The humanities are not just dying — they are almost dead. In Scotland, the ancient Chairs in Humanity (which is to say, Latin) have almost disappeared in the past few decades: abolished, left vacant, or merged into chairs of classics. The University of Oxford has revised its famed Literae Humaniores course, "Greats," into something resembling a technical classics degree. Both of those were throwbacks to an era in which Latin played the central, organizing role in the humanities. The loss of these vestigial elements reveals a long and slow realignment, in which the humanities have become a loosely defined collection of technical disciplines.
The result of this is deep conceptual confusion about what the humanities are and the reason for studying them in the first place. I do not intend to address the former question here — most of us know the humanities when we see them.
Instead I wish to address the other question: the reason for studying them in the first place. This is of paramount importance. After all, university officials, deans, provosts, and presidents all are far more likely to know how to construct a Harvard Business School case study than to parse a Greek verb, more familiar with flowcharts than syllogisms, more conversant in management-speak than the riches of the English language. Hence the oft-repeated call to "make the case for the humanities."
Such an endeavor is fraught with ambiguities. Vulgar conservative critiques of the humanities are usually given the greatest exposure, and yet it is often political (and religious) conservatives who have labored the most mightily to foster traditional humanistic disciplines. Left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic inquiry — "Western civ and all that" — as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.
The humanities have both left and right defenders and left and right critics. The left defenders of the humanities are notoriously bad at coming up with a coherent, effective defense, but they have been far more consistent in defending the "useless" disciplines against politically and economically charged attacks. The right defenders of the humanities have sometimes put forward a strong and cogent defense of their value, but they have had little sway when it comes to confronting actual attacks on the humanities by conservative politicians. The sad truth is that instead of forging a transideological apology for humanistic pursuits, this ambiguity has led to the disciplines’ being squeezed on both sides.
Indeed, both sides enable the humanities’ adversaries. Conservatives who seek to use the coercive and financial power of the state to correct what they see as ideological abuses within the professoriate are complicit in the destruction of the old-fashioned and timeless scholarship they supposedly are defending. It is self-defeating to make common cause with corporate interests just to punish the political sins of liberal professors. Progressives who want to turn the humanities into a laboratory for social change, a catalyst for cultural revolution, a training camp for activists, are guilty of the same instrumentalization. When they impose de facto ideological litmus tests for scholars working in every field, they betray their conviction that the humanities exist only to serve contemporary political and social ends.
Caught in the middle are the humanities scholars who simply want to do good work in their fields; to read things and think about what they mean; to tease out conclusions about the past and present through a careful analysis of evidence; to delve deeply into language, art, artifact, culture, and nature. This is what the university was established to do.
To see this, one must first understand that the popular critiques of the humanities — overspecialization, overproduction, too little teaching — are fundamentally misguided. Often well-meaning critics think they are attacking the decadence and excess of contemporary humanities scholarship. In fact, they are striking at the very heart of the humanities as they have existed for centuries. (...)
To talk about the crisis of the humanities is to consider the survival of the university itself. The heart of the university is the arts, understood broadly. For the first centuries of the institution’s existence, every student had to traverse an arts curriculum before going on to achieve an employable degree in law, medicine, or theology. At any given time, the arts faculty and students would have formed by far the largest bloc in any university — the fact that students are still awarded B.A.s and M.A.s is an indication of their centrality. The arts were, in theory, the seven liberal arts, although in practice primarily grammar (including what we now call literary studies) and logic. The seven liberal arts had a wide mandate covering most of what we consider the humanities, as well as mathematics in all its branches and the physical and natural sciences. Alongside the arts were the three highers — theology, law, and medicine — which had a more professional orientation and sat in an occasionally uneasy truce with the arts.
What has happened relatively rapidly is the absorption of all areas of human endeavor into the university. One of the premises behind the land-grant universities dotting the American landscape is precisely that they could foster progress and innovation in agricultural science. That may well have been a fine idea, but there is no particular reason that you need a university to improve yields and reduce livestock mortality. When Illinois Industrial University was established, in 1867, it was supposed to be a purely technical institution. In 1885 it became the University of Illinois, and within decades, its presidents realized that they needed to build a proper humanities core to justify being a premier public university. The first decades of the 20th century saw both its departments of classics and English literature become leading American centers. As recently as 1992, a whole cadre of British polytechnics were officially dubbed universities. Some of them — Lincoln being one example — responded by building up a humanities core.
In short, the contemporary university is a strange chimera. It has become an institution for teaching undergraduates, a lab for medical and technological development in partnership with industry, a hospital, a museum (or several), a performance hall, a radio station, a landowner, a big-money (or money-losing) sports club, a research center competing for government funding — often the biggest employer for a hundred miles around — and, for a few institutions, a hedge fund ("with a small college attached for tax purposes," adds one wag).
Unbundling may well happen. If it does, where will the university be found amid the wreckage? Where it always has been: with the people who read stuff and think about it. What is fascinating and perverse about the current situation is that what was once peripheral to the university — engineering and technology — is now at its center, and what was once its center has been reduced to the margins and forced to make a case for its continued existence.
We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. We stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some phrases involving "skills," "relevance," "a changing economy," "engagement," or "values." The reason it is hard to articulate is that the ideas behind the words are hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
What have the humanities ever been for? Some might say, as one humanities dean put it, that the humanities teach us about how to express our ideas and unleash our creativity. That case barely needs refutation. The puzzled glances of actual artisans, writers, and artists — who historically have had little university training — should be enough to disabuse us of the notion that "Introduction to Food Studies" is a necessary prerequisite to making pottery or writing novels.
Another says that the humanities is about the search for values. But "values" is a hard thing to put in a diachronic frame because it is not clear that there is any analogous notion in any culture besides our own. Values can hardly be a necessary component of the humanities, as there was no notion of them for most of the humanities’ history. Furthermore, making values, however specified, tends invariably to privilege certain disciplines over others. Values might have a lot to do with Spanish Golden Age literature, but what have they to do with historical linguistics?
A supposedly related goal for the humanities is that of ethical training. Indeed, the humane letters have long been regarded as imparting some sort of moral education. But do they? An informal survey of humanities scholars might not lead one to optimism on that score. Even then, incommensurate paradigms pose a challenge. A polyamorist who volunteers for Greenpeace may be one person’s ethical paradigm; a staunch monogamist who happens to drive an SUV is another’s. But they are not obviously compatible with each other. Which one would a humanistic education produce?
Another argument holds that the humanities are about truth. This is a slippery argument: Many things are true in one sense or another, and certainly most such things do not fall under the remit of the arts. Now, maybe there are truths that are more important than other truths, but that can be delineated only within a particular framework. For some, theology might provide that framework; for others, technology. Humanists obviously have their own framework, but the humanities are that framework. Hence, a petitio principii.
Finally, we are most commonly told that the humanities are about skills. There is something valid about this argument: learning to parse Sanskrit undoubtedly entails some general cognitive benefit. But those benefits are always byproducts. No one wants to learn Sanskrit because it will give them a leg up in a fast-moving economy. It will never be a compelling case for the humanities that they are like a gym for the mind. Forget about attracting administrators — that argument will not even get you any students. (...)
The world has seen an explosion in the number of universities in the 20th century. The vision driving this expansion, however, has been the notion that universities can become science labs, innovation incubators, professional schools, engines of meritocracy, agents of social change, and guardians of equality. Praiseworthy those may be, but they are tasks for high schools, research labs, institutes of technology, apprenticeship programs, activism workshops, and the like. They have no essential connection to the university but are simply wedded to it out of convenience. Even so, it is those roles that hold the position of greatest influence in the modern university.
For now, at least, the humanities are permitted to retain a much-diminished place. The most prestigious universities in the West are still those defined by their humanities legacy, which surrounds them with an aura of cultural standing that their professional purpose no longer justifies. The humanities continue to lend cachet to educational credentials, granting an elite status worth far more than any "marketable skills." That is why every technical institute with higher aspirations has added humanities programs: Accounting or law or engineering can be learned in many places, but courtoisie is passed along only in the university, and only through the humanities — and everyone knows it.
Meanwhile, the humanities provide cover for the economic engine that the contemporary university has become. The holder of an endowed chair would prefer not to think of himself as an accreditor of the next generation of corporate consultants, hedge-fund managers, and tech CEOs — even though that is the most socially "relevant" and visible effect of his work today. It is the lingering presence of the humanities that allows the modern university to think better of itself, and to imagine itself to be above commercial or political vulgarity. This "case" for the humanities is implicit in every glossy flier produced by a university development office, but no one could state it without blushing.
The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve. Perhaps we demand a case for the humanities only because we cannot fathom having to make a case for anything else. (...)
That is the current state of the humanities: derided by the public, an easy target for lazy attacks by politicians, a scapegoat and straw man for left and right alike, considered useless by industry, divorced from its historic patrons in the church. Platitudes will offer no shelter for the coming storm.
The result of this is deep conceptual confusion about what the humanities are and the reason for studying them in the first place. I do not intend to address the former question here — most of us know the humanities when we see them.
Instead I wish to address the other question: the reason for studying them in the first place. This is of paramount importance. After all, university officials, deans, provosts, and presidents all are far more likely to know how to construct a Harvard Business School case study than to parse a Greek verb, more familiar with flowcharts than syllogisms, more conversant in management-speak than the riches of the English language. Hence the oft-repeated call to "make the case for the humanities."Such an endeavor is fraught with ambiguities. Vulgar conservative critiques of the humanities are usually given the greatest exposure, and yet it is often political (and religious) conservatives who have labored the most mightily to foster traditional humanistic disciplines. Left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic inquiry — "Western civ and all that" — as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.
The humanities have both left and right defenders and left and right critics. The left defenders of the humanities are notoriously bad at coming up with a coherent, effective defense, but they have been far more consistent in defending the "useless" disciplines against politically and economically charged attacks. The right defenders of the humanities have sometimes put forward a strong and cogent defense of their value, but they have had little sway when it comes to confronting actual attacks on the humanities by conservative politicians. The sad truth is that instead of forging a transideological apology for humanistic pursuits, this ambiguity has led to the disciplines’ being squeezed on both sides.
Indeed, both sides enable the humanities’ adversaries. Conservatives who seek to use the coercive and financial power of the state to correct what they see as ideological abuses within the professoriate are complicit in the destruction of the old-fashioned and timeless scholarship they supposedly are defending. It is self-defeating to make common cause with corporate interests just to punish the political sins of liberal professors. Progressives who want to turn the humanities into a laboratory for social change, a catalyst for cultural revolution, a training camp for activists, are guilty of the same instrumentalization. When they impose de facto ideological litmus tests for scholars working in every field, they betray their conviction that the humanities exist only to serve contemporary political and social ends.
Caught in the middle are the humanities scholars who simply want to do good work in their fields; to read things and think about what they mean; to tease out conclusions about the past and present through a careful analysis of evidence; to delve deeply into language, art, artifact, culture, and nature. This is what the university was established to do.
To see this, one must first understand that the popular critiques of the humanities — overspecialization, overproduction, too little teaching — are fundamentally misguided. Often well-meaning critics think they are attacking the decadence and excess of contemporary humanities scholarship. In fact, they are striking at the very heart of the humanities as they have existed for centuries. (...)
To talk about the crisis of the humanities is to consider the survival of the university itself. The heart of the university is the arts, understood broadly. For the first centuries of the institution’s existence, every student had to traverse an arts curriculum before going on to achieve an employable degree in law, medicine, or theology. At any given time, the arts faculty and students would have formed by far the largest bloc in any university — the fact that students are still awarded B.A.s and M.A.s is an indication of their centrality. The arts were, in theory, the seven liberal arts, although in practice primarily grammar (including what we now call literary studies) and logic. The seven liberal arts had a wide mandate covering most of what we consider the humanities, as well as mathematics in all its branches and the physical and natural sciences. Alongside the arts were the three highers — theology, law, and medicine — which had a more professional orientation and sat in an occasionally uneasy truce with the arts.
What has happened relatively rapidly is the absorption of all areas of human endeavor into the university. One of the premises behind the land-grant universities dotting the American landscape is precisely that they could foster progress and innovation in agricultural science. That may well have been a fine idea, but there is no particular reason that you need a university to improve yields and reduce livestock mortality. When Illinois Industrial University was established, in 1867, it was supposed to be a purely technical institution. In 1885 it became the University of Illinois, and within decades, its presidents realized that they needed to build a proper humanities core to justify being a premier public university. The first decades of the 20th century saw both its departments of classics and English literature become leading American centers. As recently as 1992, a whole cadre of British polytechnics were officially dubbed universities. Some of them — Lincoln being one example — responded by building up a humanities core.
In short, the contemporary university is a strange chimera. It has become an institution for teaching undergraduates, a lab for medical and technological development in partnership with industry, a hospital, a museum (or several), a performance hall, a radio station, a landowner, a big-money (or money-losing) sports club, a research center competing for government funding — often the biggest employer for a hundred miles around — and, for a few institutions, a hedge fund ("with a small college attached for tax purposes," adds one wag).
Unbundling may well happen. If it does, where will the university be found amid the wreckage? Where it always has been: with the people who read stuff and think about it. What is fascinating and perverse about the current situation is that what was once peripheral to the university — engineering and technology — is now at its center, and what was once its center has been reduced to the margins and forced to make a case for its continued existence.
We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. We stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some phrases involving "skills," "relevance," "a changing economy," "engagement," or "values." The reason it is hard to articulate is that the ideas behind the words are hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
What have the humanities ever been for? Some might say, as one humanities dean put it, that the humanities teach us about how to express our ideas and unleash our creativity. That case barely needs refutation. The puzzled glances of actual artisans, writers, and artists — who historically have had little university training — should be enough to disabuse us of the notion that "Introduction to Food Studies" is a necessary prerequisite to making pottery or writing novels.
Another says that the humanities is about the search for values. But "values" is a hard thing to put in a diachronic frame because it is not clear that there is any analogous notion in any culture besides our own. Values can hardly be a necessary component of the humanities, as there was no notion of them for most of the humanities’ history. Furthermore, making values, however specified, tends invariably to privilege certain disciplines over others. Values might have a lot to do with Spanish Golden Age literature, but what have they to do with historical linguistics?
A supposedly related goal for the humanities is that of ethical training. Indeed, the humane letters have long been regarded as imparting some sort of moral education. But do they? An informal survey of humanities scholars might not lead one to optimism on that score. Even then, incommensurate paradigms pose a challenge. A polyamorist who volunteers for Greenpeace may be one person’s ethical paradigm; a staunch monogamist who happens to drive an SUV is another’s. But they are not obviously compatible with each other. Which one would a humanistic education produce?
Another argument holds that the humanities are about truth. This is a slippery argument: Many things are true in one sense or another, and certainly most such things do not fall under the remit of the arts. Now, maybe there are truths that are more important than other truths, but that can be delineated only within a particular framework. For some, theology might provide that framework; for others, technology. Humanists obviously have their own framework, but the humanities are that framework. Hence, a petitio principii.
Finally, we are most commonly told that the humanities are about skills. There is something valid about this argument: learning to parse Sanskrit undoubtedly entails some general cognitive benefit. But those benefits are always byproducts. No one wants to learn Sanskrit because it will give them a leg up in a fast-moving economy. It will never be a compelling case for the humanities that they are like a gym for the mind. Forget about attracting administrators — that argument will not even get you any students. (...)
The world has seen an explosion in the number of universities in the 20th century. The vision driving this expansion, however, has been the notion that universities can become science labs, innovation incubators, professional schools, engines of meritocracy, agents of social change, and guardians of equality. Praiseworthy those may be, but they are tasks for high schools, research labs, institutes of technology, apprenticeship programs, activism workshops, and the like. They have no essential connection to the university but are simply wedded to it out of convenience. Even so, it is those roles that hold the position of greatest influence in the modern university.
For now, at least, the humanities are permitted to retain a much-diminished place. The most prestigious universities in the West are still those defined by their humanities legacy, which surrounds them with an aura of cultural standing that their professional purpose no longer justifies. The humanities continue to lend cachet to educational credentials, granting an elite status worth far more than any "marketable skills." That is why every technical institute with higher aspirations has added humanities programs: Accounting or law or engineering can be learned in many places, but courtoisie is passed along only in the university, and only through the humanities — and everyone knows it.
Meanwhile, the humanities provide cover for the economic engine that the contemporary university has become. The holder of an endowed chair would prefer not to think of himself as an accreditor of the next generation of corporate consultants, hedge-fund managers, and tech CEOs — even though that is the most socially "relevant" and visible effect of his work today. It is the lingering presence of the humanities that allows the modern university to think better of itself, and to imagine itself to be above commercial or political vulgarity. This "case" for the humanities is implicit in every glossy flier produced by a university development office, but no one could state it without blushing.
The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve. Perhaps we demand a case for the humanities only because we cannot fathom having to make a case for anything else. (...)
That is the current state of the humanities: derided by the public, an easy target for lazy attacks by politicians, a scapegoat and straw man for left and right alike, considered useless by industry, divorced from its historic patrons in the church. Platitudes will offer no shelter for the coming storm.
by Justin Stover, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Gary Neill
