With lengthy statements about the humanities such as here and here and here circulating widely through the digital airwaves and academic hallways, it seems that we’re in the midst of yet another crisis in the liberal arts. This one isn’t a matter of “politicization” (as in the mid-1980s) or of half-baked “theorization” (mid-1990s — Sokal, Bad Writing . . .). It’s a dollars thing.
Searches cancelled, graduate admissions slashed, salary freezes . . . the humanities seem hit the hardest, and humanities professors are scrambling for grounds for pushback. The big question this time is, how to justify the humanities to others?
That’s a particularly hard question for many humanities professors to address because they have, in recent years, come to define themselves precisely in adversarial terms. Their job, they declare, is to provoke students to think critically about conventional values, beliefs, norms.
We won’t go into how selectively they apply the practice, but only note the impasse it poses when resources begin to dry and a public case must be made. A way out of it appears in another story on the crisis by Andrew Delbanco which appeared in the Chronicle a few weeks. He wrote:
“Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust.”
Instead of looking at the social and political and financial scene and fashioning appeals, let’s first examine ourselves, in particular, I would say, the adversarial mindset. Forget about the “utility” of the humanities to the wider world — that’s a losing approach, and all those statements about how studying the humanities might have made those financiers and politicians more sensitive and responsible are, if not hot air, then certainly ineffectual.
Delbanco does offer a positive recourse by stating that humanistic study “deepens and enriches individual experience,” a justification that stands up well. But as long as humanities figures embrace the oppositional identity (Delbanco groups it under the term “critical,” as opposed to the “curatorial”), they can’t pronounce it with vigor. They better learn, though, because university budgets, especially at public institutions, are only going to get worse next year (when those property tax revenues sink).
