It did little for my digestion this morning when I opened The New York Times to Patricia Cohen’s article entitled “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” The context for the article is all too clear, since as Cohen notes, “previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term ‘humanities.’” She follows up by citing the decrease in jobs available in literature due to university hiring freezes and other budget cutbacks, but of course that decrease is pretty general across the liberal arts. And it will get worse. Within the last few days I have received repeated messages from friends at other research universities reporting cuts in operating budgets for 2009-10 (and for the next year as well) of anywhere from 15 to 20 percent. President Richard Levin announced yesterday that Yale would impose cuts beyond those he had announced last December — a freeze for salaries above $75,000, a 7.5-percent (up from 5-percent) reduction in non-salary expenditures for next year, and an additional 5 percent for the following year. And Yale is in better financial shape than most universities.
The question is how the pain will be shared — or, perhaps, if it will be shared? The large universities have announced the cancellation or deferral of large building projects, but in fact the bulk of those projects are in the sciences and technology. Salary freezes are presumably across the board, though selective hiring freezes will be differentially allocated. What reason is there to fear that cuts will disproportionately affect the humanities? My own deepest concern, one not addressed in the Times article, is that library budgets will be disproportionately affected. Libraries, after all, are the laboratories of the humanities, but I am not aware that libraries have been targeted thus far. It may be that we will find that selective restrictions on faculty hiring are prejudicial to the humanities, and, if so, we should monitor the situation. But I am more concerned that such cuts will produce much larger numbers of contingent faculty. We may also find that campus humanities centers, university presses, and other humanities-critical campus institutions are under special financial pressure. We need to be watchful, and we need data.
My hunch, however, is that this is not a “humanities” problem but a “liberal arts” problem. The decline since the 1960s in students receiving BA degrees in the humanities (cited by Cohen) is in line with the decline in students receiving degrees in the liberal arts — mathematics and physics are doing no better than literature in this respect. The case we need to make is that a free market democracy needs liberally educated citizens in order to function optimally. If we in the humanities, and our colleagues in the other liberal arts, buy into the argument that our task is to produce job-ready workers the day after graduation, there is no way we can compete with the advocates of vocational undergraduate education. The liberal education sky is not (yet) falling, but liberal educators need to make clear to the public that the sky could fall if we neglect the traditional mainstream goals of undergraduate education. Let’s not whine about the humanities. Let’s watch, think and act.
