http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/a_wretched_defense_of_the_huma.html
June
23, 2013
A Wretched Defense of the Humanities
By Peter Wood
The American Academy of Arts and
Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus
appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the
humanities. This is one of the report's immediate goals, phrased of
course in the financial imperative, "Increase investment in research and
discovery." The report as a whole is presented as a response to a
"bipartisan request from members of the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives" in 2010. The American Academy took up this request
and appointed a 54-member commission to figure out what "actions" are
needed to "maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific
scholarship."
Let's see. That works out to
1.1296 pages of report per commissioner. Many of the commissioners also
appear in a 7-minute accompanying video, which begins with the actor (and
commissioner) John Lithgow explaining that the humanities are the
"beautiful flower" at the end of the STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and math.) With a piano softly playing Christian Sinding's Rustles
of Spring in the background and a camera exploring the petals of a yellow
gerbera, Lithgow continues, "Without the blossom, the stem is completely
useless." Cut to George Lucas, Rustling Spring pianissimo:
"The sciences are the how and the humanities are the why."
Cut to the Milky Way with Lucas's voiceover, segueing to architect Billie
Tsien, "The measurable is what we know and the immeasurable is what the
heart searches for."
The video portion of the Heart of
the Matter is beautifully produced, as I suppose one might expect from a
commission that included Ken Burns as well as George Lucas. But it is, I
suspect, not terribly persuasive. It comes across as the high-minded
extolling high-mindedness and perhaps thinking a little too well of themselves
for their act of generosity.
The humanities does get the
privilege of contemplating some of the more uplifting aspects of our
kind. Courage, kindness, and faithfulness come within its compass.
But so too do humanity's deepest dyed iniquities. It takes a humanist to
plumb treason's serpentine pride; to come alongside Othello's green-eyed
monster; or to exalt over the corpses of his enemies with Achilles. That side
of things is, let's say, not part of the pitch in the video or the report.
Although it may have a ghost-like
presence in the title. The Heart of the Matter, of course, was the
title of Graham Greene's great post-war novel about a guilt-ridden British
policeman in colonial West Africa whose altruism is confounded by his
fecklessness. His final act of supposed generosity is suicide, but even
that fails to achieve its intended purpose.
But I rather doubt that the
Commission was being so ironic. Its tone is much too sententious to have
reckoned with the possibility that the humanities have charted a course in
recent years in which high aspiration is so inextricably mixed with
self-destruction.
The opening statements on the video
do quite accurately capture the anxiety at the heart of the report
itself. The sciences are thriving. Captains of industry, political
leaders, and the opinion-shapers of all sorts thunder about the importance of
educating the coming generation in the sciences. Are the
humanities to be left in the dust?
It is a fate not easily
skirted. The New York Times put the report in context by
noting the mere 7.6 percent of bachelor's degrees granted in the humanities in
2010 and the long, steep slide in humanities majors at Harvard from 36 percent
of the undergraduates in 1954 to 20 percent today. Where have the students
gone? It is not that they are defecting en mass to biomedical
engineering or fractal geometry. The burgeoning undergraduate majors are
fields such as business, economics, and international relations.
Economics can be squeezed into the humanities, and the Commission does mention
economics as one of the valuable social sciences, but it doesn't really appear
to be "the heart of the matter."
The report is actually a bit vague
about what the humanities actually are. The executive summary throws a
wide lasso:
Emphasizing critical perspective and imaginative response,
the humanities--including the study of languages, literature, history, film,
civics, philosophy, religion, and the arts--foster creativity, appreciation of
our commonalities and our differences, and knowledge of all kinds. The social
sciences reveal patterns in our lives, over time and in the present moment.
Employing the observational and experimental methods of the natural sciences,
the social sciences--including anthropology, economics, political science and
government, sociology, and psychology--examine and predict behavioral and organizational
processes. Together, they help us understand what it means to be human and
connect us with our global community.
Wide lassos are good equipment for
capturing concepts as big as "the humanities," but the Commission's
list lacks the basic sense of order. It comes close to admitting that the
humanities are just the category of "everything else" after you
subtract the sciences from the curriculum.
But let's take the formulation at
face value. The key ideas are (1) critical perspective, (2) imaginative
response, (3) creativity, (4) appreciation of commonalities and differences,
(4) knowledge of all kinds, and adding the social sciences, (5) examining and
predicting behavior. All these together conduce to (6) understanding what
it means to be human, and (7) connecting us to our global community. If
you take the first item seriously ("critical perspective,") the rest
of the list looks a little wobbly. That's because the natural sciences
are every bit as creative, focused on human commonalities and differences
(think of DNA), deal in "knowledge," etc. What it means to be
human is at least as much a scientific question as a humanistic one.
I don't really want to be
obstructionist. The humanities are important and, in principle, deserve a
robust defense. But I have to wonder how carefully thought-out The
Heart of the Matter is. If the goal was merely to perform some old
songs from the songbook, or to twirl the lasso around in lasso tricks, I guess
these bland formulations will do. But it would have been nice to see an
intellectually more serious effort. The humanities haven't existed
forever. They are a division of human inquiry and teaching that grew out
of a particular tradition. Humanistic learning was, for many generations,
deemed essential for the man who sought to enter public life, and it was also
taken as the indispensable grounding for the worthy life of a free
individual.
Those views may have been mistaken,
but mistaken or not, they no longer have much grip on Americans. We have
been slowly dispensing with humanistic learning for a very long time.
Think back to Justin Morrill, the Vermont Congressman who in the midst of the
Civil War succeeded in passing the bill that authorized the creation of the
land grant universities. Morrill fiercely opposed having the humanities
play any part in these new institutions. His opposition was eventually worn
away by the universities themselves, but he stands as perhaps the best
expression of 19th America's distrust of the humanistic
tradition. How many Harvard graduates did America need? Morrill
thought, 'not so many.'
The great 20th century
democratization of higher education was intermittently friendly toward the
humanities but mass higher education is not really a great fit with the
strenuous ideal that students should wrestle with the obdurate materials of
human excellence and folly. Mass education throws its emphasis on
credentialing students for productive and prosperous careers. The
humanities occasionally lend themselves to that purpose, but it isn't their
primary business.
We can inventively shoehorn the
humanities into serving practical goals. And that indeed is what the
Commission seeks to do. Study the humanities, it says, because if we
don't there will be "grave, long-term consequences for the
nation." But what they mean is that mass literacy is a good idea;
voters and consumers should be "informed"; lots of
"resources" should be available online; teachers should be
well-prepared (and have their student loans forgiven!); foreign languages
should be taught; and we should encourage more study abroad. That's not
the whole list of desiderata but the rest of it is similar--practical policy
proposals that have thin connections to the humanities as such.
Unless, of course, you redefine the
humanities as whatever college professors in the traditional humanities
disciplines happen to be teaching at the moment.
And that seems to be the whole game.
The Commission pretends to speak with the authority of Erasmus or Diderot about
the importance of a human-centered curriculum, but all it really musters is the
voice of a middling utilitarian. Reading the report brought to mind
Jonathan R. Cole's The Great American University. Cole, a
former Columbia University provost, delivered this tome several years ago in
which he rehearsed the great accomplishments--mostly in the sciences--of
American research universities as part of an argument for more and still more
public funding.
The Heart of the Matter has still other ventricles. For unknown
reasons, the Commissioners devote several pages to plumping the importance of
the Common Core State Standards for K-12 education. Whatever the merits
of those standards, they have virtually nothing to do with improving the
situation of college-level humanities. Possibly they cut in the opposite
direction through their emphasis on reading "informational texts" and
their pedagogical focus on minimizing attention to historical context and
background knowledge. But in The Heart of the Matter, we get eight
pages of explanation of how the Common Core will strengthen literacy, prepare
citizens, and support teachers.
The Commission was co-chaired by
Richard Brodhead and John Rowe. Rowe is the retired chairman of Exelon
Corporation, who has contributed a lot of time, attention, and money to
promoting charter schools. Brodhead is the president of Duke
University and I suppose such an established figure that, at least in the eyes
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has lived down his infamous
behavior during the Duke lacrosse affair. Perhaps in polite company that
shouldn't be mentioned, but I confess I was astonished to see him put forward
as the primary academic figure behind this report. If we are to make the
case for the humanities as the ennobling part of higher education, might it be
better to do so under the symbolic leadership of someone who has modeled
courage, temperance, and faithfulness to the actual ideals of disinterested
judgment?
But that's just a petal falling from
the "beautiful flower." The video, with Rustles of Spring tinkling
underneath the somber voices of Yo-Yo Ma, Earl Lewis, David Brooks, Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Sandra Day O'Connor, etc. is little more than a parade of
balloons but it has the charm of well-picked metaphors. The report, alas,
has not even that.
Is there a better way to promote the
humanities? I am inclined to think the humanities thrive when the
humanists are self-evidently offering good and important work. The
humanities decline when they descend into triviality. The answer to a
nation skeptical of these disciplines is not more balloons, nor better
metaphors, or even better-crafted reports. It is better work.
____________________________
Peter Wood is president of the
National Association of Scholars.
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