As an old Humanities professor living with
considerable pleasure in the modern world, reading my friends’ suggestions and
recommended readings on Facebook and trawling Early English Books Online for
research evidence, I am moved to express a few thoughts on the Decline of the
Humanities.
All
the phenomena of budget cuts and preferential treatment for income-generating
programs are of course real, and our first instinct is to regret them. But
then, my first instinct is to regret seeing photographs of Stockholm filled
with veiled Moslem women. First instincts sometimes need to be scrutinized,
judged with care, and occasionally corrected.
First
of all, we need to be sure that our loudly-voiced regrets are untainted by
concern for our own jobs, careers, and profession. I believe, for instance,
that there are currently more people writing poetry than reading it; and I
believe that there are more people who have profound knowledge of Edmund
Spenser’s work than there are young people dying to have that knowledge
communicated to them. This is disappointing for us, but the phenomenon will not
go away, any more than cost-cutting administrators will go away. The case is
altered.
It
began to be altered when ‘the profession’ professionalized itself following the
19th-century German model, and the ideal book by a scholar was no
longer something like Gilbert Highet’s Poets
in a Landscape but something like A.E. Housman’s edition of Manilius. The
process continued when those same monumental editions came to be frowned upon
by tenure committees and replaced, as an ideal, by fashionable but largely
unreadable articles and monographs with hundreds of endnotes,
highly-specialized but blending, in an intellectually dubious way, knowledge
and opinion, scholarship and criticism. The tenure committees themselves had
much to do with the development, favoring as they did publication of such
material and deprecating teaching and ‘popularizing’.
Another
alteration occurred in the 1960s, when political revolt unleashed a storm of opinion
that considered apolitical scholarship as dangerously reactionary on the one
hand and that brought an entire cultural generation to favor feeling over
thought, on the other. One faction of the young (abetted by some of their
elders) hounded politically-incorrect professors out of their lecture-rooms;
another faction trusted no one over thirty and decided the past was bunk.
A
third alteration, a generation later, sprang from the invention of computers
and all that followed therefrom: the Internet, Wikipedia, tablets, smartphones,
and suchlike. What this did was to make unbelievable amounts of information
available with unbelievable ease – at least to those who, or whose
institutions, could afford the necessary hardware and software. It reminds me of
my introduction to rock-climbing, and discovering that the nylon ropes, the
sticky-soled clinging shoes and the curiously-shaped bits of metal that helped
hold us to the rock made the whole process almost obscenely easy compared to
the work of an older generation in hobnailed boots with hempen ropes and hammered
pitons. This, of course, is still going on; and I am not sure most of us have
really caught up with the informational universe in which our students live,
move and have their being. It is a universe based, not only on an addiction to
screens, but also on a new sense of what information is: no longer a hard-won
treasure to add to a store of global insight informed by inherited or acquired
values, but an environment at the same time limitlessly vast and easily
accessible, where you pick what takes your fancy and discard it when it has
served its purpose.
The
fourth and most recent alteration came with, and from, the Great Recession.
This made an entire generation of educational administrators realize that much
of their business was in essence a luxury trade flying under a democratic flag.
As most of them now are products of the Sixties-to-Nineties generation
themselves, they have no hard-wired interest in the humanities, and many feel
(an older generation would have said “think”) that science and technology,
especially in the service of ecology, are of far more use to humanity than
classics, philosophy, and the works of Edmund Spenser. Also, their funds are
running out. So they cut where they need to, and do not feel especially guilty.
As
in other areas of life, lateral thinking may help reorient us away from
lamentation. The culture has changed, and it will not go back to what it was.
What can and should ‘higher education’, and in particular what we call the
Humanities, do in this new world? I offer a few suggestions.
1.
Literature, particularly
literature of the past (and that includes Classics) is not really suited to the
majority of current 18-year-olds. On the other hand, all of us have at some time
taught mature students in their forties or older who have made sacrifices to
come back to university and beg to be
taught Shakespeare, Spenser, Ovid and Virgil. Accordingly, I suggest that
Literature departments be reoriented toward mature students, and that
18-year-olds be admitted to them, but only on specific application.
2.
Plagiarism is everywhere, and
authority is so over. The Humanities are no longer places for examinations and
stern evaluation. Some kind of group research project may be a better way of judging
how far students have progressed. The concept of a Degree may have to be
re-thought, and in programs where real competence is required, Pass-Fail may usefully
replace grade-inflated A-minuses, As and A-pluses.
3.
Much reading of, and learning
about, History and Literature may in future be done in an adult and associative
part-time context. Those guiding such discussion groups or clubs will be more
like worker-priests than like Vatican theologians.
4.
It seems not unlikely that for
future Humanities scholars, learning to write code and to create websites will
be as important a part of their training as phonology, library science or the
economics of Ancient Mesopotamia.
5.
There will, it seems to me, be
need for far fewer full-time Humanities teachers. This is a situation we should
look full in the face and for which we should prepare our profession and our
institutions; for if we do not, our institutions will prepare for it without
us. It might be useful to institute a numerus
clausus in Doctoral programs, as happens in a number of countries with
regard to medicine.
6.
We should work much more
closely with high schools, with their teachers, and with secondary-education
developers. It is at their level that students should learn that the past is
not bunk and that history does not begin with World War II. We are, in a sense,
the customers of their product; and we should loudly and unashamedly make our
vision, and our needs, known to them.
7.
In the same way, we should work
with grade-school teachers and curriculum developers. It is at that level that
should, and must, be learnt the basic literacy too many of us still have to
instil at freshman level. It is we who can help them overcome the last vestiges
of the Sixties silliness that equates equality of opportunity with equality of
performance.
These are
just few ideas that, to my mind, it is
more worth while to pursue than lamentations over business-oriented
administrators and semi-literate plagiarizing students. The case is altered,
and we live in a whole new world.
