The latest efficiency measure in the State University of New York system elicits commentary from K. C. Johnson at Minding the Campus.That post is from 2010, but it could be from 1995, or it could be, as this lament from 2018 indicates, Contemporary Relevance.George Philip deserves a prominent place in any 2010 academic hall of shame. The SUNY Albany president recently terminated the university's French, Russian, Italian, Classics, and Theater departments, citing financial concerns. That Albany purports to be a quality university (and is, in fact, one of SUNY's better branches) makes Philip's move all the more unjustifiable.Professor Johnson's essay is a reaction to a Stanley Fish column in the New York Times, a newspaper that once characterized the demolition of Pennsylvania Station as a "shameful act of vandalism"; in the same editorial suggesting that our era would be judged by the monuments we destroyed. So let it be with the humanities.
Greg Summers may go down as the history professor who ended the history major at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.Stevens Point is one of several former normal schools now calling themselves universities along State Highway 29, where there is abundant excess capacity. Efforts to combine departments have been common for years. Put some mail cars on the California Zephyr and have it make the stops the mail train used to make. Combine the Twentieth Century and New England States west of Buffalo. Reduce administrative expenses by creating one Languages and Literatures department where there used to be German and Russian and Italian and Latin. Of course there are no proven success stories. Because it's retrenchment, pure and simple. But the academic enterprise is reluctant to retrench, let alone to rethink the curricular abuses that have alienated people. There's a lot going on, and a lengthy post follows.
He might also, potentially, become the guy who helped save history at the central Wisconsin university by finding its sweet spot.
The UW-Stevens Point provost is both a historian and the chief architect of a sweeping proposal that attempts to transform the school with 7,725 students into "a new kind of regional university." A regional university without a history major. Or majors in German, French, geography, geology and two tracks within art (two-dimensional and three-dimensional). It would be a school of interdisciplinary "career-focused" majors.
A few other universities have tried something similar, but so far there are no proven success stories. The truth is, no one knows for sure whether the idea will work. But UW-Stevens Point has its back against the wall, facing a nearly $8 million structural deficit and enrollment that has dipped to a 45-year low. Its leaders needed to think outside the box.
It's not that the retrenchment, whether along Highway 29 or elsewhere will prove to work better.
What's happening at Stevens Point reflects conversations about higher education happening across the country. Many legislatures — and their constituencies — are demanding universities run themselves like businesses, with college seen as a stepping stone to a career. Cutting-edge science buildings rise up on campuses amid much fanfare; humanities classes are perceived as being at home in musty old buildings covered in ivy.As a general principle, treating a university as a place for job preparation is going to fail. Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell wrote that obituary long ago. "[A university] is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth." Otherwise it's a "jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology."
That "conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology" pretty well describes the language, literature, and many social science departments these days, whilst the area studies departments are trade schools for future human resources junior executives. And now it's Miami of Ohio seeking to combine the New England States with the Century.
Low-enrolled majors were identified as having 35 students or less in the program by the Provost’s Office.Apparently even Miami's attempts to match the profile of selective institutions in admissions and curriculum cannot hold up against demographics, and perhaps, against people taking "to get a good job, get a good education" literally. It's not turning out well outside of the allegedly more vocational disciplines.
Along with [Latin American Studies] 17 other majors were identified as low-enrolled. These include American studies, art history, critical race and ethnic studies, classical studies, French, French education, German, German education, health communication, health information technology, Italian studies, Latin education, religion, Russian, East European and Eurasian studies, Spanish education, social justice and women's, gender and sexuality studies.
Too late, perhaps, for those disciplines facing consolidation or discontinuance to take Inside Higher Ed contributor Jeffrey R. Wilson seriously. "The humanities study things humans make." Look, anybody who has little patience for talk about "the human condition" ought be taken seriously, but where's the fun in that?
Once upon the time, the first two years of college, when it was still a liberal arts core curriculum, rather than a general education cafeteria, served that purpose. Somewhere, though, anthropology narrowed its focus, turning the attempt to understand the varied ways in which people interact into yet another manifestation of identity politics and vulgar Marxism.Didn't you know that vulgar Marxism is the humanities these days?
I was glad to read the Sun-Times editorial “To revive the humanities, think New Deal,” which called for investment in the humanities as an essential antidote to our country’s divisions of race, culture, and politics — and which hearkened to the Work Progress Administration.As if there aren't already enough Minimal Publishable Units being churned out by people looking for obscure writers who check all the diversity boxes without producing anything interesting.
The WPA included investments in the humanities — in theater, public art, poetry, historic preservation and library collections. Many WPA projects, including hundreds in Illinois, were designed to take the humanities outside of classrooms and off college campuses into the public sphere for anyone to enjoy for free.
However, the WPA also was rife with sexism, racism and classism. Contributions by women and people of color came about through efforts of determined individuals who fought against traditional systems to ensure the inclusion of diverse voices and experiences.
As powerful as the New Deal was, we can do better with an agenda that invests in the infrastructure of change through the humanities.Good grief. With friends like Gabrielle Lyons, executive director of Illinois Humanities, do arts, letters and social sciences need enemies. And they have enemies, notes Washington University's Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado.
1) Change-making policies are insufficient and less effective without the humanities at the table to ensure approaches that include empathy and diverse voices, and that center the experiences of those most impacted.
2) Infrastructure projects have historically been applied in ways that amplify segregation, disenfranchise vulnerable populations, and upend culturally and historically relevant sites. The humanities provide context. We need to invest in memory, meaning and memorials if we are to fully capitalize on infrastructure in ways that create social, as well as physical, resilience.
3) The humanities are as crucial to the nation’s success as science and technology. They are where the narrative of the American dream can be, and is being, rewritten. We need to galvanize the creative sector — the thousands of individuals and nonprofit cultural organizations that host and employ them — with resources. If we are to reimagine the social contract foundational to our identity as a country in a way that is inclusive, just and socially relevant for current and future generations, we need humanists to light the way.
Little did I know that, even if the field of Spanish was still somewhat shielded from the fallout, the humanities were already being dismantled, and the 2008 financial crisis would bring a long-term reckoning.That's right, "liberal-leaning publications." But if your friends don't tell you a problem, will your enemies?
It is both infuriating and disheartening to witness the real-time dismantling and destruction of the infrastructure that afforded scholars like me a top-notch humanities education and secure employment. We must never accept this destruction. The public discourse about our fields can be very poor, and we lack the collective coherence to reflect our common knowledge in ways that can significantly shape public perception. Narratives about our profession in national and social media have become deeply harmful and often foreground damaging policies.
The conversations surrounding the humanities in liberal-leaning mainstream publications are of such carelessness and scandalous frivolity that you begin to understand why we are so readily erased by dumbfounding clichés and stereotypes. The multiplicity of think pieces about universities churned out in the clickbait era feeds multiple mischaracterizations of our trade.
The Stevens Point campus highlighted a popular perception that emphases in literature, history, or languages lead nowhere for cash-strapped graduates but to more debt and fewer jobs. Yet what the article on official university policy misses is why students do not concentrate in the liberal arts in the fashion of the past.That was Victor Hanson, responding to the Stevens Point story when it broke five years ago, and yet, for all of Professor Sánchez Prado's defenses of the new dispensation, he hasn't rebutted the claim that incomprehensible writing and vulgar identity politics turns people off.
After all, only that fact of declining enrollments allows the university to institutionalize the unspoken reality of eroding student interest. In other words, the university is simply burying liberal-arts majors that were already killed off not by bottom-line-minded state legislators but by the choices of either students or faculty or by university policies, or by combinations of all three.
If higher education’s increasing fixation on job training is the whirlpool that swallows history majors, the monster across the narrow straits of liberal-arts education is a many-headed politicized orthodoxy, a Scylla that consumes the flesh of the liberal arts and leave the bones as dreary reminders of boilerplate race, class, gender, and culture agendas. In the case of history, few increasingly wish to sit in a class where the past becomes tedious melodrama rather than complex tragedy, a sort of reeducation camp in which modern standards of suburban orthodoxy time-travel to the past in order to judge materially impoverished historical figures or pivotal events as either culpable or exonerated.
The tragedy, then, is not just that a campus of the University of Wisconsin would drop the history major but that the custodians of history in the 21st century lost the ability to teach and write about history in a way that sustains a hallowed 2,500-year tradition.
Even within academia, the conversations about the humanities in the United States today, including some of the presumptions that ground efforts to “save” them, are deeply inaccurate and misguided. Clearly, the idea of surrendering to the neoliberal discourse of skills to justify our existence is as ineffective a defense as the repeated platitudes about the humanities forming good liberal citizens. These perspectives have failed to halt the decline because they present a world in which the humanities embrace their defeat within profit-driven institutions or imagine magical solutions from a fortress of nostalgia. I am increasingly unsure that our task is to “save” the humanities, a discourse that keeps us entrenched in the past rather than looking to the future.It doesn't matter. Vulgar Marxism in English. Vulgar Marxism in Latino Studies. Vulgar Marxism in anthropology. Mr Hanson diagnoses what happens next. "The students then are assumed by the course’s end to be outraged, persuaded, galvanized, and shocked in politically acceptable ways. Usually they are just bored, as supposedly with-it professors endlessly regurgitate the esoterica picked up in graduate schools."
Many cannot even accurately describe the humanities in a way that matches the broad spectrum of disciplines and programs that constitute them. The inertial conflation of “the humanities” with “English departments” is perhaps the predominant error, although not the only one. English departments do not even constitute the totality of literary criticism inside the university.
There's an awful lot in Professor Sánchez Prado's essay, including the lede, buried well into the essay.
In reality, it has become incredibly difficult to teach subjects like Renaissance drama or the 19th-century novel because students come to college, even in elite universities, with an astounding lack of prior knowledge. The idea that students are turned off by cultural studies and would return to a classical education is laughable and easily disproven by existing course enrollment trends. In my elite university, some students tell me that they never read a book before college, or took an art history class, and certainly never learned any history outside the US context. Even cinema studies, whose teaching was at some point denounced as too great an accommodation to the popular, is a deeply esoteric subject to them.It's the Distressed Material, isn't it? Maybe the high schools ought to reimburse the universities for sending in unprepared matriculants. Or perhaps the universities ought stop admitting unprepared students and calling it access. Let's have Wilfred McClay and Robert Nisbet take up the argument.
Gutting the humanities preempts the task of delivering a curricular structure that would provide formational and remedial education to these students. To address their limitations, instructors resort to classes focused on the present and the familiar as a way of enrolling students who would steer clear of our courses otherwise.
A rather gloomy Gus, our friend Robert Nisbet. And yet it is hard to contest the essential truth in what he says. Even in his observations about “classics” he proved prophetic. At Princeton, it is now possible to graduate with a degree in classics and not to have studied Greek or Latin at all. Quod erat demonstrandum! Nisbet might proclaim, confident that a Princeton classics major wouldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.And they can't even come up with a book of poems and a candle when the lights go out!
And it is striking how much of Nisbet’s bill of accusations against the humanities, delivered in 1982, still applies very precisely, over four decades later: the domineering status of political ideology, obsession with questions of race and sexuality and identity, the steady preoccupation with oppression and marginalization and historical grievance, the celebration of the transgressive, the tyranny of overspecialization. All of this was firmly in place in the faculties of our “best” institutions during the Eighties.
Mr McClay echoes Mr Wilson in attempting to define the humanities. "The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms." Fine. Just do it. "The point of the core curriculum is to help matriculants figure out what they're good at. Develop that, and then your departments will be fine." Do it right. "It's on higher education to get the job right, and, unfortunately 'transgressive hermeneutics' and a misunderstanding of 'critical thinking' will not do the job." Deconstruct the good stories at your own risk.
Neglect that advice, and all of Mr Wilson's advice will be for naught.
The prestige disciplines in the humanities— law, economics, government—enjoy broad cultural understanding and appreciation of their social value. They could teach the more niche disciplines—literary studies, philosophy, the arts—how to be more publicly engaged. At the same time, the enterprise of the humanities in general benefits from a wide cultural understanding that these disciplines are on the same team.Sorry, no, this is not the time for rent-seeking activities, or attempting to purge the realists from law, economics, or political science.
Broadening the definition of the humanities to include fields such as law, economics and government could mean that already well-funded scholars gobble up humanities resources from less well-off disciplines, such as history, classics and cultural studies. But funding is a positive-sum game. Recognizing those prestige disciplines as part of the humanities could dramatically increase the overall funds allocated to the humanities from various agencies—a bigger pot for everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment