A Lament for the Humanities

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, by Victorian social reformer Thomas Hughes, is a much-beloved story of a young boy shipped off to an English boarding school and of how he fares there. The story is based on the author’s own experiences at Rugby School back around 1840, when the headmaster was Dr. Thomas Arnold, father of the poet Matthew Arnold and grandfather of the novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward and great grandfather of the novelist Aldous Huxley. Although treated irreverently by Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians, Dr. Arnold (as he is always known) is generally acknowledged as the greatest force reforming English secondary education in the Victorian era. Rugby is one of the great private schools (somewhat misleadingly known as public schools, the equivalent of what Americans call prep schools, although in England prep schools are for younger boys). Dr. Arnold set a pattern, changing such institutions from barbaric hellholes to be endured during adolescence to models of exemplary clean and concerned living—Christianity, cricket and cold baths—producing dedicated leaders for Home and Empire. (The influence of Plato’s prescriptions for the training of the Guardians in the Republic is very obvious.)

Hughes writes sympathetically of teachers and pupils—the exception being the bully and cad Harry Flashman, who is finally expelled and goes off to an army career of fame and glory in the series of very funny, pseudo reminiscences by George MacDonald  Fraser—but the one thing that clearly bemused everyone was the only lad at all attracted to science. Martin, known as the “Madman,” is obsessively interested in the natural world.  He blows himself up with chemicals, he experiments with electricity, and he has a passion for wildlife, knowing every animal in the vicinity of the school and keeping a variety of small beasts in his own study. All of the other boys, especially the near-Jesus-like figure Arthur, stick to the classics. Latin into English, Greek into English, and then English into Latin, and English into Greek.

A year or two earlier the young (non-fictional) Charles Darwin had had the same problems as Martin. He came from a family where science was the norm—his dad was a doctor and his uncle an industrialist—and he and his older brother had set up a chemistry lab in the back garden. Then when he went away to another of the famous public schools (Shroseberry) was a scientific round peg in a classics square hole. Darwin is often portrayed as not-very-bright because of his schoolday experiences but the simple fact of the matter is that he had little interest in Latin and Greek. Even when he went to the University of Cambridge he could not read for a science degree because there were none! It was only because some of the professors were interested in science that he could finally start to move towards his real interests. For three years Darwin attended the botany lectures of John Stevens Henslow, but not only was he not examined on them, because they were not part of his prescribed studies, but he had to pay an extra fee.

I have been thinking much about these sorts of things, especially about the relative statuses of the arts and the sciences and how things have changed. I spent this last week with a younger colleague in Washington, running a course on museums for our graduate students. On Monday we went to the Natural History Museum and on Tuesday to the Air and Space Museum. On Wednesday we went to the National Gallery of Art.  The contrast between the first two days and the third could not have been more pronounced. In the Natural History Museum and the Air and Space Museum you almost literally had to walk on kids to go from one room to the next. Shipped in by massive coaches from all over the Northeast, they were everywhere—yelling, screaming, laughing, pushing, running. Please understand, I am not complaining at all. I thought it was terrific. There they were in the IMAX Theater looking at the repairs being made to the Hubble telescope.  There they were gawking at the Wright brothers’ first successful flying machine. There they were giggling and having their photos taken next to reconstructions of Australopithecus afarensis and other ancestors. There they were looking at how forensic scientists can reconstruct the lives of early settlers from the gravesites.

Then came the National Gallery of Art, a little bit like a mausoleum. Nary a kid to be seen. Just old fogies like me. There seems to be absolutely no attempt to provide context or discussion or learning. I remember on my somewhat ill-fated trip to Austria earlier this year going to the chief historical art gallery and seeing a fascinating exhibit on the preservation and restoration of its Vermeer—an exhibit that had a very large audience. In Washington there is supposedly a kids section, but it is closed. At this time of year! But context or discussion or whatever, all of those little Americans on their ways home are going to have their minds filled with the excitement of science and technology, and the other side to human learning and experience won’t have had a look in. 

It is true that there is history. Later in the week we went to the Museum of American History and the incredibly well-organized and powerful Holocaust Museum—both of which were filled with children. But even here I was not sure that history was the first intent rather than propaganda—all of that stuff about the Star Spangled Flag and how it inspired the national anthem, not to mention the top hat that Abraham Lincoln was wearing on the night he was assassinated. I am not at all going to trivialize the Holocaust Museum and its messages, but I came away with more of a sense of guilt about the failure of the West to help the Jews than any real understanding of how a country as civilized and cultured as Germany could sink so low, so quickly.  Lots of stuff on Avery Brundage and removing the Jews from the American track team in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, but little on the background culture and psychology that led to the horrors of the Final Solution. 

I love science and I am certainly not going to disparage propaganda. It has always seemed to me that the United States works as a country in a way that Canada never has because it has such powerful shared symbols. But I am depressed at the way in which society has swung from an obsession with the humanities to the exclusion of the sciences to the complete reverse, an obsession with the sciences to the nigh exclusion of the humanities. You have only to spend a week or two on virtually any university campus—certainly the campus of any university with research pretensions—to realize that this is true. To take my own field of philosophy, you see how true this has become, particularly in this time of reduced budgets and pressures to get more for less. Florida State’s neighboring research university, the University of Florida, has been faced with the same horrendous financial black holes as us. So what was the reaction of the president? Close down the doctoral program in philosophy!

The same is true I am afraid elsewhere, and not just confined to the United States. Nor can one simply pick off the troubled spots by saying (as I have certainly heard said of the University of Florida’s department) that “they’re not very good anyway.” No one would want to say that Middlesex University in England is one of the world’s academic hot spots. It is a fairly recently converted polytechnic that specializes in business and sports management and criminology and that sort of thing. The Guardian newspaper ranks it 112 out of 118 British universities and the Times ranks it 104 out of 113 universities. Yet, given the possibilities, philosophy at Middlesex was outstanding. Small, focusing on Continental Philosophy, it was recently ranked 13 out of 41 British institutions. It offered several different masters programs as well as a doctoral program. It is way ahead the most academically prestigious unit in the whole university.

So, faced with budget concerns, what was the reaction of the administration? Close it down! In a way, the reasoning was logical to the point of being bizarre. One of the good things about the humanities is that we are a lot cheaper than the sciences. We don’t need labs and expensive equipment and so forth, not to mention squads of graduate students and postdocs to do the actual physical work. So generally that helps at budget time. However, state granting authorities are aware of this and so there is a tendency to give more to universities for science students than for humanities students. That is fair enough, but then combine it with a directive that caps the number of students that an institution can enroll overall.  The result is that there is pressure to enroll science students and to drop humanities students. Someone in sports management is worth more than someone in philosophy.

As it happens, it looks like there is going to be a happy ending to this story. Kingston University, another converted polytechnic, is in respects no more prestigious than Middlesex. But it does have a much bigger on-campus place for the arts and humanities, and it is going to pick up the Middlesex philosophers, taking the whole package. One institution’s loss is another’s gain. But what a sad story. And I ask, can anything change? Or were my Washington experiences simply a mark that the battle is over? The humanities are doomed.  The Philistines are upon us.