Futures for the Humanities

Abstract

Futures for the Humanities Amy Koritz (bio) Engell, James, and Anthony Dangerfield. Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 277 pp. Kezar, Adrianna J., Tony C. Chambers, and John C. Burkhardt, eds. Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005. 345 pp. Liu, Alan . The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 573 pp. The Society that can build the most productive and efficient mechanisms for harnessing human creative energy will move ahead of those continuing to make a fetish of the greed motive. Richard Florida The humanities the core of the university. She may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. J.M. Coetzee Humanists often hear these days that that we belong to downwardly mobile disciplines. This warning comes mostly from our own ranks, since those in positions of real power are too busy pulling in the rewards of status to spend much time worrying about their poor relations. Derek Bok, in his important book on the increased influence of the market on higher education, dismisses us with a single paragraph. Bok observes that humanists tend to complain about the loss of a clear, shared sense of intellectual purpose in universities and attribute their increased commercialization to this loss of purpose. In his experience, however, "[N]o faculty members feel a stronger sense of mission than the scientists, yet it is there—not in the humanities—that commercialization has taken hold most firmly" (5). Meanwhile, humanists themselves have developed a cottage industry of commentary on our degenerating health in the academy. Among these documents are many well-informed, useful, and heartfelt pleas that we refocus our collective attention away from the individualistic, career-driven model of professionalism dominant in higher education and toward the greater good of ensuring at least the survival, if not the revival, of humanistic teaching, learning, and discovery—however the writer in question understands those activities. All those cries of anger, frustration, and fear from humanists are completely warranted. It is true, as English professors James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield point out in their award-winning book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, that the number of bachelors degrees in the humanities has been declining steadily and that the pay differential between humanities professors and those in sciences and professional schools has been widening (according to these authors, in 1996 a beginning assistant professor in business earned on average $25,000 more annually than a similarly ranked humanist). There is certainly little question that literary studies, by any measure most of us can think of (faculty size, salary, number of majors, teaching load, good jobs for our PHDS), is not doing well. There is in fact broad consensus on the reason for this. Money. While in the United States the G.I. Bill enabled a massive influx of students into higher education, democratizing what had been an opportunity reserved for a small elite, the Cold War shaped the institutions providing [End Page 240] that opportunity by funneling federal support to scientific research. The federal funding mechanisms put in place on the heels of Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) guaranteed that scientific research would become a crucial component in the fiscal health of universities. By attaching huge indirect cost recovery monies to grants for scientific research, the federal government ensured a steady stream of research, at least some of which would prove useful for its own ends. In contrast, the research accomplished by humanists seemingly had no value to industry or the government. Nor did the teaching of literature manage to maintain an analogous public legitimacy. Literary studies has for some time lacked a rationale that achieves either general agreement among its professional practitioners or is commonly understood and endorsed by society at large. This waning of status is distressing. The many attempts to revive the humanities and return them to their previous centrality in the education of young adults are therefore welcome...