As humanities scholars continue to struggle for public support, maybe they will replace the word “truth” with “wisdom” as shorthand for the value of their work. A panel of distinguished scholars often deployed the latter word as they discussed “The Public Face of the Humanities” on Friday here at the annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies.
That is not to say that the term “wisdom” was left uncontested—it, too, has become suspect over the years—nor, on the flip side, were the panelists uniform in rejecting the notion of truth. But they did agree on at least one thing: that humanities scholars need to communicate that their research, no less than research in the hard sciences, produces new knowledge.
“I sometimes sense a desire, among humanists, to believe that what we need to do is to pretend that the past 30 or 40 years of intellectual history didn’t happen—or that it was all a wrong turn,” said Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature and the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University.
He was referring to complaints by both critics and practitioners that the scholars have only themselves to blame—in particular, the critical-theory movement that swept through American academic departments in the 1980s and ’90s—for their current predicament. The story goes that, by rejecting notions of universal aesthetic value and unmediated historical truth, humanities scholars left the public wondering what the point was.
But arguing about ideas like universalism “is precisely what we’re supposed to be doing,” said Mr. Bérubé. And for students, learning about the history of those ideas—and challenges to them—"is a path to a form of wisdom, to a deeper understanding of human affairs.”
What’s dangerous, he said, is seeing the humanities as “the repository” of wisdom, a set of glorious artifacts about which there is nothing new to be said. “When we defend the humanities in the abstract without specifically defending research in the humanities"—whether it is archival work, archaeological work, or even “queer readings of Willa Cather"—scholars jeopardize their support. And that research produces new knowledge that challenges conventional wisdom and can change the course of history. “Isn’t there perhaps some connection between queer theory and the increasing acceptance of gay marriage?” he asked.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, who moderated the panel, agreed with Mr. Bérubé on the question of new knowledge: “It is important that we make clear that one of the reasons we want to write about Shakespeare and Milton is that we have new things to say about them and that there is no limit,” said Mr. Appiah. “There will always be new things to say about them; that’s why they’re interesting.”
But later Mr. Bérubé made a point of saying, “I don’t see the danger of stressing contingency,” citing not just Shakespeare but also Stephen King as writers whose value is not “set in stone.”
Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard University, took a different tack, saying, “I do think we can explore timeless questions and universal truths if it is done carefully and responsibly.”
In her talk, Ms. Lepore said she found “tremendously inspiring” the case W.E.B. Du Bois made in the early 20th century for scholarship: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
Part of the work of the humanities is to explore what makes a good life, she said. They provide more than “soft power” or what Jim Leach, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, called “cultural power": a compassionate understanding of foreign people and their concerns. As well intentioned as that argument for federal support is, said Ms. Lepore, “defending the humanities by emphasizing its value to national security” might put it in the same fix in which political science now finds itself. She alluded to Congress’s recent directive to the National Science Foundation that any political-science research it supports must be “in the national interest.”
Ms. Lepore is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written a book about how, over time, different interests have appropriated the symbolism of the American Revolution for various political ends. She said the Tea Party movement had made her think differently about her work. “Much of the public hates what I do,” she said. “That’s worth confronting.”
Mr. Appiah responded that “we can’t expect that when we tell [the public] the best current understanding, they’ll like what we say. The nation organizes itself around untruths. They want you to reconfirm what they think.”
Scholars’ ‘First’ Public
Part of the problem with public outreach, it is often said, is that the professional reward system doesn’t recognize it. Scholars on the panel acknowledged recent efforts by groups like the American Historical Association to change that, but said they did not go far enough. “For all the number of panels like this, there’s an awful lot of lip service” to the idea of speaking to a broader public, said Ms. Lepore, when what is needed is a “dedicated reimagining of what we do.”
Of course, humanities researchers do reach millions of nonscholars every day, in their undergraduate classes. Those students are “our first public and most important public,” Ms. Lepore said, and present their own set of challenges. “We need to explain our research to people who know nothing and probably care even less,” she said.
Another problem, a member of the audience pointed out, is impatience. “How can we get people to be patient for research that doesn’t immediately lead to something?”
“It would help if they weren’t $25,000 in debt when they graduated,” responded Mr. Bérubé. But funders, too, are drumming their fingers, and not just at humanities scholars: Scientists are also being pushed to conduct applied research that promises concrete results.
Ms. Lepore put impatience in the context of larger cultural changes. “Figuring out what makes a good life takes a long time, much more than four years,” she said. Meanwhile, students “measure time in terms of the next version of the iPhone.”
She and Mr. Bérubé shared an antipathy for students’ desire that they be able to “relate to” what they are learning. “We should ban the word ‘relatable,’” said Mr. Bérubé, “and replace it with ‘translatable.’”
Ms. Lepore said she saw the same emphasis on “relatability” in her school-age children’s classrooms. “That comes from the long legacy of [the education theorist] Howard Gardner, engaging the emotions of students rather than students’ ideas,” she said. “‘How can you find yourself in others?’ I want them to find others in others. It’s been a real shift.”
Another panelist, the Stanford University art historian Alexander Nemerov, was more sanguine about students’ desire for something deeper. “Art is important in their lives,” he said. “They’ve yet to have the notion held up to the bitter light of skepticism. Students are looking for someone to believe in something.” He tries to feed that hunger, he said, “but not in a way that panders.”
Perhaps, an audience member suggested, humanities scholars should not have “surrendered a charismatic vocabulary” when talking to the public.
“A charismatic word I’d like to have more in my work is ‘story.’” said Mr. Nemerov. “It’s not the same as saying we’re producing new knowledge. It’s better.”
Earlier in the day Earl Lewis, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, also emphasized the importance of story. Reminding his audience that the original acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics was “SMET,” until its proponents on Capitol Hill realized that was too easily misread as “smut,” he attributed the great success of the STEM movement to a strong narrative about the importance of math and science learning.
Similarly, he said, the humanities needs to get its story straight: “We need to craft a narrative that is consistent, with a clear thesis that everyone can understand.”
