very close to a publishable level from the start.
My tutors have said bluntly that if you are interested in publishing commercially, editors often greatly prefer submissions from authors who have their Masters. It's a bellwether that the manuscript has a better chance of doing well and that the author has a clue about how the industry works and will be easier to work with.
I don't doubt that there are exceptions to every rule, which is why I qualified the above in terms of undergrad programs, which I've seen first hand to be a rather complete waste of time.
Even if someone wanted to go into a creative writing specific graduate program, they'd be better served getting other humanities fundamental learning from their undergrad courses, in my opinion. Everything I saw in undergrad creative writing could be learned in a couple of months.
Literature departments are maintaining themselves on "Creative Writing" programs aimed at every Harry Potter and YA fiction fan in the world. As such, a lot of unwitting kids think they can go to a trade school in how to be a literary millionaire/billionaire.
That is not the case, and an undergrad writing program won't do anything other than cause you to miss what might make you a good writer, namely all of those other humanities classes that people who think they're in a writing vocational program don't care about. You know... the Shakespeare courses, the PHIL courses, the culture-specific courses, the weirdo Psych courses about Freud, the criticism courses, etc.