Introduction: The Future of Scholarly Knowledge in the Humanities

Abstract

IntroductionThe Future of Scholarly Knowledge in the Humanities James Miller (bio) it seems fitting that david bromwich kicked off the new school's two-day conference on "The Future of Scholarly Knowledge." A quarter-century ago, Bromwich helped shape our ongoing conversations about the future of the academy by publishing Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, a polemic of rare eloquence. Then as now, Bromwich himself defies stereotyping: he champions the idea of tradition, but he's an open-minded pluralist whose heroes range from Burke and Hume to Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. And he writes a plain prose that exemplifies the pleasures of demotic English in the hands of a scholar who knows how to wear his learning lightly. As Bromwich's keynote paper for the conference makes plain, the terms of his critique remain largely unaltered: today, as he did 25 years ago, he deplores how young scholars are advised "to aim at corporate approval, at the sacrifice of the difficult thing that intellectual self-knowledge may be. There has never been a more desolate title of a scholarly essay than 'The Way We Think Now.'" That is true enough, even though the late Clifford Geertz, who wrote the classic essay of that title, was jaunty, even insouciant, while contemplating the barbarians inside the academy's gates, quite unlike Bromwich, whose lamentations are keen. In his opening remarks, Bromwich directed our attention to two different forces that he believes darken the prospects for free inquiry in the contemporary academy: the growing influence of learning [End Page 557] assessment experts who demand that scholarship and teaching undergo a kind of cost-benefit accounting to demonstrate their utility to students; and the countervailing influence of the intellectual fashionistas of the academic left, who beat the drum of "social justice" in an effort to secure "safe spaces" for individuals belonging to previously marginalized and oppressed groups. As Bromwich puts it, the most militant proponents of social justice on campuses "have discouraged the inquisitive instincts that nourish education quite as effectually as the funding giants who demand to know the cash value of every course a student might take." Even worse, "the branch of the humanities that has gone furthest to make a fetish of 'resistance' and 'transgression' has itself sponsored protocols of intellectual conformity as thoroughly routinized as any in academic history." The three panelists who convened the day after Bromwich's keynote to discuss the challenges to scholarly knowledge in the humanities were a diverse group, including Daniel Kevles, a historian of science; Rosalind Morris, an anthropologist with a strong interest in the humanities; and Akeel Bilgrami, a multifaceted philosopher from an analytic background. In his paper, Daniel Kevles issued a salutary reminder that the pursuit of useful results in applied research sometimes fosters progress in fundamental knowledge in the sciences—it would be too glib simply to denounce all forms of instrumental inquiry. The American land grant research universities that sprang up in the nineteenth century were built, in part, on the promise that they would produce advances in knowledge that would prove useful to society as a whole. I would add that it is also worth recalling how Enlightenment proponents of universal education, such as Condorcet, hoped that the spread of free public schools would be instrumental in fostering "real equality, the final end of the social art," by enabling all citizens to "have the knowledge necessary to conduct himself in the ordinary affairs of life, according to the light of his own reason, to preserve his mind free from prejudice, to understand his rights and to exercise [End Page 558] them in accordance with his conscience and his creed" (Condorcet [1794] 2012, 126). Rosalind Morris, in sharp contrast to Kevles, issued a sweeping denunciation of the instrumental focus of the "corporate university"—and she clearly received Bromwich's keynote address as the provocation he intended. At one point in her spoken remarks, she made plain her core disagreement with him: deploring his lack of sympathy for students seeking safe spaces, she declared that "the problem is that there should be an aspiration for an imagination of the place of the other."1...