Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities -- it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it -- is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries. The “job crisis” has existed for over a quarter of a century -- no crisis, then, but a semi-permanent depression. As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable.
More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public: The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities -- with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever -- has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.
Our collective responsibility as humanists is to face those facts. But it is also to refuse fatalism.
Why not the following for a future? Graduates of our doctoral programs not merely well and fully employed, but fought over by universities, businesses, and public agencies. Children of any age, not just those between 18 and 21, taught to learn by experts. Cultural and educational institutions cooperating to such a degree that humanists go back and forth between sectors, and the publicly acting intellectual becomes the norm. A widespread adoption among citizens of a once-popular assumption: that the humanities uniquely provide a hard-won wisdom, gleaned from the total experience of humankind. The humanities holding sway, profoundly influencing decisions large and small.
That future, I insist, need not wait on the powers that be to experience an epiphany (or suffer a breakdown). But to achieve it, we must question why we have fallen so far. Who’s to blame? In a recent essay in Harvard’s alumni magazine, the literary scholars James Engel and Anthony Dangerfield name their chief villain in the title: “The Market-Model University.” Certainly, there is fault in a society that spends billions on the health of the nation’s body and chump-change on its soul. But that crazy imbalance, after all, measures not only others’ coarseness, but also our own failure. After spending much time haranguing educational capitalism and a new administrative crassness -- we administrators are crass, but that’s not new, nor is the power of money -- Engel and Dangerfield acknowledge that humanists might share the responsibility for their own plight. Arguing “more and more only with themselves” in “unedifying disputes,” the two authors say, faculty members in the humanities suffer from “endemic pettiness, bad faith, and guilt by association.”
One simple reason for the decline of the humanities is that they have stopped being fun -- for faculty members and students and for the public beyond academe. Coinciding with an emphasis on the sciences and with increasingly narrow career training, the culture wars might have chosen better timing. Like never.
But the nastiness -- and there appears to be a record number of dysfunctional humanities departments now -- is not limited to intellectual matters. In Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, the English-department chairman at a small college asks a colleague how things are going in other fields, such as French, Spanish, German, Italian, and classics. “Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame,” his colleague answers. “Same as English.”
The abusive pettiness that Russo satirizes is a climate. It is the weather of failure. The evil lies not in our cost-recovery stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves. It lies in the defeatism of humanities departments; and insularity is its fearful twin.
I became aware of such defeatism when I spent a year recently as an interim graduate dean. I began to notice my reactions to the day’s schedule. If a group of scientists made an appointment, I knew that I should lock the safe or get my checkbook ready for compelling and expensive proposals. If I saw that my colleagues in the humanities were coming by, I would reach instead for a tissue. The president of a major research university told me that, when he offered his faculty members funds for new proposals, he received more than 50 ideas from scientists, 30 from social scientists, and nothing from humanists except requests to put more money into existing programs.
That’s the problem. We sometimes confuse selling our disciplines with selling out, and wholesale distrust of our own institutions inspires neither us to ask nor the institution to give. Beyond that, we are not problem solvers. An engineer takes a problem and fixes it. A humanist takes a problem and celebrates its complexity. That is fine until we ourselves are the problem.
The current generation of humanities graduate students is not quietly accepting a losers’ culture. That is laudable, even critical. But the complaining tone of the graduate-student caucus at last December’s meeting of the Modern Language Association imitates the very voice of the mentors that the students chastised for not doing enough to ease the job shortage. And their reported opposition to a new emphasis on meaningful careers beyond academe also imitates their elders’ myopia. Maximizing academic employment and populating the frontiers beyond the academy do not constitute alternatives. Those are not either/or solutions. They are interdependent.
Our insularity is a political and intellectual failure as well as an economic one. We have become increasingly interested in the world examined by the humanities, but we have never had less actually to do with that world. We have debated canons and taught Toni Morrison, but we have not engaged with urban schools and community groups. As a result, the percentage of African-American and Hispanic graduates of our doctoral programs remains dismally low.
In all, too much posturing and too few ideas headed toward action contribute to a culture of edgy despair and fretful infighting in the humanities.
Lest I repeat the faults that I name (and I have been guilty of every one of them myself), I want to offer six proposals:
* Act on fact. Humanists tend to substitute rhetoric for data, just as social scientists often substitute data for thought. What departments and programs do not know about their own graduates is stunning. I worry that we humanists often do not collect information -- about, for example, where our graduates get jobs -- because we do not want to know what it will tell us. And the universities that gather data on their departments too often behave in the fashion of Dickens’s Chancery, collecting mounds of statistics but using them only to fill storage rooms with paper. While the merely quantitative can be misleading, it also can spur dialogue.
* Practice doctoral birth control. It is astonishing that there are now more than 140 doctoral-degree programs in English, when only about one-third of their graduates get tenure-track jobs in their first year on the market. Of course we must reduce enrollments and programs. I don’t know how to discourage status-conscious universities from maintaining worse-than-useless doctoral programs other than by the kind of public disapprobation they are already beginning to attract.
Those departments that do want to be responsible might consider either of two rules of thumb in admitting students. First, any department should accept only 1.3 times the number of incoming students as the number of graduates in the previous year who found truly significant jobs -- positions that they chose, not jobs that they accepted out of economic necessity. The extra 0.3 allows conservatively for attrition. That rule might lead to many fewer students -- or it might encourage faculty members and students to collaborate to enlarge the range of meaningful careers. Alternatively, let any department admit as many new doctoral students as it can assuredly support through fellowships and teaching for every term of a five-year Ph.D. program. Less-than-full support prevents full-time education and encourages a lethargic approach to earning a degree. It’s exploitative, an anti-luxury that no one can afford.
* Reclaim the curriculum. In the near term, reducing enrollments is vital, but doing so is not free of the taint of defeatism: It is based on an assumption of a continuing shortage of opportunities for humanists. Humanists have the power to increase the number of dignified faculty positions: The key is to put new value on all courses being taught. How? Have the regular faculty members at large universities resume teaching those courses that many have shunned -- chiefly freshman writing and language instruction. If students don’t want to take a particular course, and the faculty members don’t want to teach it, better redesign the course. Redesign, then reassign -- not to exploited adjuncts or part-timers, but to newly created tenurable positions (at best) or postdoctoral fellowships that (at least) constitute a carefully considered career step. If full-time faculty members teach the entire curriculum, then universities might combine adjunct lines into additional tenurable positions.
The humanities have always held two advantages over other fields: First, we attract a cohort that teaches wonderfully; second, our scholarship and teaching often have far more to do with each other than holds true in other fields. Shockingly, we’ve lost the lead in curricular innovation to the sciences during the past decade -- perhaps out of fear that our emphasis on teaching is a result of how little our scholarship is valued. If that is the case, we must immediately lose our resentment and re-establish our pedagogical eminence.
* Unleash the humanities from the insularity of academe. Even generating additional faculty positions will not get us to where we need to be. The math just won’t compute. In my own department of English, at the University of Michigan, after two years of trying to persuade faculty members to teach more first-year courses and administrators to allow us to convert lecturer slots into assistant professorships, we created three new positions in a department of 75, an increase of only 4 per cent. Clearly, the economic status of the humanities within the academy will not change until there is a major improvement in job prospects for humanists beyond the academy -- which will provide the kind of competition that universities face for scientists, engineers, lawyers, and even social scientists.
I won’t go into the details of my own foundation’s initiative to create jobs beyond academe for humanities graduates. Briefly, we’re developing summer and postdoc internships for students in new-technology firms, businesses, news and entertainment media, schools, and cultural institutions. We’re not just after any job -- we’re after leadership positions. Even if the job shortage went away tomorrow, the effort would remain crucial, for our final concern is not jobs for the relatively few, but the potential of the humanities to make life better for everyone.
There is evidence that the world beyond academe is not hostile to humanists, and may even be welcoming. We have been swamped with e-mail offers of assistance and internships from a wide range of employers. Indeed, in Walt Kelly’s phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us” -- those faculty members who remain wedded to the belief that the only successful outcome of a doctoral program is an assistant professorship at a research university or top college. Yet, we are also beginning to get letters of support and advice from faculty members who appear ready to shuck their “only cloning” perspective.
* Redesign graduate programs. Most graduates of our programs who do achieve academic positions will be taking them at institutions of learning very different from their own, ones that stress teaching far more than research. That is why the Preparing Future Faculty program, sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, matters so greatly: It sends students from research universities to other kinds of higher-education institutions to learn about other kinds of academic lives. That is also why our foundation will announce a competition to award newly created postdoctoral fellowships to people who wish to get experience teaching in other types of academic institutions. The fellowships will be in addition to the internships in the non-academic sector that we will sponsor: Both programs seek to widen the perspectives of humanists.
The stretch needs to include community colleges and, perhaps, the public schools. That possibility is likely to be controversial. Where is the opportunity for scholarship or for professional development in the schools? Conversely, where is the benefit to public education of an infiltration by a bunch of irrelevantly prepared elitists who approach the schools like imperial aristocrats visiting the colonies? What about the unions, the school boards, the superintendents and principals, the damnable mound of certification requirements? Yet every objection is swept away by the equally important facts that we will need two million new teachers in the next decade, that many of our schoolteachers are inadequately prepared, and that we have unemployed Ph.D.'s. How dare we hold that our children of all ages do not deserve to be taught by bright people expert in their fields?
I am not saying that our graduate programs must change wholesale. Disciplines do have their own integrity, and that integrity should be guarded with religious intensity. But I would make a distinction between the scholarly aspect of programs and the surrounding activities of professional development. We need internships, carefully staged and guided development of pedagogical abilities, even degrees that combine a humanities discipline with necessary knowledge in, say, new technology or journalism.
* Embrace contradiction. While we must insist on learning for its own human sake, we also must connect the humanities to the immediate challenges in our culture. To make the world safe for private scholarship that is deliberately, grandly, rightly unconcerned with consequence, we need to become newly public. That means requiring students to learn how to explain their work to non-humanists. And it means that all of us must speak up. We must make the case for the value of a liberal-arts education, and for the sense that the humanities make possible the thinking about values and creativity that no technology can produce -- and without which any democracy will fail. Someone must have convinced us that sermonizing was out or that the song was tired -- but when I state the value of the humanities to public groups, it is as if many in the audience are hearing the goldenest oldie imaginable, a song they loved, still love, and have not heard for too long.
Without that music, a culture dies. Triumph for the humanities? Just imagine the consequences of defeat.
Robert Weisbuch, on leave as a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B4
