Neither soft nor frivolous, the humanities are research-driven and essential to the future of American innovation. That was the rallying cry heard at the annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies, which ended here on Saturday.
The council is a national group that represents scholarly associations in the humanities. Delegates heard fellow humanists talk about threats to the idea of liberal-arts education at home even as it’s become an in-demand American export.
“We need an infrastructure of ideas” as much as we need an infrastructure of roads, said Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a lunchtime address on Friday. “The humanities are America’s stock in trade. They’re an aspect that we shortchange at our peril,” he told the crowd in his talk, “Defending the Liberal Arts.”
Job creation and global competition require understanding the world and its cultures, including our own, Mr. Leach said. He described the humanities as “essential to revitalize the American productivity engine.” And he called for greater recognition of academic labor as a valuable activity. While being a scholar doesn’t involve heavy lifting, he said, “professors are workers no less than carpenters and machinists.”
But Mr. Leach warned his audience that “a crisis is looming for humanities research.” He pointed out that the humanities endowment’s budget amounts to one-10th of 1 percent of the federal government’s total research-and-development budget.
The humanities endowment “is a forgotten research institution in Washington,” the chairman said. “We at the NEH are fighting to preserve a federal role in knowledge development and dissemination.”
Hard Times
At another session, “The Consequences of Financial Turbulence in the Academy,” panelists shared war stories of the humanities under threat on their own campuses and beyond. William E. Davis, executive director of the American Anthropological Association, moderated the panel. He said that it was time to move beyond the kind of one-size-fits-all crisis coverage seen in some news-media reports and instead focus on “what are the concerns we need to focus on in terms of our societies,” disciplines, and individual institutions.
Srinivas Aravamudan, a professor of English at Duke University who is also president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, took a broad view, laying out four consequences of the current tough times. First on his list was mutual recrimination, as faculty members blame cutbacks and crises on administrators, who blame legislators, and so on.
Second was “excessive intellectual conservatism,” with gun-shy departments increasingly unwilling to encourage experimentation. “Resource hoarding is on the increase,” Mr. Aravamudan said.
The third consequence he mentioned was “doing the right thing for the wrong reason"—for example, trying to justify all scholarship as practical “problem solving.” Fourth was what he called “anti-internationalism” in the face of an increasingly corporate global higher-education culture.
B. Robert Kreiser, an associate secretary for the American Association of University Professors, urged faculty members not to stand by while administrators use hard times to justify draconian cuts. “You can’t transplant a backbone, but faculty members have an obligation to stand up for principles and for right procedures,” he said.
Two panelists reported from the vantage point of beleaguered public research institutions. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, director of the comparative-literature program at the University of Texas at Austin, described how she and her colleagues came together to help save threatened language programs there a couple of years ago.
She also spoke of the need to be mindful of the larger pressures under which university administrators and state legislators operate, and to step up and take action, such as writing letters in support of colleagues under siege elsewhere. That was met with some skepticism by one member of the audience, who said that letter-writing “makes us all feel good” but doesn’t have enough of an effect. The American Council of Learned Societies, he said, should encourage fresh thinking.
David Marshall, dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, raised what turned out to one of the meeting’s biggest themes: the erosion of the egalitarian ideal of public liberal-arts education. As evidence, Mr. Marshall cited increased talk of three-year bachelor’s degrees, cutbacks in writing and language courses, and a growing reliance on community colleges and distance education to take up the slack.
“Pretty soon you can imagine the TA call center in India where you call up to talk about your history paper or exam,” he said. “Students are coming in with more skepticism than ever about the value of a humanities major.”
Both Mr. Marshall and Ms. Richmond-Garza, as well as some members of the audience, described rising tensions within some state systems of higher education as campuses fight to protect their own interests. Mr. Marshall said that in the California system, some campuses would like to privatize and be able to charge higher fees.
“That notion of the public good that we’ve all lived in, going back to the 18th century, is really in peril,” Mr. Marshall concluded.
Cachet Overseas
That devaluing of a liberal-arts education comes at a time when American institutions of higher learning turn to liberal-arts rhetoric to shop their model abroad, he said. How that model works in other parts of the world was the focus of a Friday-afternoon session, “Global Perspectives on U.S. Higher Education.” It featured Lisa Anderson, president of American University in Cairo; Peter Lange, provost of Duke University; and John Sexton, president of New York University.
The moderator of the session, Thomas Bender, a historian who is university professor of the humanities at NYU, pointed out that this isn’t the first time higher-education exports have been a boom industry for the United States. From the 1890s into the 1920s, there was a first great wave of exporting American higher education abroad. He called to mind Thorstein Veblen’s barbed comment about “captains of erudition” who operated like the Gilded Age’s captains of industry. Mr. Bender said he was struck by the paradox of how American universities are admired and envied worldwide “but doubted by Americans at the very time these things are generally praised.”
Ms. Anderson spoke of how quickly ideas and research spread globally now, then went on to talk about how many of her university’s graduates had played roles in the recent uprising in Egypt. “It was a revolution born very much in the traditions and triumphs of liberal-arts education,” she said.
Discussing Duke’s ventures abroad, Mr. Lange said the university had found that a far-flung campus could be a good place to try out strategies and technology that could then be put to work stateside. “We’re viewing what we’re doing as creating a circulatory system” for students, faculty members, and staff, he said, as well as for technology and ideas. He focused on the idea of training people to operate in multiple environments over multiple careers.
Ms. Anderson cautioned that one can’t lose sight of the local milieu. She said that the circulatory-system model doesn’t necessarily take into account that what students are being educated for “is a life somewhere.”
Mr. Sexton talked about the kind of horizon-expanding education he received at a Jesuit boys’ school in New York. Nowadays, he said, “we have developed a serious allergy to nuance and complexity. Thought is dying. We want everything to be reduced to lists and slogans.” Meanwhile, “nothing comes back at you from the policy makers but the economic effect"—how many jobs will this create?
What he called the “planetization” of the world offers fresh opportunities for American higher education to reassess its values. Translating what you do into another culture gives you a chance “to decide which ideas are most important to you and which are better than yours, something that Americans don’t frequently consider,” Mr. Sexton said.
