Tag: Humanities

Crisis in the humanities? What crisis? If there is one, it is not of the kind commonly supposed. The evidence proves that funding is collapsing, student recruitment wavering or plunging, and academic posts vanishing. But understandable concern over these problems masks deeper troubles, which are not the result of the economic travails that arts departments undergo, or matters of the prestige or popularity of the disciplines they teach, but intellectual challenges that arise from within the humanistic tradition and its encounters with science.

A sense of crisis erupted in arts departments in US universities last October when George M. Philip, president of the State University of New York, Albany, announced the closure of most of its degree courses in modern languages, literature, Classics and theatre. He made no serious attempt to justify the move on intellectual grounds, but presented it as a mildly regrettable adjustment to market conditions – the outcome of the need to “rebalance resources”.

The university lost $32 million (£20 million) of state funding in a single year, with a further $12 million expected to go in 2011. What’s left must be concentrated on useful and sought-after programmes, so the argument goes.

Evidence that has poured in from the press since then seems to support this argument. Last month, the American Historical Association reported a 46 per cent drop in the number of history-related jobs advertised with it, the lowest level in 25 years. The previous year, 15 per cent of the ads were withdrawn without appointments being made.

Since then, according to the association’s latest survey, the job market has collapsed, while the longstanding pattern of increasing numbers of students opting for history programmes has faltered and fluctuated. The same pattern, in even more accentuated form, is discernible in literature and philosophy programmes.

Economics, business studies, computer studies and other courses popularly associated with job opportunities have, by contrast, begun to show signs of recovery from the austerity of recent years, attracting relatively more funding, more students and more posts. Now Republicans have proposed abolishing the National Endowment for the Humanities – the world’s largest single source of arts research funding.

Read full story.

It is precisely because Martha Nussbaum is so obviously one of the stars of the American academy that many people will be inclined to sit up and listen when she produces “a call to action” about “a worldwide crisis in education”.

Her new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, certainly pulls no punches. “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance,” she writes, “a crisis that goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government (than the economic crisis of 2008).”

She fears that current major trends within education are “producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself”, and that “all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanisation”. At stake is whether we are going to end up with “a world that is worth living in”.

Read full story – whether the situation is as dire, especially in the UK.

Oh dear, not great timing for an attack on the humanities – see why I study history.

Don’t get me wrong – I can easily live with the occasional bung. There’s nothing I’d like better than to travel first class, fill my spare room with duck houses and build a moat around my suburban semi (second home and mortgage taken care of); if you want me to, I’ll even find time to drag myself on to that flight to the Caribbean for a little lobbying. Just leave a brown envelope filled with used notes round the back of the humanities block and I’m your man.

But I draw the line at research handouts for lecturers who don’t need them. No academic that I’ve ever met works nine to five, five days a week. With three months of holiday and every weekend free, who really needs a cash incentive to finish that groundbreaking study of the use of intransitive verbs in Elizabeth Gaskell’s work or undertake that much-needed study of medieval Provencal plainsong, the only window of opportunity for a research trip being July?

Read full story in Times Higher Education.