[The Montana Professor 22.1, Fall 2011 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Ken Egan
Executive Director, Humanities Montana
ken.egan@humanitiesmontana.org
Human beings crave meaning and purpose in their lives: Why am I here? What is my role? How do I as an individual fit into the stream of history and culture? In short, how and why does my life matter?
The humanities are dedicated to helping individuals resolve these questions. Philosophy, literature, history, languages, religious studies, the social sciences, and legal studies provide overlapping, sometimes contradictory, often complementary ways of exploring these crucial questions.
Yet we live in a cultural moment when the fate of the humanities is very much in doubt. We can read any number of passionate tracts worrying about the end of the humanities in formal education. Martha Nussbaum's recent Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities reads like a jeremiad urging the academy to return the humanistic disciplines to its core. She argues that only arts and humanities education can teach the critical thinking, empathy, and world understanding needed for full participation in civil society./2/
Lively discussions on the Humanities Roundtable, a social network hosted by Humanities Montana, underscore these worries. High school students observe that philosophy is devalued in their studies; humanities professors assert that their disciplines have been displaced by vocational and professional training. (Visit www.humanitiesroundtable.org to read more.)
From the dual perspectives of director of a public humanities nonprofit and former English professor, I believe in the capacity of the humanities to make a difference in the lives of all citizens, both inside and outside academia. As I consider the current malaise in the humanities, two themes seem to predominate: 1) the perception that the humanities do not help Americans make a living, and 2) the marginalized status the humanities disciplines have gotten themselves into through excursions into esoteric, theoretical scholarship that excludes too many.
The first critique is an understandable response to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Yet I do not accept the underlying premise of the question. Is it sufficient to simply learn technical skills in anticipation of future employment so that we can pay the rent, or is there more? Don't we need to consider why we're here, what we're about, how our lives connect to others? And is it sufficient to master a set of skills without the critical thinking to analyze the practical and philosophical assumptions of the very activities in which we're immersed?
Jesse Bier puts the case eloquently in a recent article in this publication: "What graduates into the real world need is not higher vocational training…but the adaptive mechanisms of thought provided by any serious core curriculum in liberal arts and—surprise! literature, in particular. The breadth, composure, flexibility and habits of insight and persistence thus bred into the mental processes of the young undergird and safeguard them for the rest of their lives."/3/
To frame these values in the language of assessment, the American Association of Colleges and Universities defines certain "Essential Learning Outcomes" for college students—outcomes for which the humanities are a critical factor:
The second challenge—how the humanities disciplines have marginalized themselves through a flight to theory—is more daunting; faculty have even established hiring and tenuring protocols that reward what many see as exotic, precious, indecipherable work. This raises an important question: Even if we can confidently assert the importance of the humanities to the individual's meaning-making, can we with equal confidence maintain that what is fundamental to the humanities' enduring value is communicated meaningfully to our students?
My simplest answer is yes. But first I must make a disclosure: I have frequently practiced the kind of scholarship often parodied by the humanities' harshest critics. Coming of age as a teacher and scholar in the early '80s, I fell in love with Foucault, Bakhtin, Gilbert and Gubar, etc.—theorists now considered old hat! I too brandished "dialogic" and "panopticon" with glee. More recently I have become enamored with the writings of Richard Rorty, a neopragmatic philosopher who teaches that we all use Final Vocabularies that define the who, what, why, and how of our lives, ultimately crafting a contingent explanatory narrative that serves as a tool for living well.
So yes, I too have wandered in the labyrinth of the postmodern and the esoteric.
But I have exited the maze challenged, tested, disoriented and, finally, re-oriented—and more committed to the public humanities than ever. I've learned that our theoretical excursions "out there" can lay the groundwork for ideas and perspectives that can make a difference right here in Montana.
Think of it as the life cycle of a public humanities insight: The individual scholar, ravished by an encounter with a text, a theory, a historical moment, tests an insight on students and colleagues in formal and informal conversations. S/he then prepares a conference paper to widen the circle of sharing and critique. The original insight, having undergone refinement and revision, appears as a published article or book. In the feedback loop of the academic's work, s/he then takes the enriched insight back into the classroom for further debate and reconsideration. Finally, the scholar considers how to share the insight with the public beyond the academy, in venues where new and different tests of relevance and value emerge.
I do not mean to argue that all scholarly effort must follow this arc from private reflection to public sharing: Tenure-track faculty must bring their graduate school research to publication, established scholars tend to pursue lines of inquiry that require sustained engagement with their disciplines, and professors attend to an insight's interdisciplinary impact within the academy. Yet more academics can—and should—follow the path to public humanities. Such journeys would go a long way toward helping resolve the legitimation crisis that confronts our various fields today—by transforming one person's brilliant insight into an idea that is accessible and helpful to many.
I've witnessed this very process time and again with colleagues around the state of Montana. Faculty at institutions large and small often produce remarkable scholarship that later forms the basis of a dynamic public humanities program. To cite just a few examples:
The humanities are still very much in the process of reacquainting the uninitiated with the relevance of their intellectual work, so it is not surprising that current critiques of humanities scholarship, while often persuasive about the other-worldly, difficult nature of that research, can miss the deeper potential of that careful thinking. More than ever, scholars carry a responsibility to situate their work in the wider context of public service. We must, of course, collectively respect the life cycle of an insight, granting the individual academic the space and time to experiment, innovate, challenge, flail, revise. But the academic must in turn be willing to consider how to test ideas against the standard of community need: How does an act of scholarship help answer the fundamental questions we all confront?
The humanities do matter, but we must demonstrate their vitality and currency through innovative thinking and intentional efforts to reach audiences not only in the classroom but beyond. Acts of public outreach can bring the scholarly work of the humanities full circle and make a strong case for the centrality—the profound necessity—of humanities education in achieving the shared goal of making life better.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 22.1, Fall 2011 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]