In an op/ed piece last week, Graeme Turner from the Centre for Cultural and Critical Studies at The University of Queensland closed his ruminations on the contemporary landscape of the Humanities in Australia – “scorched earth”, he reports – thus:
Without proper support for the full range of disciplines, including the humanities, our higher education system will no longer demand international respect and the much vaunted national innovation system will simply fail.
The second claim is somewhat separable from the first. So, first things first.
Turner would probably be well aware that the crisis of the Humanities is not particular to Australia. We may have been in the forefront of rationalising and abolishing humanistic disciplines, but the United Kingdom and the United States are catching up in a canter – driven in both instances by significant funding cuts to universities, with much more on the way. In Britain, high rankings in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have not been sufficient to save notable programmes in such disciplines as Philosophy and Religious Studies. Meanwhile, in the wash up from an enquiry into fees and funding, speculation has resurfaced that Cambridge University may be considering severing its links with the state altogether. Less privileged universities will have to find other ways to deal with cuts to teaching budgets in the order of 80%.
State universities in the US face similar pressures, and so to some degree do some of the privately endowed Doctoral institutions, whose funds were slashed by the impact of the Global Financial Crisis.
Writing in the New York Times, the prominent literary theorist Stanley Fish reviews the inadequacy of the traditional arguments mounted to save Humanities programmes. Simply reciting nostrums about the heritage of culture and knowledge, appealing for cross subsidies and attempting to play the entrepreneurial game have all failed, he suggests.
He’d no doubt be sceptical, one imagines, of Turner’s plea that the Humanities be funded in order to foster the “national innovation agenda”.
Fish suggests political action, by which he doesn’t appear to mean sit-ins and campus protests, as the only viable answer. He also implies that a defence of the value of the Humanities in its own terms is the only plausible argument.
Left undebated, or perhaps just lightly sketched, is the question of whether humanistic scholarship has been its own worst enemy. But that’s something I’ll take up in another post.
Update: Part Two.
It’s worth reading Fish’s follow up to his first article on the crisis in the humanities. His suggestion is that we need a better defence of the place of the University itself, and then a defence of the humanities as integral to the mission of a university.
I reckon it’s those older, core techniques of humanities (I probably mean the literary field as it’s what I’m trained in) training–interpretation and critique–that are dying within the project of liberal arts for a mass education. Humanities for the elite– that’s another story.
Thankfully, my nephew just switched to History from Commerce in form 11.
“It’s all a load of crap”, he opined about the dismal science.
If Orwell were alive today, 1984 would include references not just to the shrinking size of the dictionary, but the shrinking depth and breadth of curricula. The effects are similar. I reckon grade inflation has similar uses.
Hmmm, as a humanities graduate and a commerce drop-out I find these debates very interesting. The following is some muddled thought bubbles.
Firstly, I find it interesting in the sense that there’s somewhat of an attitude that universities should remain frozen in a curricula model thirty to ninety years old.
As society changes, for better and for worse, so do universities. I think much of this debate conflates “saving” the humanities with the increasing profit-driven thinking of universities and the poor intellectual rigor of other “soft” degrees and majors, like commerce.
But I don’t think the two are necessarily as closely linked as some outline. I would point to – in Australia at least – the growth and success of various Asian studies degrees at unis like Griffith and ANU.
I think, also, some of this debate is the product of the increasing popularity of higher education as well. Uni populations have ballooned compared to the sixties and seventies where (in Australia at least) some of these models became widespread. As the greater uni population expands, it’s only natural that the focus shifts to encompass the different demographics.
I loved my humanities degree. It has profoundly shaped who I am today, and how I engage with the world. However, I’m reluctant to prescribe that course everyone. It was right for me, at the time. If other people think something else is right for them, so be it.
There are certainly many thriving humanities depts across Australia, so I feel like reports of demise are both greatly exaggerated, and also indicative of a particular mentality in humanities departments that they or their proponents feel the need to justify themselves.
I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to defending the humanities and can say that where I am currently employed I am surrounded by the technologically competent but otherwise culturally incompetent and profoundly ignorant. Having had, over the years, extensive contact with the medically trained I can confirm that even at that august level their education tends to produce trained idiots rather than educated people. Things are far worse, however, in other work places where, for example, training in ‘social welfare’ degrees of all sorts frequently produces armies of singularly blinkered and viciously judgemental individuals whose arrogance is only matched by their almost complete ignorance of, for example, human history, let alone those areas of human endeavour commonly referred to as ‘the arts’.
And I’m just clearing my throat on this one.
“‘social welfare’ degrees of all sorts frequently produces armies of singularly blinkered and viciously judgemental individuals… ”
*Emphasis mine.
Surely you can see the irony in that sentence?
Just a vague knowledge of this area – and thus far I lend more credibility to academics such as Jason Potts on the issue. Arguments about the contribution of the humanities/creative industries to the ‘national innovation system’ are *not* tosh and I wouldn’t depend on a literary theorist to evaluate them.
On one level, there’s no point in the humanities mounting an argument in their own terms, when arguments for their very demise are in the terms of economic rationalists. Part of the problem lies with them – with the many taken-for-granted assumptions that actually quash innovation and economic growth.
For example, there’s too much emphasis on the immediate value derived from a pursuit, rather than value that accrues indirectly (but is often vital!). Akn’s comment @ 5 could be an example.
That ground is currently being fought by people like Potts teaching a heterodox economics that is in fact more descriptive of the real-world using complexity theory.
But secondly, the arts do have to evolve (re: Patrick’s frozen curricula comment above) – and perhaps haven’t been able to. ‘Creative industries’ has been QUT’s answer but IMO it’s lacking.
Seems to me that some of this is due either to universities themselves or the conditions under which they are forced to operate. Degrees seem to be becoming increasingly vocational in structure and as such there is not the room to explore other disciplines whilst studying for a major as there once was.
Not only that but in some cases an internal transfer from one course to another has to go through UAC. This was the experience of my son anyway, as compared to me merrily dipping into heaps of other areas besides my core subjects as a student.
Patrick: the difference between my judgement that others are judgemental lies in the capacity to exercise judgement as opposed to being judgemental which is defined by the usually facile online ‘urban dictionary’ (as oppsed to the rural one?) as the as:
So, no, I don’t perceive irony as the two words in fact have meaning differing in degree and by nuance.
We all exercise judgement. Judgementalism is a predisposition to exercise such judgement in a way designed to dismiss, belittle or harm others where the grounds for exercising such judgement don’t exist.
As a senior faculty manager in schools and at state level for Humanities [history,geography, social slops et al, the roses had many names] subjects for about 30 years I witnessed and struggled against the accelerating decline in the status of such as ‘bottom line’ appeals to ‘economically useful’ subjects slowly became the norm and the theme grew that if you couldn’t get a job out of it it wasn’t worth learning.
The result was,compared toother subject areas declining space in school syllabus, larger class sizes, heavier teacher loads, less resource allocation ]physical, financial and human], an overt guiding of aademic students to the high prestige subjects and away from those that explore humans in their societies and environment and a growing, to the point of nearly complete, disregard for the basic concept of education as being of value to the students’ understanding of their world and themselves in favour of the 3 Rs so they could be a ‘hand’ in the economic factory.
Incidentally English suffered the same decline to alessr extent.
In the end I took a package and became an irrigator may the gods forgive me.
“I would point to – in Australia at least – the growth and success of various Asian studies degrees at unis like Griffith and ANU.”
Somebody who knows, please tell us, because I thought that Asian Studies had been in steady decline for the last 30 years (when I did an Asian Studies degree, and that just for interest).
From what I remember of my time studying humanities at Uni it was in decline because there was nothing in it that could be patented and therefore bring money into the Uni. Colgate sponsored the Economics faculty not the Arts Faculty and it became not Publish or Perish but Patent or Perish. If you couldn’t attract outside $$ then you were stuffed.
On second thoughts why not make study of “The Wire” an accessory to both economic and arts degrees rather than say Chaucer. After all we live in a world without memory despite the wide availability of the tubes as memory conduits. By watching “The Wire” at least our young students will pick up the street skills necessary to make an economic contribution as dealers. See, immediate relevance that Chaucer will never have. Maybe this will help our Vice Chancellors to advance a claim.
Humanities dying?
No. Murdered. Starved to death. Bludgeoned into a stupor then strangled.
No, “dying” is not the right word.
But …. resurrection is still possible …. maybe.
I was at the talk that Prof. Turner gave last Thursday at UQ on this topic. He was a little broader in that than in his article in the higher ed supplement. He did for example, draw attention to the fact that much humanities scholarship has driven away the people who used to naturally support it with ‘theory’. However that’s not to say, for example, that he agreed that what went before theory came along was any good either.
He also talked in some detail about the impacts that research funding schemes have had on the Humanities, specifically about the various research initiatives and the way they have over the years, completely distorted the playing field. Also, he outlined it was his experience (as an ARC federation fellow and on the PM’s innovation strategy committee thingy), that the peak science funding bodies actually actively – voraciously, in fact – campaign against any initiatives which might redress any of the inequities in research funding arrangements.
He did suggest that most of the redress is to be found inside in the University itself, not at the level of the government, as is hinted in his article online.
But strategically he did suggest that humanities scholars ought to first of all, stop bitching at each other and learn to cooperate for the greater benefit of all. And secondly, stop kvetching about the situation and start suggesting solutions, not just articulating problems. He had an anecdote about an important paper outlining funding priorities which excluded the humanities, on the basis that the paper’s authors when they asked humanities faculties what they wanted, got a different answer every time, and were therefore unable to even articulate a coherent vision about “what the humanities wanted”.
In other words; we need to get our act together, we need to start articulating solutions with a common voice and stop attacking each other’s work*, and we need to work at the level of our institutions to effect change there first.
* That’s why I will relentlessly stoush with anyone who brings up the issue of ‘post modernism’ or media studies or critical theory as a short hand for ‘whats wrong with the arts today’, because that’s exactly what you are doing when you do this – devaluing someone else’s work without understanding it.
Someone suggested The Wire as an object of study above. You do realise that modern television is in fact an object of study in the modern academy and that Australia has world leading research and researchers – Graeme Turner included – in these sorts of areas.
I reckon the rot set in with two developments of the 1960s ‘relevance’ fad – abolition of the compulsory language prerequisites for medicine and law, and introduction of the semester system. There were few jokes or allegations about lax and arbitrary assessment when language study was at the heart of humanities faculties. Similarly, the semester system, with its supermarket-stlye packaging of decontextualised mini-courses and school class-sized ‘tutorial’ groups was never appropriate for the humanities.
The ANU this year changed the name of its humanities school to the school of cultural inquiry and kicked out the philosophy department. They still do not offer any courses in Shakespeare other than an interpretation of Will in film and the drama department no longer offers any practical courses. Gender studies, religion and the classics have been reduced.
Meanwhile the rest of the university grows daily…
It boils down to money pure and simple. And I expect it will get a lot worse. Studying what it is to be human is a luxury we apparently cannot afford, especially if we want material success.
It’s difficult not to see this as a decline in the very things that have distinguished much of western culture over the last century or so and I think it is no accident that the biggest department now in the ANU’s school of cultural inquiry is the archeology department.
Included, and a pioneer to boot: the first, or one of the first, in Australia.
Whenever I had to do the excruciating departmental shift at Melb U Open Day making nice with the Year Twelves, I would field the unending line of well-dressed fathers saying ‘But if she does English, what sort of job will it help her to get?’ with the standard answer that we would mould her into such a paragon of clear thinking, good written expression and broad understanding of human nature that employers in all sorts of fields would be falling over themselves to give her a job — at least if they had any brains, and who wants to work for a moron, right? Oh okay, I didn’t say that last bit.
Back in the day, it was all more or less true.
Yes, exactly (though I would date it a decade later), and we’ve had an example of that on this very blog within the last 24 hours. History? Pffft. Not “relevant”.
*headdesk*
As the mum of a bright-eyed girl who is still all agog with the wonder of studying first-year Yartz at Melbourne Uni, this post makes me sad.
As someone who doesn’t consider the University educated that highly,my take on this discussion will be loaded ,cocked and firing.However as someone disenchanted by Professionalism in all its forms,the problem may not be any University Department,but something that undermines a lot of values.I simply refer to the fact ,for nearly all the years of my life where the possibility for memory and the use of skills has been possible,there has been the after war events,the during war events,the pre -war events.56 years isn’t that old until the accumulated figures of a life noticing war and its effects are plainly added up.I lost my innocence about the world to early,to care about the fictionalised accounts of such,or any attempt by intellectual means to grasp humanity differently.The sadness of being a young baby boomer is lost in the poison of the demographic prostitutes.They have destroyed more than their natural competitors who maybe arts humanities science and mathematics graduates.I retain an interest in a well composed composition of whatever length if my understanding is improved.The instantaneous demographic type collation rarely depicts life genuinely.Take them on,for the fight maybe more than one-dimensional characterisations,before it is too late.
Graeme Turner Peace Beard
But seriously, from the US perspective
http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2010/10/thoughts-occasioned.html
Don’t be sad, Helen, there are still a lot of fabulous people in that faculty, fighting the good fight.
Mark,
wrong question. Are the humanities being murdered? (given the death of a thousand cuts)
The answer is fuck yes, and the consequences mean we will be delivered unto Hobbes’ world.
Strongly suspect if we’d had humanities graduates making lending decisions instead of bankers, none of this unnecessary madness would have happened in the first place
Rather than being murdered it’s being extinguished (as in bucket loads of extinguishment)
‘Studying what it is to be human’ may lead to uncomfortable conclusions which conflict with the doublethink required to acquiesce and consume in a modern economy. Perhaps even black armband attitudes or political activism.
The answer has to be to stimulate demand for erudition, the lack of demand for or value placed on an education that isn’t focused on a dollars and cents result is the problem.
Surely the logical response to the GFC is to save money by slashing commerce and management degrees. They got us into it!
Yeah but…
Might I suggest that the humanities academe has failed to convince enough people that it produces things of enough worth to justify its continued funding.
Why is it that a bunch of scientists, of famously limited social and political skills, have had more luck with this?
See, PC, you just didn’t know how to sell your English degree. With all that understanding of human nature you should have been able to size up those dads in a flash: our graduates become school teachers in country towns ’till they marry a fabulously rich farmer, or, our graduates become advertising executives and are all driving Porches before they’re 25 ….
The humanities courses are going they way of the arts courses (fine arts, music etc) – they are languishing because the chances of turning them into lucrative careers are slim. Also because people have lost interest and become distracted by a 1000 other things they can do with their time that look more fashionable. Our consumer society doesn’t have time for the humanities. And languages are too hard for Australian brains.
I walk in a city park each lunchtime – 30 years ago a good number of workers would’ve been there, lying on the grass reading a paperback. Now it’s rare to see a reader – if they’re not busy shopping, or eating in a cafe, they are in the park talking/texting on their ‘phones.
Not quite, Robert. It has failed to convince the right people: the people who have power because they are the sorts of people who go after power. We in the humanities ought to understand these people better than anyone else, what with literary types reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare’s history plays, and history types knowing about the policies of everyone from Machiavelli through Robespierre to Nixon. And there, I agree, in our failure to communicate (oh the irony), we are culpable.
RM @27:
Ah, but scientists can demonstrate the benefits of their ‘activity’ and their ‘goods’ so much more readily: their ‘product’ is more demonstrably tangible, so much more ‘useful’.
The ideological straight jacket of that question doesn’t really fit the Humanities, which is why many people working in the area are struggling to ‘catch up’.
Oh, I don’t know so much about that stereotype Robert – I know of several science and engineering academics who are pretty much just wheeler dealers, much to the disappointment of the postgrads and postdocs who they manage to attract with their big talk. I also think you are may be overrating the political and personal skills of many humanities academics.
As touched upon by Tyro Rex, the culture of individualism within the humanities subjects reduces the political strength of humanities departments both within the University and makes it harder to approach the funding game in the same way as the sciences do, where the competition is usually at least one step higher between labs or teams. The lack of available corporate funding probably only exacerbates this.
As someone who has studied in the humanities and works in the sciences area I also think the sciences often tend to get a far easier ride culturally and politically than the humanities because politicians and the general public don’t understand science and don’t understand statistical significance, confidence intervals etc.
Thus Science is something that is difficult (something which has become a double-edged sword now) while humanities subjects just involve “reading some books”. Some of the clinical studies that I come across are simply laughable but they would never attract the same sort of criticism as gender studies, film history or linguistics and they are routinely reported in the media as signficant despite that being far from the case.
I think there are many areas where humanities and sciences researchers can gain from collaboration – the plight of the Murray-Darling Basin being just one example.
When I went to school homework had no direct effect on final scores, getting a job or the gaining of scholarships. So for most of the time I was free to pursue what I was interested in and get an education. Now the time I spent getting an education would have been taken over by boring assignments that have to be done by the students or their supporters if the student is going to pass at the end of the year.
Humanities is the big loser here. The informal education process created a life long enjoyment of delights of new ideas and the joys of discussing the meaning of life and everything.
The whole question of research quality is, as Tatyana already points out, completely biased *to* the sciences (and even more specifically, the bio-sciences). Research quality is often already measured as the ability to attract dollars … so research that has industry partners is judged, ipso facto, to be “better”.
And the scientists, quite contrary to what Robert suggests, are already very organised politically, which I already said. Voracious lobbyists. As DJ points out, some science/engineering faculties often contain at least some men (usually) who are nothing but deal-makers. The playing field is tilted such that such “dollar attractors” are highly valued by executive staff. Note in the preceding exactly where in this I mention quality of research, or citation indices, or anything of the sort of thing that one might determine that a research output is actually found to be worthwhile by other researchers.
And Prof. Turner specifically mentioned Mathematics departments as also losing out in the research funding areas in a similar way to the Humanities.
Also … 30% of the students. 10% of the staff. A basic inequity that surely must indicate to Robert that simply, Humanities academics have a considerably higher teaching load, which surely impacts on research outputs.
So how about “yeah but … I don’t want to think about this issue more closely, because to so might challenge my preconceptions about ‘use value’”.
A fellow student in my department was doing a “research commercialisation” grad dip as part of his research degree, the uni wanted students to do this. Him and I think an EMSAH student the only arts students there. He was talking about the funny conversations he was having with the science and commerce types and their assumptions about the use-value of his research into classical history. I pointed out to him that many of those very same science and commerce types will use the money they make in their commercial activities to buy things like home cinemas or foxtel subscriptions and watch the history channel in their leisure time.
BTW I work and undergrad qualified as a comp.sci … but the thought of a higher research degree in same filled/fills me with intense mirth … and adds exactly nothing to my commercial value as a programmer … on the other hand submitting my M.A. thesis in coming months and possibly starting my Ph.D next year very exciting.
A friend of mine was involved in a successful application to the latest ARC Centres of Excellence ARC funding round — this post gives some idea of the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that can usefully take place, and on a national scale. I think there may also be plans afoot for the ‘History of the Emotions’ centre to collaborate with some of the other medical disciplines: ageing, psychiatry, healing processes and management. The comments thread there is absolutely worth reading, too.
No PC, its just that not everyone has the wit to grasp and then reproduce in comprehensible form complex issues in ways that guarantee an authentic new slant on something intractable and long standing, for the benighted rest of us.
The mix of social, anthropological, psychological and poleconomic factors,over time and space, for better or worse, at least partially mediated through metaphysics in this case; each component needing explication in its own right, let alone as to where it might fit in with the overall argument has to be seen as complex.
Maybe people took the complexity of the subject, explained by Mark better than any of the rest of us could have done, for “complexity” in his language?
Yep, absolutely.
” we’ve had an example of that on this very blog within the last 24 hours”
Where is this travesty? Reference?
I studied media in the late 80s and early 90s. Looking back it seems prophetic. Fisk was our key text for our foundation first year unit. It’s very disappointing … he was right.
That would be *cough* the last 36 hours. This is the charming response to a comment of mine at #139. Pretentious, moi? (Note inclusive popular culture reference.)
Prof Turner wasn’t very complementary about “interdisciplinarity” – it’s a fairly modern trend that is not always of value, and yet reified to holy status in certain places, I think was his take.
In any case, back here in Australia, the social sciences have been leaping ahead – often matching the ‘hard’ sciences in attracting funds.
Humanities is having a tougher time of it, sure….
Not to dazzle humanities academics with proper statistical analysis
, but if you look at the numbers in 2009 humanities (i.e. “Society and Culture” and “Fine Arts” categories) had 29% of students and 29% of teaching staff. This puts them smack bang on average for overall (national) teaching staff to student ratios (about 1:34). The 10% appears to be directly from the table as a proportion of ALL university staff that are “Society and Culture” teaching staff.
Natural and Physical Sciences students do appear to be significantly privileged with a ratio (1:18) almost half of the humanities. However, vocational degrees such as IT (1:37), engineering (1:39), architecture (1:42), education (1:51) and particularly Lefty E’s “management and commerce” (1:74) all appear to be worse off in terms of teaching ratios compared to the humanities. That said, the statistics provide no direct insight into variations in the proportions teaching staff that also do research and the differing ratios potentially tell us more about that, than anything about actual class sizes.
I have sometimes had to work quite hard at a uni dominated by scientists to point out some basic things about social science research, eg:
a. ‘NO, I *have* actually published quite a lot of articles, and if you ever tried google scholar instead of yer damn inbred poindexter “Web of Science” (which does not record social science and humanities publication, do you understand? finally? its DOESNT EVEN RECORD them – thats why they’re not there, damn your eyes!!) not only are they there, on Google scholar, being cited, but
b. I ACTUALLY WROTE THEM MYSELF *cough* unlike you!! *un-cough*
There. that’s better.
Oxford is also likely to abandon the state at some point as well, Mark. That’s what this is all about:
http://www.campaign.ox.ac.uk/
Things like classics are very strong in both Oxford and Cambridge, although (as several people have pointed out above on other matters), there is a significant language component in classics. There is also still a fairly steep language requirement for entry into courses like history. Classicists often get jobs in the City, sometimes even as quants. The logic is that if you’re clever enough to get at least a 2:1 at Oxbridge, then you can do anything.
I suspect we are paying for the huge growth in student numbers; people come in with different expectations and needs and the system has to adapt.
Thought to have an early night, no way.
PC’s comments had me back to a tute, where the tutor was explicating on a powerful novel, “An African Farm”;by a South African writer, Olive Shreiner.
A sort of South African version dealing with issues and themes that Louisa and Henry Lawson dealt with here, during the same era.
Coming to a key point, she chose to read out a tract similar in style and substance to Bronte’s remarkable outpouring on the roof of Rochester’s mansion by way of Jane Eyre, as to resolution in adversity. Shades of Hannah Arendt, the tract created images of a fiery virtual crucible; from which not even the strongest bravest human products emerging might survive, as the narrative reveals, on its progress.
She stopped, overcome by the affect the writing had on her, let alone us and actually wept.
We knew why.
We knew that without knowing it, she was telling us her story; including her own “human toll” as to the costs (whatever) that accompanied her rise to the position of a responsible academic, capable of something unique and cutting edge as to her speciality and her life in general.
I think she thought she’d shown weakness, but I’ll revere her until the day I day, same as Mark, or Quiggin, or Mother McKillop,or many of the rest of you, because she strove so hard to bring the realities of the novel and its imperative message to NOT to take things for granted, in diametric opposition to the sludge we get on telly.
But it’s nice to know and experience what can be beautiful in life and why. And its a very stupid thing, a society that seeks to blind itself, lest it see reality for what itisin its various forms.
Just thinking on this lady, she gave a lecture, excellently delivered but no pulling of punches.
Went down like a lead balloon.
Later she was nonplussed. I just looked at her and said, “it wasn’t you Rosemary, they just didn’t want to know”
The agony of a long distance intellectual and battler, out of time and place in the medieval market square of an undergrad lecture; misunderstood except by a small group of also exceptional people who could have understood her experience and her knowledge.
Who heals the physician?
What struck me was the difference between Stanley Fish’s opinion piece in the New York Times and Graeme Turner’s in the The Australian. The first had a real idea and an argument, real intellectual spark, the second did not. It didn’t even try to address the critical and extremely difficult questions of why the humanities are of value and how they can be defended. The thought occurred to me: is the relative continuing prestige of the academic humanities in the US linked (either as cause or effect) to the quality of its practitioners in comparison to us Australians?
@6
I recently met a person in “heath sciences” who told me that the view that the Dalai Lama is a terrorist is “reasonable” and should be “respected”. Sigh.
Mark Bahnisch said:
Ahh…an innocuous sounding conclusion is really the sting in the tail. The Decline of the Wets comes home to roost. (sorry to mix metaphors).
Actually the situation is somewhat perverse in that the main victims of cuts to Humanities have been the traditional elitist subjects like Classics and languages. Which are actually difficult and therefore not so popular amongst lazy students. They are worthwhile to those dwindling numbers who still prize the heritage of our civilization.
Trendy mickey-mouse course such as Communications and Media Studies still have some support because they are easy credits for lazy students. “the challenge is to fail” Stove.
But yes, in answer to Mark’s question: the Humanities are partially victims of their own folly: the long pointless detour into post-modernism has made them a laughing stock, with unfortunate consequences for serious scholars.
More generally, Humanities subjects are victims of google, wikipedia and social networks. Once upon a time one needed a scholar to answer questions about society. Now one simply has to punch in a search string.
Lefty E @ #25 said:
Your suspicion is largely baseless.
The GFC was triggered by a government companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) agreeing to buy a massive amount of toxic securities derived from low-income and minority mortgages. An idea heavily promoted by “humanities graduates” from the late seventies through early noughties.
Results speak for themselves.
(Not that Wall Street cannot trash the economy without help from politically connected Humanities graduates, if cut enough slack.)
Quite seriously, Mark quotes Graeme Turner and Stanly Fish as credible authorities in defence of Humanities. These two guys are respectively the national and global intellectual leaders of the Culture Studies movement.
They are part of the problem, rather than the solution, to what ails the Humanities.
I know and love Social Sciences and Humanities. But I am not surprised to see them wither and die after watching the degeneration of these scholarly domains over the past couple of decades.
Just look at the degenerate farce of post-modern cultural theory, with its endless parade of quackery – Queer Studies, Peace Studies, Black Studies etc.
And the social sciences have not been much better. Economics, my own speciality, completely dropped the ball from the nineties through noughties with its obsession with discredited financial theory. That complementing the dubious nostrums “management gurus” in the flagship MBA courses.
To be brutally frank: what happens if H&SS go on strike? Well, nothing much. Society goes on pretty much heedless. This puts H&SS somewhat below garbage collectors in the real social pecking order.
We do have a need for Social Sciences and Humanities. But they will have to put themselves on a sounder intellectual footing before the public sits up and takes note.
And H&SS really should learn how to write entertaining prose, not the prolix rubbish served up in most journals. Bloggers at least know this, which is why so many people interested in society make bloggers their first portal of call.
If Humanities & Social Sciences seek deliverance then they need look no further than their glorious past. Late 19th and early 20th C modernist social theory, in contrast to late @0thC post-modernist social theory, is going from strength to strength.
Keynsian economics has been re-vitalised by the success of fiscal stimuli in staving off global depression.
Weber’s notion of charismatic authority could have no better validation than Osama Bin Laden.
Durkheim’s theory of anomie is perfectly exemplified in the distress felt by remote indigenous communities.
Marx’s analysis of how financial crises cause economic instability and polarisation of wealth is stunningly confirmed by the GFC.
And, of course, Darwin’s evolutionary anthropology is now cutting huge swathes through the nonsensical thickets of Blank Slate sociology.
The way forward is to go Back to the Future.
Re: Dave #18. Just to clarify what happened with philosophy at the ANU. There had been three philosophy programs – the philosophy program in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), and the philosophy program in the humanities faculty. Philosophy RSSS and CAPPE were research and graduate study only programs; all undergraduate teaching in philosophy at the ANU was done by members of the humanities program. Recently, the philosophy from the humanities faculty were merged into the other programs to make one big philosophy program, which is still ostensibly in the RSSS.
Re: dj #32. Agreed that there seems to be a curious asymmetry with general views on the sciences and the humanities: if the lay person doesn’t understand the sciences, that’s because the lay person isn’t smart or well read enough; if the lay person doesn’t understand the humanities, that’s because the humanities are too obscure or arcane. It’s not entirely clear how this feeds into present issues however – beyond the vague thought that it may make it easier for governments to justify favouring the sciences over the humanities.
again, at the talk, he specifically addressed this very point. turner said this is the wrong argument to make. to argue “why the humanities have value” is to assume this is in question. it is not.
the point is not a philosophical one about the worth of the humanities, it is a practical one as to how to redress the structural funding imbalances and institutional road blocks that face the humanities in the modern university.
The central paradox of the Humanities is that most folks don’t miss them until they are gone. In the case of history that sense of loss often arrives at the same moment as some cataclysm.
Nations and institutions that are governed without an accurate appreciation of history are doomed to fail.
Furthermore, citizens who have been denied an accurate appreciation of history aren’t really citizens at all. They are subjects in a nation of the blind leading the blinded.
I don’t mean to gloat to offensively but the withering of the Humanities in yet another data point to add to my Decline of the Wets thesis. To which we might add the Death of Multiculturalism just announced by the Angela Merkel, the otherwise wishy-washy Christian Democrat chancellor of Germany.
An announcement of some moment coming from a resurgent Germany. But greeted with almost universal silence, or blank stares of incomprehension, by our own cultural professors.
Oops, I stand corrected. Here is Tim Soutphommasane who tries to perform the Lazarus trick on his pet theory. He begins by pleading: “Can we call multiculturalism something else?”. And goes onto say that there is nothing wrong with multiculturalism after all, that a few intellectual wriggles can’t iron out. Concluding: “There is multiculturalism and there is multiculturalism.”
Now I ask you, when the public debate turns to the value of Humanities, and one of the more prominent public intellectuals churns out tripe like that, is it any wonder that public support for the Humanities is muted?
To add to Tyro’s points, think about the history of the twentieth century, the post-war boom and the demand for expertise thanks to the Cold War. For seventy years scientists and engineers have had very highly developed political skills where it counts—managing demand for technical and research output measured in terms of national security and national development. Think not of a stereotype of scientist-engineers sequestered in labs, think more of three generations of canny, well-disciplined Werner von Braun types with BHP and the Defence Minister on the phone.
And an anecdote: when I was going through the honours stream in my undergraduate degree the custom in my department was to award one University medal to the best thesis, or none at all if there wasn’t one; whereas my colleague, a chemist, told me in his Department university medals were awarded to all those honours students who achieved better than a certain grade. Very politically smart on the part of the chemists.
It’s notable, Katz, that history as a humanities discipline suffers from inequitable tertiary funding but benefits from State and Federal nation-building policy ie. Bob Carr’s promotion of Australian history in high school curriculum, Keating’s Pacific revisionism, Howard’s promotion of ANZAC commemoration, etc. If not from the Cold War, historians have done well out of the Culture War.
Not being directly connected with a uni nowadays, I don’t have a lot to add to this debate, and anything specific I did add would be out of date by yonks. However, I can say getting an Arts degree and then a postgrad degree in arts changed my life immeasurably for the better in subtle ways of thinking about the world that I can’t even begin to describe. Until I went to uni as a mature age student and enrolled in courses of English, history, ancient history, archaeology, etc, etc, I had no idea what I was missing out on, despite being already very widely read. I came away from uni understanding things and more importantly knowing how to understand and think about them. It is a skill we ignore at our peril, and the sooner the politicians and employers wake up to this, and its wide application, the better.
Tyro Rex @26: I wasn’t disparaging “The Wire” which I think a very fine drama nor do I disparage in general the study of what used to be called “popular culture”. I do question the general quality of teaching and research within “cultural studies” because of the consequences for young people who are often so dumbed down that they are unaware of it. This is how hegemony operates.
The sphere of cultural production and consumption is not invulnerable to critical political analysis. I note, for example, that while the humanities appear to be under attack at public sector universities and in public schools they continue to be valued in private schools and at the old institutions of the UK. I suggest that an education in language, classics and humanities will become again the hallmark of a well rounded (male) ruling elite while the children of the working classes will continue to acquire higher degrees in Homer Simpson. You can imagine how the latter will be regarded by the former.
Several years ago when my daughter completed high school I met a young woman who had returned to address the school speech day. She had been school captain (of the oldest and best performing selective girls school in oz), had rowed, swum and musically played through her six years as well as achieving astonishing HSC results. She told me that after getting Hons 1 in French at Usyd she was off to retrain (I forget what now) because she couldn’t get a job. She couldn’t even get a start because Australian employers wanted someone “trained”. Pigs.
The elephant in the room that all you culture vultures don’t want to see is Post Modernism.
Pomo has destroyed “culture” (where did I leave my AK47 Muriel?)
If I was into this pointy headed stuff I would read a book called “Intellectual Impostures” By Sokal and Bricmont.
Just as well I never read books.
Huggy
I would also like to intone ritualistically the names of two commenters to try to summon them to this thread for their contributions:
Brett Holman, Brett Holman, Brett Holman!
GregM, GregM, GregM!
Liam,
Probably history has done well out of the Culture Wars in some respects – like people are much more aware of it, but I’m not sure the Culture Wars themselves have been that good for the standing of the discipline itself. (You’ve probably read Stuart McIntyre’s The History Wars. I draw your attention to the conclusions in the final chapter.)
(Mark, I hope this comment isn’t OT.)
Liam, in the Australian context its the biosciences who generally get the big bikkies, usually by promising to cure cancer (again).
Wow!
If you lot went back & reread these posts, as a funder of your hobby, rather than a receiver of funds, you should be able to see just why most tax payers are sick of you.
Yes, I said hobby. You seemingly to believe someone else should fund your interest for you.
Just like you, most of us have an interest. The main difference is that we earn a living doing something the community values enough to pay us for, then indulge ourselves in our own time.
All the above rubbish trying to justify the world funding your little game shows the disdain you hold for the welfare of the “real” people you expect to fund you.
Get real folks, tougher times may be coming.
akn said: ” I do question the general quality of teaching and research within ‘cultural studies’ because of the consequences for young people who are often so dumbed down that they are unaware of it.”
A nasty little slur, akn, even if it’s not entirely coherent. Name names or retract.
Re Phil @ 59: ‘The main difference is that we earn a living doing something the community values enough to pay us for’
The community funds your ‘enterprise’? Isn’t that parasitic too?
Don’t generalise: some activities and industries that spring off from the core ‘enterprise’ of the humanities are capable of creating their own ‘wealth’ and depend on no public purse (think publishing), if this is the general idea you find offending.
It might be useful to look into the ideas and arguments of the actual discussion that is taking place here (and look at the links from the New York Times, as well as the comments thread there, for a start, and in a way of a global perspective, provided in the post and by Dan @ 1) before dismissing several centuries’ worth of ‘knowledge capital’, the creation of which has always depended on external funding of some sort.
In addition to the issues already raised in this thread, I’d like to point to a trend which seems likely to make things worse for the humanities, at least in terms of research possibilities. eResearch is a buzz word these days (and let me make it clear that I’m a fan – if it’s done properly, there are lots of exciting possibilities) but humanities are already losing out in this field. Digital research in the humanities depends first on the availability of digital versions of existing sources, in contrast to work in many scientific fields where new research techniques produce the digital data. Most of the funding currently available in Australia for eresearch initiatives is expressly barred from being used for digitization – it’s mainly directed to managing data and making it widely accessible. These are fine aims, but from the point of view of the humanities, it is very limiting because the data doesn’t yet exist in a form where it can be manipulated as digital material. And the cost of making that leap is very high. I’m a linguist, and I was reading on a blog oriented to that discipline yesterday that transferring old tapes to digital files, done properly i.e. including stabilising the original media as much as possible, costs more than $300 per hour of tape. Other types of heritage data face similar entry barriers…..The National Library’s newspaper project using crowd-sourcing to check OCR scans is a brilliant solution to this problem, but you can only do that sort of thing so many times, and I think it’s also symptomatic that this is happening outside the university sector.
Simon, that’s a really interesting point. I’ve been using the National Library’s newspaper project extensively for something I’m working on, and while it’s absolutely wonderful and I’m finding material that I would never have found before, or at best would have taken me hundreds and hundreds of hours in the library, I’m also finding that searches are hopelessly unreliable because of course they don’t pick up words unless they scanned correctly in the first instance, which of course most of them haven’t, and the older the paper the truer this is.
It’s a point of honour to jump in there and make corrections to every useful item I find, but only when one is actually doing this does one realise what a gargantuan task it would be to render all those records fully readable and effectively searchable. Given that this material is potentially invaluable for scholars of history, cultural and other, it seems insane that there shouldn’t be research funding available to make it, erm, available.
Nick: a considered opinion rather than a slur. Now, without any effort I was able to locate the following absurdity which is a study of celebrity and the law that concludes that celebrity is a good fing because it sells newspapers. Sorry, because it generates economic activity. Ho hum. Admittedly, the authors are a sociologist and two legal academics rather than cultural studiers but I cite the work as evidence of a rot initiated by cultural studies because it tells us no more about junk culture than what a plumber would tell us about faeces which is that it stinks. Oh, and that “…celebrities create social capital by getting people talking”. Apparently humans have only started really talking since an army of young women called Brittany appeared on the horizon. Australia is beset by no more urgent sociological or legal issues than the cult of celebrity. I’m so relieved. I thought that there were serious issues around here somewhere…
Now, a question for you: whatever happened to queer theory? A decade ago it was all the rage at Western Sydney. Poor little devils, instead of Marx (which they needed in order to grasp exactly how they and their families had been shafted) they got queer theory. So, where is it now?
PC@63
Thanks for illuminating my points for me so neatly!
Thirding the point about digital humanities. I work on the Dictionary of Sydney project http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org, which is about making historical scholarship accessible, and we’ve had grants funding the development of the IA and the technical back end, as well as some of the content, but we are now looking for operational funding. The problem with the grant system in the humanities at present is that it assumes the research is done, the book is published and then the costs finish. Of course, if the project outcome is a digital resource, it needs hosting, technical support and maintenance at the very least, and if it is to grow, further operational funding, and technical development to keep up with future changes. If only to support philanthropic fundraising efforts. We’ve found some support from the City of Sydney, but universities are not interested.
akn: “Admittedly, the authors are a sociologist and two legal academics rather than cultural studiers”
Like I said, name names or retract.
Paul at #57, yes to all clauses.
Rob at #58, indeed, it’s the perfect illustration of science’s better public relations work. I’ve often thought humanities researchers should have some kind of uniform or distinguishing garment to be prestigiously photographed in, the equivalent of the ubiquitous lab coat and safety glasses indicating quality research. Alexander I in Russia introduced student uniforms including swords; like a lot of the Tsars he was crazy not stupid.
Akn at #64 if you really want to start a fight, accuse a lawyer of practicing a humanities discipline.
Look Nick, this bovver boy attitude is unbecoming and the demand to “name names” is redolent of the sort of intimidation developed by the ‘house un-american activities committee’. In the meantime I would argue that relativism found its most comfortable niche within cultural studies and that postmodern philosophers within cultural studies are indeed the active ideologists of the age of neoliberalism in which no specific value attaches to any one thing in particular except that it has a market value. Market value is the only measure of value because other values are in fact forms of violation of the specificity of the cultural values of subordinates. And so on.
HuggyBunny I see brings up Pomo and Sokal. This is so done to death it’s not even worth engaging with seriously. It’s like being asked to recapitulate 40 years of climate research to a denialist. Get over it and move past it. Sokal didn’t even submit that infamous article to a peer-reviewed journal, so his research methods are completely and totally flawed (peer review is all in research in the Humanities as it in the Sciences), which makes his conclusions absolutely untrustworthy. In other words: he is as bogus as the straw men he attacks.
Attacking something you don’t understand is just ignorance turned into a viciously enforced ignorance. Huggybunny, Phil and his obsessions with “hobby”, and Sokal can add themselves to that list. Engaging in the culture war of the ignorants in a race to the bottom.
I was going to originally add something about history and culture wars. I do classical history, its not generally been a winner from the culture wars.
However, structuralism, post-structuralism, textual analysis, all these sorts of things can be useful in classical history, if applied with discretion. So a broad-scale assault on these tools as useless and futile as dills like Huggybunny would believe is far worse than wrong.
Its proof of what was discussed above, in terms of science. That people when they don’t understand science, defer to scientists (except for the most idiotic of climate and religious fundamentalists). Therefore I would like to propose that people who mount such attacks on humanities topics be considered as believing in such fundamentalisms (that ignorance is strength).
akn, the Mccarthyite bovver-boy just wanted a few facts. Nothing too post-modern there, I’d have hoped.
Getting back to the point about defending the humanities. The question of why taxpayer money should be spent on teaching/researching the humanities in universities is very much an open question, whatever Prof Turner may have said. And it’s true that the ditching of these ideas haven’t helped: 1)that the canonical philosophical and literary heritage represents the highpoint of human endeavour, and 2) that democracy can only thrive under a well-educated citizenry, where well educated implies a basic familiarity with the humanities. The budget cuts in Britain seem to have declared that it’s fine for the academic humanities to go on, so long as private money is involved. How do you defend against that? Stanley Fish said it was impossible, and he’s probably right. But at the very least you need strong voices and strong reasons for the public funded academic humanities. A few years back the Australian Academy of the Humanities gave it a shot under the direction (if I remember well) of Iain Macalman and Meaghan Morris. It was a very good collective attempt, but not, I think, particularly persuasive to skeptics in the end. It’s easy, of course, to preach to the converted…
Ahh relativism gets a shakedown. The boogie man. The problem is that it is like asserting that the BER is a failure, or that economic stimulus didn’t save us from recession, or that the world isn’t warming. In other words such assertions just don’t match reality.
‘Relativism’ in at least some form is a true description of human experience.
My cultural experience is quite relative to my experience of it. As is yours.
Not only that, but phenomenological research tells us that people see what they expect to see – in others words that perceptions of reality are based on ‘expectations’ which are typically always, cultural in basis.
Apart from the purely biological, there is little that’s universal. Murder (in limited cases) and incest are usually taboos, that is sure, but the form of the expression of these taboos are not. While there are underlying biological impulses to a large range of human behaviour, there are few truly universal expressions of it in human societies. They all take different forms, that need careful research to uncover and be sure of their similarity in underlying motives.
What is so hard to understand about that?
So I think this should be my last contribution to this thread derail.
Just as climate denialists have no real part in a climate debate …
Erm, Nick, not to be taking sides or anything but there’s a link in akn’s comment #64 to a site that discusses the book and names the names. Perhaps you didn’t see it.
I come from that generation of scholars who were finishing their studies before post-modernism hit the universities and I have to say, I don’t consider the specialties of, say, Aboriginal studies, Native American Studies, Women’s studies, Afro-American Studies as part of Cultural Studies (in fact I’m not even sure what Cultural Studies are) but branches of the discipline of history one avoids studying at one’s peril. And close textual analysis is something I thought historians always did. Nor, for that matter, have I come across anything approaching post-modernist historiography in my reading, which in my area of early colonial Australia/the American Revolution I’m pretty on top of, and keep gaining knowledge of all the time.
Except for this one book on defence studies [?], an area in which I occasionally get sent books to review. As you can see, I wasn’t impressed, though more because I didn’t think it was very good history, than because of its incomprehensible content.
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras/article/view/941
[Youse will probably kill me for this.]
PC, “akn” was quite specifically slurring cultural studies academics in the original comment. My point was that a “sociologist and two legal academics” don’t count as evidence to back up akn’s claims.
@ Phil, 59.
You say hobby, I say pathway to lucrative government job for my history boffin. He still enjoys his history as a hobby when he’s not too busy. In contrast our friend doing a PhD in science is likely to have to get a DipEd or MTeach in order to get a job when she finishes, unless she wants to be a poorly paid post-grad for the rest of her life, despite working in an important field. So which is the hobby? I too have taken my Bachelor in Education (BEd)in humanities and turned it into a quite comfortable government job, in my home town. I pay lots of tax. Perhaps some of my taxes fund your enterprise?
Tryo Rex – do you think those endless debates in the 80′s about what should be in ‘the canon’ did the humanities any good? It seemed to me that the humanities academics tore their credibility to shreds. All that tossing out of the privileged, white, male, colonial, imperialist viewpoint ….
I wonder if the humanities as we’ve known them can survive in the post-book era. You can apply your theories to films or computer games or whatever, but the traditional study of the humanities was always informed by the history of the subject and discussions about that history. Humanities that are so focussed on the new will be a different thing.
Andrew Norton once remarked that the B.A. was a finishing school for middle-class girls. Which may well be true, but I think, still worth public funding. If most people valued the humanities at all, it was for their ‘civilising’ function. ‘Nice’ people knew something about art, literature and history, played a musical instrument, could read, at least, in another language. But times have changed and that kind of civilising isn’t valued so much.
Liam’s right: the sciences did well in the service of the state in the cold war. I thunk the sane explains the boom in social science post 9-11. Think ARC priority areas, terrorism studies etc
Why hast thou summoned me, foolish mortal? I was having a really nice kip.
I don’t know that I have a lot to add other than some ‘me toos’. Also I’m a probably bit jaundiced at the moment from not even managing to get a job interview for the few lecturing jobs going in my field (though that could be due to me being crap, either just generally or at selling myself), and because I’m at Melbourne, where the Arts faculty is still going through a lot of pain. (I started out in the School of History, about 3 mergers later it’s about to become the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies). So I don’t think that historians have done very well out of the history wars (and I’m even a military historian, albeit not an Australian one).
So, the me toos: I do agree with the general idea that the system is skewed in favour of the sciences: the way the ERA weights co-authored papers is an example of that (many science PhD students will have their name on a few of these by the time they graduate; it’s very rare in history, at least, to co-author papers at all, much less as a student). I do think it’s a mistake (but perhaps, sadly, an unavoidable one) to play the economic benefits card. Not everything has a monetary value, or at least one which can be computed in advance; that does not mean it is without value. I disagree with Fish that this has to come down to repeating old nostrums; it’s about robustly arguing for what the humanities can give us. And I would like to fourth the statements of Simon, PC and Emma above about the importance of digital humanities, and I agree that the exciting stuff in this area is not being done in universities but in libraries and museums. The NLA’s Trove is a great example of this.
And yes, do not underestimate the persuasive power of scientists with a funding proposal. (Before I went into history I was in astronomy, and Australian astronomers have been very successful over the years in getting money for big projects.) Part of the problem, ironically, is that the humanities are too cheap to run. A salary, some overseas travel every couple of years and various sundries is nothing compared to running a science lab. But all that hardware is tangible, it means photo-ops, glossy brochures, impressive lists of equipment in annual reports. A historian can only show beancounters a bookcase or two and a filing cabinet full of photocopies, which only impresses other historians (maybe).
Maybe this is where big, dynamic, web projects (like the Dictionary of Sydney) could play a part — even politicians get the importance of the web now. If these sorts of things became more common outputs of humanities research projects (as well as books and articles) then it might help make the value of what we do clearer to all. But as I say, university humanities departments don’t seem to be terribly interested in new media. There’s just no push here.
Still dont see why the taxpayer should pay enormous sums to teach people a hobby. Apart from some teachers, some journalists and a handful of future academics, 90% of humanities students are just hobbyists. If I went back as a mature age student I would study history, but I would expect to pay for it – because I am never going to be employed as a professional historian and pay taxes. Why should that be different if I was 18?
By the way, if I did want to defend humanities I wouldnt use people like Stanley Fish as a battleflag. “Post modernism” has deservedly made the humanities a public joke.
“But as I say, university humanities departments don’t seem to be terribly interested in new media.”
The indifference was palpable 12 years ago when we were starting up M/C. Sad to see that nothing’s changed.
Tyro Rex:
And of course you would support that by somehow arguing that consciousness isn’t rooted in biology? That the material conditions of our existence are irrelevant? Even the Buddha, whose aesthetic practices brought about unique breathroughs in knowledge, recognised that mind is conditioned by material reality.
Look, I’ll raise your relativism with one 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which document commences:
But hey, maybe I’m just being a fuddy duddy modernist.
Nick, I don’t think it necessary to “name names” when arguing general tendencies.
As well I’m aware that there are far too many lawyers driving taxis with too little to do and a malicious interest in litigation to take the risk. Besides, the condition of me naming names would be you thinking thoughts. So, I’ll tell you what, I’ll continue on my path of not naming names and you continue on yours.
@59 @80…
…are pretty good examples of what you’re up against if you want to convince people of the value of your field. You’re dealing with people who:
a) Know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
b) Are part of the ‘ignorance is strength’ brigade.
c) Have made up their minds already and aren’t for changing them (but don’t call them prejudiced! They’ll object most strenously and cry unfair!)
So good luck, you’ll need it!
Brett, unfortunately, not all politicians get the web. We were just unsuccessful in a very modest grant application to Arts NSW, for a project relevant to every school student in Australia,in the same round where Opera Australia got $20 million or something. But I agree the great projects are mostly being done, albeit on shoestrings, in libraries and museums.
A wonderful Victorian/Tasmanian digital history project Founders and Survivors, has tapped into international epidemiology funding, as it is following the convict records into government records to the AIF records and so generates life histories over several generations. Pure genius to produce a scientific outcome for a humanities project, and long may they be funded. But that’s the kind of ingenuity humanities scholars need to build.
Sorry, that link seems to be busted. It’s here: http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/
Oh, akn, you’re a good modernist.
Let me get this straight: you think anything that isn’t a privileged white male colonial [sic] imperialist viewpoint tears credibility to shreds?
I think you’ve got it completely arse-backwards, Russell, but never mind.
Never (presumably) having done one, how on earth would he know? And what an appallingly sexist (not to mention privileged white male) remark. Toss out his viewpoint!
AKN, consciousness is biological. It’s products are not. Society has a biological aspect, but it is not its only one.
Russell: “do you think those endless debates in the 80?s about what should be in ‘the canon’ did the humanities any good?”
In my understanding, (I only did engineering in the 80s, I came to the humanities in the 90s) the debates weren’t about “what is in the canon”, but rather, “what is a canon? how is a canon formed? who decides what is in it?” which are fundamentally different questions. And they are essential ones.
Questions I find many of my philological classicist colleagues still have to grapple with at least occasionally. For example; many of the texts that survive to us moderns, survive because they were “in the canon” during the 3rd and 4th centuries, and thus being taught as texts to students in the late classical period. So we find that lots of copies come out of the Oxyrhynchus corpus (google ‘Oxyrhynchus papyri’), for example.
I was in Melbourne recently and saw a great keynote about work with digital editions of Terence’s comedies and the illustrated manuscripts thereof, by Andrew Fraser at Uni Melb.
Myself I’m rather interested in using digital mapping for the quantification of the geographic distribution of certain types of Latin inscriptions, because in general I’m interested in the interplay between the ideologies of Roman space and Roman power, and the former rather ambitious project gives me a lot of hard data about it.
People also might want to look at the work of Lev Manovich at UCSD, or especially Yuri Tsivian’s fascinating ‘cinemetrics’, for example of things in the ‘digital humanities’ directly relevant to modern cultural product.
For all those people who think the acquisition of knowledge and the getting of wisdom is a hobby, I spose I could spend all my time watching football and going shopping, and while the former might make me feel more part of mainstream society and the latter might increase my ownership of things I have absolutely no need for, I doubt either hobby would make me a better person.
And, btw, last time I looked people were still studying dead, white, imperialist males like Shakespeare, Dickens,Lawrence etc, and white imperialist females like Austen and that wasn’t that long ago. And the people who are reading them haven’t turned into little green monsters. So what canon got chucked out, I’m not sure. So far as I’ve been able to work out, given I have a few English sholars who are very good friends, people do not sit around in English departments teaching students how to analyse the front page of the Daily Telegraph. In fact the only striking difference I’ve noticed is that you can now do courses in vampire literature, and I think that’s a good thing.
@ 89,
Oh, and film appreciation. And if you don’t think film (including some TV film) can ve an art, you’ve, well, missed something.
In which case Tyro Rex, you may enjoy Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: a neurobiological approach against which to test your thesis.
Alternatively try any of the recent collaborations between Buddhism and neoroscience for an examination of the interplay between the materiality that conditions consciousness and consciousness unhindered by the limitations of conditioned existence.
Short: I think you are wrong.
It’s interesting how some people choose to diss something by linking it to ‘girls’. Of, course if middle-class girls want to do something, it must be useless.
I know quite a few filmmakers who are returning to uni to do their Ph.Ds by making a film and writing a thesis alongside that. It kills the proverbial two birds by giving filmmakers a qualification which allows them to make money out of teaching and gives them access to facilities and a bit of money to make a film.
Visual artists have been doing this for years of course, as very few artists can support themselves solely through their practice.
PC – those culture wars would have seemed different to the participants, but to me as an onlooker, it appeared that many academics were trashing their subject: as if all the sources they/we had been studying were found to be corrupted by their objectionable viewpoints and had to be replaced by sources with more correct viewpoints.
Adding new interpretations would be fine – that’s how scholarship progresses – but the old sources were rejected as tainted. There’s only so much time in the day for reading and if students were to read the new, approved books, then they would never experience the rich, historical aspect of their subjects.
I suspect a happier balance has been reached now. My point was only that it was bad PR for the humanities at the time. The threat to the humanities now is from a materialist consumer society that doesn’t value what the humanities are about.
Russell, as someone who was doing a BA in the ’80s and had English Literature as a major, I remember reading quite a lot of ‘dead white male’ stuff. I don’t think your memory as an outsider accords very well with reality.
I also did Cinema Studies as a major and it was ‘white, male, but not always dead’ stuff. Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, Murnau, Keaton, Chaplin, Welles, Lang, and very USA-centric. It gave me a great basis in that form of cinema, but also gave a me a bit to catch up on in other ways.
Russell,
Can you please list new “approved” books. I mean, I’m really curious.
It’s nonsense of course Paul.
I work in a university which isn’t quite as down on humanities as some others seem to be, thanks no doubt to factors like the standing of many of the senior scholars in the faculty. Nevertheless it is certainly getting harder and harder to teach and research well. The screws are tightened more and more every year.
I do think though that there is no appreciable decline in the desire of incoming students to study humanities. Lots are planning to teach after their degrees but there are still plenty who resist the pressure to direct their educations narrowly and literally towards specific jobs.
I thought about replying to some of the sillier claims above about the declining standards of humanities education especially in literature, but part of what’s wrong with them is theta absolutely don’t distinguish between programs offered at different universities.
Fine – I mean it was the debate that was damaging, in PR terms, not what actually happened. It appeared to me that humanities scholars couldn’t agree on what would form the basis of their discipline.
Paul, I wasn’t keeping lists – my humanities studying was done in the early 70s. In the 80′s I was studying Chinese (Taiwan vs Beijing faculty politics!) at Murdoch U and just a casual observer of what was going on in humanities there. Murdoch had a certain reputation in the humanities and ‘cultural studies’ from that period which it is still trying to live down.
There, there, Brett. You got it goin’ on.
the shorter AKN: everything humanities is biological. ‘cos if the products of consciousness have to be biological, then culture is nothing but biological.
oh and looking at that synopsis, there’s nothing in there that is remotely in disagreement with anything i’ve said, nor anything i’d necessarily disagree with.
you are manufacturing a disagreement where there is none. basically I think you haven’t actually read and digested anything i’ve actually written here, in your zeal to fit reality to your ideology. oh sorry, that must be biology, not ideology. after all it’s a product of your consciousness.
well, i have to to off to an actual scholarly conference keynote now, no time to correct your faulty ideology about the products of consciousness being purely biological.
Conditioned by material reality does not mean limited by material reality especially where people undertake to free themselves from conditioning.
It was yr claim that there are no universals beyond biology that drew my attention. Those universals are pretty potent, I would think. Moreover, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an achievement of universalizing modernity that you dismiss by simply claiming that universals don’t exist beyond biological imperatives. Therein I detected the whiff of pomo relativism that is unable to find the sort of common ground with others that the study of humanities depends on.
Over and out. The weekend.
Akn, the Declaration is an absolute because we choose, politically, to make it so. I quite like most of its clauses personally, but the freedoms and rights it lists aren’t beyond criticism or political dispute. Article 16.3 for instance.
Biology… or ideology? You assert, we deride.
Given some of the desolation and lack of imagination in some posts here, must say am glad to have been at uni as an manured age student, later than some of you.
Back to Mercurius, 83, for some of you.
Yes Mr Burns, (@89), “the acquisition of wisdom and the getting of knowledge” is a hobby – unless it’s directed to a practical end like getting a job. If watching footy and shopping were my hobbies, I wouldnt expect the tax payer to pay for my time, my couch, my TV set, and my credit card.
If your hobby is reading dead white males or “vampire literature”, why should the taxpayer pay for your books and your time? It isnt us rationalists who seem to be selfish.
The taxpayer should pay for me books, Bill, because I’m on the old aged pension.
They paid for them at uni because I was very very bright and had a postgrad scholarship that I had to work very very hard to get.
They also paid me money to go to uni because they had this very very odd expectation that I was there to work,(study) not play football. And they didn’t want me to starve to death.
Of course, we could burn down all the unis and put the students and staff on the dole. Would that satidfy you?
@97
Good one Russell! So what appeared to be happening, to you, is more important that what actually happened.
You probably profess to loathe postmodernism too, but, as the Palmolive lady once said, “you’re soaking in it”.
Back when I was a “middle-class girl” at uni in the early noughties, there were lashings of Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Austen and TS Eliot. The white (mostly) male imperialist Canon, dear Russell, you’ll be relieved to know, is safe and well, and you and the rest of the world who aren’t “middle class girls” are therefore immune from having to actually read or engage with any of it.
Enjoy your hobbies at the mall and the oval, safe in the knowledge that someone, somewhere is reading this stuff, so you don’t have to!
Where has it been stated that any persons’ “hobbies” should be funded by taxpayers?
And how does one decide whether one scholastic pursuit is “directed to a practical end like getting a job” and whether it is merely directed toward pursuing a “hobby”?
Certifications, like the right to write medical prescriptions or the right to connect pipes to a water main are to a greater or a smaller degree guild or trade union restrictions imposed upon entry to various trades and professions. The true “rationalist” would rebel against these artificial restrictions to trade.
Conversely, it might be insisted, persons should not be permitted to enter public administration until they have proven themselves proficient in the history and theory of public administration, that is, by passing courses in the history of public administration.
Certification of persons permitted to write prescriptions is defended on the basis that this protects the community from dangerous quacks.
Certification of persons entitled to enter upon professions of public administration appears to be an affront to the notion that every person’s opinion is of equal value.
Yet the ignoramus who maladministers the state causes far more damage than the quack who writes dodgy prescriptions.
Here is the source of the ignorance of vulgar “rationalists”. They are ignorant of history, preferring to replace a true knowledge of facts with a their own untutored prejudices.
The historical truth is that public education was founded on the perception that only education would protect a democracy from its own excesses. The idea of individual upward economic mobility was seen as a secondary benefit of public education.
Now, the “rationalists” have misstated the foundational principles of public education. This proves that any “rationalist” is an ignoramus when he asserts the individualistic model of education to be the foundational principle of public education.
In fact, the humanities were not perceived to be a “hobby”. Rather, they were accorded the high status of qualities essential for the full and informed exercise of democratic citizenship.
Mr Burns these days you should pay for your books out of your old age pension. When you were at Uni, sure you should have been paid when you were a lecturer or researcher, not so sure someone should be paid if they are a student – there are loans available.
But if studying literature (or whatever else) is something you do for enjoyment of personal edification it is a hobby. No different from playing football. No one goes to Uni to play football, or is paid by the taxpayer to play football in this country. (Because we dont have sports scholarships).
Not convinced that you are very very bright either, as you seem to be very very bigoted towards anyone with interests you dont share.
It seems they didn’t teach you to read very well Mercurius – in a post that asks are the humanities dying, I merely note that the bitter bust-up in the academy in the 80s appeared to me, and therefore possibly others, to reflect some confusion about what the humanities should be doing. That was hardly helpful in promoting a positive image for those courses.
I go to a mall about once a year, and the last time I went to an oval would have been for the St Patrick’s Day parade at Subi Oval, sometime in the 1960s. (Catholic boys school compulsory parading)
Are you really trying to imply that people who dont have Humanities degree cannot cope with the “full and informed exercise of democratic citizenship”? That is easily the most pompous and elitist comment on this entire thread, (warrants a High Distinction at least)! I’ll bet the 95% of parliamentarians who dont have degrees in “the history public administration” would have quite a giggle too.
Cant see what relevance at all that stuff about plumbers doctors and guilds even had.
In fact public education was originally allmost entirely religious in character, so I doubt you know much about history.
If you attend Uni to study something simply because it is an enjoyable subject for you then it is a hobby. Naturally a “Studies” academic wont see it that way, but a hobby it is.
As an old aged pensioner you’ll find that the taxpayer does pay for your books. It’s called the public library where you can borrow them for free. Just as they paid for the books, back in the days your were a student, and it appears you thought of yourself, and even today, sadly, think of yourself, as a specially privileged person, of less fortunate people than you who were apprentices and labourers and other people who were in less self-elevated positions than you hold yourself in.
They’re not going to get you an original of the Gutenberg Bible at your local library, although I know that there are those here on this site who would decry that as final proof, if proof were needed, of the complete fraud and evil of capitalism.
But get over it learn some humility and use your public library.
We pay people to study, teach and maintain scholarly-rigorous discipline in humanities subjects because it’s the sum total of our national, and human, inheritance. Cultured, educated, critical people with reading skills are a common good, and a society that isn’t prepared to pay in a communal way for the critical maintenance of its culture doesn’t deserve to keep it.
Every time I run into someone on a thread who whinges about the way such-and-such an Australian culture is on the decline in the face of po-mo/neoliberalism/America/immigrants/politicians/feminists/whatever, I feel like stamping my left thumb on caps lock key and yelling IT’S BECAUSE WE DON’T PAY ENOUGH PEOPLE TO READ OLD BOOKS.
You’re a fool, Bill, and you don’t know anything about public education or religion in Australia.
Public education was originally allmost entirely religious in character – through monasteries, or similar instiutions established by royal/aristocratic grants. The origins of public education long pre date white Australia – try to be a little less parochial.
Liam, I allmost have to think you are winding me up.
If you think humanities academia is “the sum total of our national and human inheritance”, you have taken a screamer over Katz. That para warranted a University Medal for pretension
ie. they were institutional orders educating a religious/aristocratic class, and not public at all. In any sense of the word “public”.
The health or not of humanities faculties at the tertiary level is hardly the be-all-and-end-all.
People will always manage somehow to stagger their way towards philosophy, history, literature with the aid or impetus of tv, career compulsion, the romantic imperative, the attractions of genre fiction, curiosity or whatever.
The humanities don’t need to be institutionalised to find an audience and to be influential. To think so is to have surrendered much and to be part of the problem.
It IS a problem that current “freedom of information” and copyright laws mean much humanities scholarship is locked up behind firewalls and subscriber-only access. The US, by contrast publishes on line on university websites a hell of a lot more, gratis, for the benefit of researchers, libraries, and the general public worldwide. And researchers here whinge that so few are interested in or aware of their work. This is partly why folks.
There is your answer.
They understand you perfectly well and they have concluded, rightly that you contribute nothing but your righteous and worthless self-importance.
They see the needs of people and see that you have nothing to contribute to it.
You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
GregM
“As an old aged pensioner you’ll find that the taxpayer does pay for your books. It’s called the public library where you can borrow them for free.”
I agree. The public library is a much underrated resource. I encourage people to donate unwanted but otherwise worthy books to their local library.
As to the humanities, I don’t want to see them die but I would very like to see them to drop their current penchant for trendy but unworthy French philosophy (ie. post-Kantian) and psychoanalytic psychobabble.
I had wozza for a Principal a few times.
Well people like wozza, who thought that all learning should be directed at jobs and if it wasn’t then it was a waste, I mean what else was learning for?
A couple of wozzas couldn’t see what was wrong with boys doing Tech Studies [good for getting jobs as mechanics] and girls doing Home Economics cos sooner or later when they settled down they would need to know how to wash and iron and cook [apologies to Home Ec teachers who generally knew better].
I mean, they used to say, its not as if our clientele are the types to go onto uni and get to be lawyers and doctors and the like are they?
Ah, the good old days.
Ah, those days have gone.
Haven’t they?
I had occasion to loan my silk-bound Folio Society editions of “The Art of War” and “The Prince” to my (younger) boss the other day. He’d heard of these of course – through his MBA/military/legal training, not sure exactly.
He was all over them in quite a sensual way.
Try to be a little less ignorant. What you describe was not public education. What you describe was education provided by private institutions funded by private sources (i.e., non-government).
Moreover, the public, or citizenry, had no control over the curricula of these institutions. It was a top-down model asserted by confessional privilege.
Education became public only when it was paid for by public revenues. Public education became democratic when the representatives of the people asserted control over provision of education.
Australia was by no means the first polity to provide public education. Scandinavian countries and the United States (and probably others) predated Australia.
@ 114 @119: Liam, Katz, you’re wasting your breath. Bill is another of our postmodern rationalists. You see, the word “public” means whatever Bill wants it to mean, and if he says that include monasteries, then it damn well include monasteries. In fact, if you suggest he’s wrong, then that will only invite more strident insistence that you’re a bunch of elitists trampling on Bill’s right to indulge in unfettered solipsism. Bill would probably be another of the ranting chorus against “postmodern relativism”, unaware that he is an ardent practitioner of it.
@ 108
Elitist! I call wingnut bingo!
Now, tell me, Bill, how much would you be prepared to back a sports team that didn’t have an “elitist” attitude towards winning? And how much would you be prepared to invest in a company that didn’t have an “elitist” attitude towards making a profit? And how much “elitism” is too much when it comes to training and equipping our military? Would you go see a Doctor who took anything other than an “elitist” attitude towards the diagnosis and treatment of disease?
So why, pray, do you object so strenuously towards Humanities departments taking an “elitist” position when it comes to the quality of ideas, expression and culture?
All true.
And when the the representatives of the people asserted control over provision of education they laid down that it would be:
Free
SECULAR, and
Compulsory.
A giant leap for humanity-if I may paraphrase from another event.
We have never looked back from that right decision of the representatives of the people.
No, that is not what I am trying to imply.
You betray your inability to follow an argument. Please pay more attention in future.
I will add another comment.
I cannot think of another bit of legislation, even the Franchise Acts which gave the vote to the people so that they were the final arbiters of their governance, that was more important for the creation of a free society than the Education Acts of the 19th Century.
I have seen in other societies where education, even at primary level, is not free, what parents will sacrifice to get it for their children, and what children will do to obtain it.
I may be wrong though. As the teachers among us would say: Discuss.
hannah’s dad at 117 makes good sense.
I had a boss named wozza who used to preach about what he called ‘action words.’ I was bemused until it turned out he meant verbs.
Our intelligent, inquisitive young increasingly can’t even do an Arts degree without some ‘practical’ component seemingly designed – shades of biopolitics – to ‘prepare’ them for the ‘reality’ of … what? A ‘career’ in a call centre with ‘action words’? Oh, feck.
I overlook the ludicrous snark emanating from the likes of Bill, because Paul Burns put him in his place in a moment.
Gee, I don’t know GregM — why don’t you ask Phil and Bill? I mean, it’s not like there’s many jobs for people who can read and write in Chad or Sierra Leone — not too many people willing to pay for their literacy skills — so why should the taxpayers of those countries pay for their hobbies?
*sigh* I’ll try again:
Russell, the fact that you and (so you claim) thousands of others mis-perceived, misunderstood and now misrepresent what was (and is) going on in Humanities departments is not the fault of Humanities departments.
If you can’t or won’t accept correction of the factual basis of your misapprehensions, at least have the intellectual honesty to own your own bullshit instead of attempting to blame others for your errors of perception.
You’ve lost me there Mercurius. I haven’t been to Chad or Sierra Leone. As I am totally confident you haven’t either.
But, having lived in countries not far out of their experience, I am totally confident of the people in Chad and Sierra Leone that their aspirations for their children, whatever their current circumstances, will be the same as those people, and our people, that they will have the chance of an education system will give them to make a life for themselves, free from whatever has happened in their past.
I don’t really care whatever Phil and Bill have to say. If it’s important to you to put a bit of shit on them for whatwever their opinions are it’s not to me.
I said what I said because, in my experience, it is true of people I have known and although I have limited my comments to current times I think that if you make any diligent enquiry over history you will find that it is a common theme that parents seek the education of their children so that they can live better lives than they were born into, and those parents are prepared to make great sacrifices to achieve that.
If is more important to you to use the occasion to waste your time on whatever Phil and Bill may have said then it is your time to waste.
Liam:
I have a practical suggestion to revitalise the humanities.
Let’s organise a dinner party featuring: Liam, Casey, Pavlov’s Cat, Fyodor, Kim, Nabakov, Skepticlawyer, and FDB.
Unlimited Barossa valley wine would be provided, and the evening would be filmed, then edited and uploaded on to Youtube. It would be the most entertaining thing, ever. And it would go a long way to persuading people of the merits and advantages of an education in the humanities.
@Liam
Bill is playing games with respect to what is known in Britain as the great “public” schools as distinct from “state” schools. The elite boarding schools such as Eton and Harrow were considered “public” because they were open to youngsters who had not been promised to the clerical life. The only requirement to go to one of these schools was the wherewithal to pay the fees, therefore they were “public” because they were not “clerical”.
Of course, “public” in the US and Australia is generally synonymous with “state-provided”. It’s arguably not as clear as it could be when “state schools” would be entirely unambiguous, but common usage doesn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to eliminating ambiguity.
Semantic goal-switching is Bill’s game. Tedious, isn’t it?
Look, in Britain at the moment the Eton born to rule are bringing down a horror budget, based on slashing social spending.
Given this is to pay off debts incurred in bailing out the City of London for its role in bankrupting the country, can we have a rethink as to what all this stuff about citizens bailing out slackers for holidays, is really about?
I agree Paul.
The French had their revolution in 1789.
The British have some catching up to do.
Tumbrils down the Mall to the Widowmaker (or the Scottish Maiden, in keeping with the PC requirements of acknowledging ethnic heritage of LP, and I am sure that there would be many Scots prepared to operate the apparatus, especially if those upon whom it was administered were sassenachs) in Trafalgar Square is the way to go.
Mercurius – you really can’t read, can you? Where I have I claimed to represent the viewpoint of ‘thousands’? You have made no attempt to correct my perception of what happened in humanities departments in the 80s. And maybe it depends where you were – it may have happened in the 70s, 80s or 90s in different places.
I don’t claim to know what is going on in humanities departments now, I hazarded a guess that “I suspect a happier balance has been reached now”.
My main point was that the humanities are dying because our consumerist/materialist society doesn’t value what the humanities do. But as most of the discussion was about universities I just asked if Tyro Rex thought that the culture wars in the humanities and social sciences in university faculties in the 80s had contributed to a poor image for those subjects.
I wasn’t thinking so much what the masses thought of it. I was thinking what PC’s ‘powerful’ people on university boards etc think. If they came from faculties – business, economics, law ?? – where academic work went forward without huge ideological fights, what did they think about what they had seen happening in the humanities departments? How does that colour their decisions today?
Attention: Arts, humanities and social sciences are not dying for lack of ideas and lack of ideas to consider.
They are dying thru lack of funding driven by microminded flat earthers. Micawberish controlfreaks scrounging on halfpennies and masters with a fear driven drive to dumb down and disinform, for fear of exposure and to keep the public uninformed and confused, so as not to see and understand goes on, in the “real world”?
What’s misappropriated, by whom and why, where when and how.
Prey I don’t blind myself to avoid seeing the truth.
The culture wars weren’t confined to the humanities, science faculties have definately inherited and benefited from the culture wars.
Bill @ 86
If we are just going to teach vocational sudies then we don’t need any universities we just need to expand TAFE for the apprentices.
Actually it’d be pretty nice to see apprentice medicos, lawyers, accountants etc etc pushing a broom for the first year.
That research stuff is pretty expensive too, better leave that for foreign companies to do.
Paul@141. All true. So true and so well said.
It is an excelllent manifesto to reverse the tide.
I can see that you take this out to the people they will see the clarity of your vision and will turn everything around at once.
Do not let anyone tempt you to change a word of it.
This is, as George Bernard Shaw said of the Prince of Wales, a comment which will shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
Paul – it can’t be only lack of funds. Back in the schools the kids aren’t choosing languages, and humanities subjects aren’t prioritised … other things are thought more important. History seems to be making a comeback though.
Prof. Turner did say that the role of “theory” in alienating the humanities from their traditional supporters (mostly, BTW, elites, in the proper sense of the word). However he did also say, and I’d agree with him, that the old way of doing things, in which one ‘oscillated’ in tune with the text (i.e. mystically communicated with it), was fundamentally flawed and required changing. In fact I would say that sort of Humanities is deader that the current sort. For a start, it never published any ‘research’.
The problem with the Humanities, as Graeme was particular to point out, not about “appreciation”; it was the turn from the late 80s and 90s to particular research funding models. Models where for example, what one got in past funding determined what one gets in the future. A decided disadvantage to a discipline that actually never really required anything much further from the institution other than the salary, and a few books for the library. So all those pretty bio-med institutes with their already-huge drug company funds just expanded even further while the English Literature department simply had its budget gradually cut and its academics told that ever-increasing “research funding” is required of them. Get those ARC grants in fellas. And then another. And another. Ad infinitum.
Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. — Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2.
Well, GregM has clearly been to charm school and the benefits are there for all to see; does that count as a humanity? And is humanity the singular of humanities? (Oh, the humanities!)
Russell, I can read fine, but thanks for your concern. @ 114, you sought to universalise your personal experience by suggesting that others might possibly share your misperceptions. When somebody does that, it’s usually a red flag that they’re on a hiding to nothing.
You have continued to insist that your personal perception of what was going in Humanities departments 20-30 years ago trumps the direct experience of several other commenters here with more extensive, more continuous and more comprehensive contact with Humanities departments over that period, and up to the present day.
You are doing the standard (ahem, white, male, imperialist) thing of de-authorising the voices of the people who actually experience the events, and substituting your own perception of it as the Authorised Version of history. And you seem affronted that I’ve called you on it. Boo hoo.
Look, I’m 100% sure that you’re arguing in good faith, and you’ve made a number of salient observations, but you need to get past your mis-perception of what was (and is) going on in Humanities departments and entertain the possibility that the voices of the people who were (and continue to be) engaged with them over a period of many years — several of them have been trying to get through to you on this very thread, go back and look around #100ish comments — might actually have more authority to speak on this subject than you do.
I specifically exclude myself from that group, because I don’t work in a Humanities department and my contact with them was limited to a few years in the early noughties (hence no invitation to Paulus’ dinner party) – but there are many others on this thread who have gently and politely tried to correct your misapprehensions about the 80s-90s Humanities upheaval, and yet you continue to insist that there has been no correcting account provided to you. You are quite correct that I haven’t corrected your view, but I didn’t claim to have done so. The correcting account has been provided by several others in comments above. I bow to their direct experience.
Here’s an olive branch Russell — in an attempt to get on a more constructive footing with you in this discussion, could I expand on your notion that our present society doesn’t value what Humanities departments do, and suggest also the following…
It’s not just a question of under-valuing Humanities, but an active campaign by certain other forces and institutions (media, government) to de-authorise the cultural force that Humanities departments once represented.
There has been a debate about cultural authority (who has it, who wields it, who should have it) going on for some decades between media, government and Humanities-led universities. Possibly it can be traced in the West back to the 60′s, when universities began to offer a critique of media and government that specifically sought to de-authorise media and government legitimacy as cultural authorities. In that sense, Universities threw the first punch, but media and government have counter-punched extremely effectively.
Universities have so far been on the losing side of this debate about authority, because media and politicians have become expert at singing the postmodern siren’s song (all the while disavowing that they have any truck with postmodernism) to a public that want to be soothed and told that their views are equally as valid as those peculiar people who’ve read all those old books.
Media and politicians are able to play on peoples’ insecurities, inferiority complexes, and stoke their anti-intellectual prejudices quite easily. Since I have quite a robust (in case you hadn’t noticed) ego, I have no difficulty in entertaining the notion that just possibly, people who have studied language and culture for years or decades might have a greater authoritative claim to it than I do — but more fragile egos who still haven’t gotten over the rough treatment their English teacher dished out to them in High School, or that undergrad essay they wrote which came back as an F, would quite like to get back at old Dusty McChalkstein, and need little encouragement when newspapers and politicians tell them that it’s time to demolish the ivory towers and burn all the books.
But enough procrastiblogging, I have a Masters thesis to write!
Like Mercurius, I date the eclipse of the humanities back to the 1960s. However, I believe that the chain of causation is slightly different.
Before the 1960s, in the western world, universities hosted intellectuals whose output challenged orthodoxy. Occasionally, these figures were persecuted but mostly they were tolerated because their output did not seriously challenge the current order. Universities were the preserve of the prosperous. Their dreaming towers were at the periphery of media consciousness.
The cultural revolution of the 1960s changed all that. For the first time ever, mass university education was made available by huge state funding. Simultaneously, in several countries, universities became the centre of political action. A small number of academics became national figures, attracting the kind of public attention and notoriety that had been the preserve of statesmen and senior prelates.
And their ideas were deeply disturbing to the pre-1960s order. For the first time the popular press asked the question: “Why are public funds being expended on this rubbish?” and “What gives these madmen the right to corrupt our children?” These questions quickly evolved into long-lived tropes.
The rise of the much-despised post-modernism in the 1980s simply added a fillip to this pre-existing trope.
I am just not sure any more that you need to put it down to any sort of “culture war”. In fact I don’t think that scholarship has ever had anything but an uneasy relationship with the “general public” and their masters the political class. Probably it was a little less uneasy when the political class tended to possess degrees in the humanities, if any, but you can certainly find 19th century anti-intellectualism and opposition to academic forms of knowledge.
Students still enroll in fairly large numbers in courses in literature, film, and so on. (Philosophy and History I think tend to suffer a little because many less motivated students find those subjects ‘hard’ I think). At any rate some version of the Humanities seems to be popular enough that it can attract the desire of a large number of students. Student enrolment is not the problem.
So as I keep repeating, I’m fairly well convinced of Prof. Turner’s argument; it’s a structural imbalance in the way that research funding is distributed — the first place to start correcting this imbalance is within the institution of the University itself. Every Vice-Chancellor will tell you how they love their Humanities faculty and highly value its output (which is why arguing for the worth of the Humanities is pointless, as it can be assumed, the ‘Education’ minister will tell you the same thing) – so what we need to do is call them out on it. Furthermore, we need to start acting as a unit, and less as atomised disciplines.
Same with the ARC though, or at least it was back when I was doing the compulsory applications for ARC funding that the university was starting to put massive pressure on all of us to do. When there’s a question on Page 1 of a very long application form asking whether your research project involves the use of human tissue, somehow you just know that ARC funding was never intended for the humanities.
Greg M.
Way up thread somewhere were you engaging in the far-right authoritarian practice of telling me how I should spend my old age pension? If so, clearly you’re some kind of insignificant dictatorial dumbed-down neo-con leveller whose contempt for knowledge deserves to be, and will be, ignored.
I would like to associate myself with Tyro Rex’s comment @ 151, especially the last paragraph. Any ideas as to how best to organise and call out ministers and vice-chancellors on their proclaimed support for the humanities? Is this best done behind the scenes or in public? From within academia or from outside?
PC : “hen there’s a question on Page 1 of a very long application form asking whether your research project involves the use of human tissue, somehow you just know that ARC funding was never intended for the humanities.”
Another excellent point that Graeme also mentioned!
Brett @ 154 … unfortunately I don’t have those answers. I’d hazard a guess that in private, in the confines of the institution, would the best first approach. No one likes being called a fool in public and it often hardens positions, I think. The point is, that Universities get quite a lot of research funding that they can disburse at their discretion, and that Humanities faculties ought to be more aggressive in lobbying for a larger slice of the pie.
Pace TR, of course, increased funding would encourage the employment of of more humanities academics. And more employed humanities academics would result in greater and/or more quality academic output. These outcomes are beyond dispute. So as far as present and aspiring academics are concerned, one element of their sense of crisis — the ability to make a living in academia — would be allayed.
However, would greater funding improve the standing of the humanities in the public mind? Turner’s assertion:
implies a counterfactual:
This Micawberish assertion ignores the most important audience of any academic output, the Australian public, or at least their gatekeepers in the media. The grim fact is that so far as the humanities are concerned, the fissure between town and gown has grown into a wide gulf. Increased funding would make academics more audible and therefore more prone to outraging “common sense”.
This isn’t a structural problem. It is a cultural problem. The Australian public have to get over their philistinism and Australian academics have to find some ways of opening a respectful dialogue with the Australian public.
I did no such thing. I pointed out that if you want the State to provide you books to read then use your public library, just as anyone else can or does. It is a free service and has nothing to do with how you spend your pension with which you can do what you like.
It has everything to do with your privileged world view that as an intellectual you deserve special consideration from the State above that of muckers like skilled workers, labourers and other ordinary people that you are too good for so that while they have to use the library system or buy their own books the State should provide you yours for free.
Mine is a socialist view, not that of a far-right authoritarian. Yours is the elitist view that puts you above the common people. Your contempt for the working class is noted and will continue to be pointed out.
Tyro Rex@75
I am one who stands above the fray, my only association with universities during my youf was to go there to fight coppers.
I have observed however, during a 45 year research career that there is a vast gulf between those who ere”educated” in the humanities and those who understand basic physics. Well illustrated in these columns during the debate on the NBN where some from the humanities sector were arguing that technical development would make wireless as fast as fibre optics! FFS!
The exposure of “Social Text” and all that Pomo garbage as a fucking joke gave people such a me (Hard headed brutal pragmatists) some hope for the future.
Now i note from your contribution that a we seem to have made no progress at all.
Huggy
Greg M,
Where on earth did I say the Government should give me my books? This particular conversation is bordering on the ridiculous.
As is often the case, the character known as GregM has whipped himself into a lather of confected outrage at something or other. Unfortunately he often forgets that a vital step in this process should be to actually comprehend what the subject of his outrage is saying.
Paulus @136: that’s very kind of you, but I’m a lawyer (with a writing hobby on the side). I’m not sure I qualify as a humanities person (although I can read Latin — does that count?).
And, btw, Greg M, spans about elitism by morally deficient politicians like JWH, or by others who follow his bemoaning the fact that some people take the time to be very good at whatever they do is, somehow a ‘bad thing’ usually indicate the person doing the complaining is incapable of meeting the required standard in their discipline. Claiming that all one is trying to do is to ensure one is in touch with the ‘popular’ usually means said claimant is sub-standard in their abilities and not up to the required profressional expertise, If producing work of the required professional standard is elitist, not only am I elitist, I glory in it. Its my experience that people who complain about it have never got over the fact that the standard of their work is so bloody bad that they could never get past 3rd class honours. (Which basically means you satisfied course requirements so you have to get some kind of mark.)
@ 162 ‘spans’ = ‘claims’
Now Paul, where on earth did you say that? You said it at @110
Your comment was ridiculous, which is what I pointed out.
Oh, FFS, what I meant was because I was on the old aged pension the taxpayer pays for any books I buy, me food, me rent etc. If you were too dim to realise I was sending up whoever I was responding to, (I think it was Bill) that’s not my problem.
Paul, just to make you happy I got First Class Honours, a University Exhibition and a University Prize in Constitutional History at a university that is actually taken seriously by the rest of the world. So much for your experience.
I didn’t take it too seriously.
Re Katz @156: ‘… ignores the most important audience of any academic output, the Australian public, or at least their gatekeepers in the media’
That’s questionable, Katz. Specialised research is not always easily accessible to general audiences. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that research in humanities would automatically be ‘user-friendly’ to a general reader. We don’t have those sorts of expectations from any other discipline.
I’d also disagree that a gap between universities and the public has never been greater. I would argue that the opposite is the case: open-access publishing ventures of scholarly materials allows anyone to download refereed articles for free (the number of these ventures is still limited, but there is an increased trend towards OA publishing in academic communities), digital versions of some published academic materials are already being made available via university repositories, and there are programs which involve inter-disciplinary involvement (already mentioned up-thread), as well as collaborative ventures with publishers, the aim of which is to publish (specialist) research in formats accessible to general audiences. (Some have argued that this is contributing to the decline of proper scholarly publishing in Australia, but that’s another story.)
‘Knowledge transfer’ is the buzz word (at least in Melbourne), academics are now expected to demonstrate that they are involved in ‘transferring’ their ‘knowledge’ in some way to other academic or general ‘recipients’, and communicating the results of research to general audiences via various programs should be supported, but, fundamentally, I would agree with Fish that the primary object of research in the humanities is to advance knowledge of the humanities. Why expect anything less?
The Humanities should be at the very centre of any university, but instead they has to almost apologise for their existence. Meanwhile, courses that should have no place at university – like “Tourism Management” – pop up like mushrooms.
Tatyana:
If I had said what you have mischaracterised, then I too would have to disagree with myself. It should always be possible for academics to explain how their researches intersect with the lives of the public. This does not entail a dumbing down of their actual researches.
Like I said in response to TR (perhaps you have read what I said) this isn’t a structural problem. The structures now exist for the public to do exactly what you have said they can do. The problem is that right now the public have little incentive to do it. As I suggested, this disinclination can be explained partly by philistinism, partly by media vilification of academia, and partly by the self-imposed non-communicativeness of academics.
BTW, humanities academics aren’t the only victims of media vilification.
Climate scientists have copped bigtime vilification from the media, especially from Murdoch’s media empire.
Katz @169:
I wasn’t trying to mischaracterise what you said, I was merely adding to the conversation.
While I agree with some of the structural problems you’ve identified, I disagree with you on this particular point: ‘It should always be possible for academics to explain how their researches intersect with the lives of the public.’
I don’t think that the object of the research in the humanities is to ‘intersect with the lives of the public’. This may sometimes be the case, but not always. I do, however, strongly support the idea of communicating results of any academic research to the public in as many formats and media as possible.
Tatyana:
I never said it should be the “object’ [your word] of academics to communicate their findings with the public.
You yourself have quoted my actual words:
“Object” implies compulsion. “Possible” means non-compulsory capability.
Most of the time the public would be utterly uninterested in what academics are saying to each other. But even the most recondite debates between academics are about the relative worth of opposing paradigms. And the fate of these paradigms are often very important for public culture.
An example of this struggle between paradigms is the ongoing debate about the nature of the French Revolution. Orthodox and revisionist historians have engaged in a long and fascinating debate about how the future should view the French Revolution. Over time, one of these paradigms will prevail and that victory will inevitably have an influence upon how societies, social groups and ideologists perceive themselves.
Yes, that’s an interesting point about the French Revolution. Reading about these ‘results’ over time offers a valuable perspective.
I must clarify what I meant by the ‘object’ of study in the humanities: I was referring to the ‘focus’ or the ‘field’ of research in the humanities (and this may or may not be accessible or relevant to the general reader, but if anyone’s interested in gaining access to original research as soon as it is made available to academic communities, via peer-review materials, these are now also much more easily available to the general public).
I agree with your other general points.
Greg, will you please stop stroking yourself? It’s appalling. And no matter how much you crow about your intellectual prowess, you aint getting an invitation to Paulus’s dinner party. You need more than a first, you need more than a prize. What makes you think that’s hot? However, if you let me turn you into Captain Peroxide like I offered, I can assure you the womens (and mens) would not keep their hands off your sparkly body. Don’t you want random people from the internet touching you all over? Come now, be reasonable. Neck biting has its consolations. You could sit at our luminary table of humanities and distract me from trying to choke FDB with Liam’s beret, for starters.
Please think about it.
I doubt this dinner party will need wine.
Re: Katz #156.
A minor point. Katz quotes Turner’s claim “Without proper support for the full range of disciplines, including the humanities, our higher education system will no longer demand international respect and the much vaunted national innovation system will simply fail” and says that this implies that “With proper support for the full range of disciplines, including the humanities, our higher education system will demand international respect and the much vaunted national innovation system will succeed”. But this is not the case. Turner’s claim simply states that proper support for tertiary education is a necessary condition for international respect and the success of the national innovation system. It does not follow from Turner’s claim, as Katz’s post suggests, that proper support for tertiary education is also a /sufficient/ condition for international respect and the success of the national innovation system. (Turner might well agree with Katz about the further need to deal with those other things Katz mentions.)
HuggyBunny @ 158
The problem is that you associate one journal for all of literary theory. Like Sokal, your research is completely flawed, so your anecdotal output cannot be accepted as remotely valid.
Not only that, like Sokal you admit to a priori bias in the matter.
Also as for basic physics, you may just want to shove your scientism up your arse. I’ve got a science degree.
Tyro Rex,
This is nothing personal.
I simply use Sokal etc as an example of the rot.
I think it also cuts both ways, many of the science and engineering graduates that I come across or work with have no knowledge at all of what we would call culture. They are ignorant, even of the history of their profession, one of the electronics PhD students I supervise had never heard of Fourier and was flat out remembering Maxwell.
One of the most serious problems that faces science and engineering is that most of the managers have come from some Humanities discipline (Horse management – for example). These guys are content free, have learned a few tricks when they did their MBA. See
http://www.hotcourses.com.au/australia/all-horse-management-undergraduate-courses-australia/ug-aus-all/dc-sh.712/order-cd-1/kw/courses.html
While Universities offer this stuff they will get no respect.
Huggy
Mercurius, don’t be a party pooper! I find my ability to recite from memory and do a version on the fly improves a great deal when I’ve had a glass or three.
In lieu of a physical dinner party, here is my contribution to a virtual one:
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2007/01/05/the-spectacle/
skepticlawyer @ 180,
Had a go at Catullus [sp.?] in First Year Latin. Some sort of free verse translation, which, of course, I don’t have. I think I’ve told the story here somewhere before of how the Latin class between 1 and 2 pm clashed with getting on the piss with me mates in the Bistro, so I dropped the former.
Paul, it is possible to combine the two
Indeed, piss and Catullus go together swimmingly well.
skepticlawyer @ 182,
Indeed. Wine and song are a poet’s prerogative.
I don’t know much about history…
‘Horse management’ is a humanities subject now?
Third year University of Queensland humanities students get to take the horses for a quick canter around the Great Court early in the morning three times a week.
@ Merc, sorry you didn’t get an invite, but I couldn’t think who to pair you with, keeping in mind the time-honoured principle that the number of ladies and gentlemen must be equal. But perhaps we could get Russell to put on a dress and be your partner!
@ Casey, GregM’s never gonna get an invite, cause he’s a pedant. I hasten to add I have nothing against pedants; indeed, when you watch two master pedants, like GregM and Katz, going at each other with no holds barred, it is a thing of rare beauty. But pedants don’t belong at dinner parties.
OK, enough with the facetious meta-commenting!
I am pessimistic about the chances of the humanities to obtain a bigger share of the pie from university administrations or government. Fundamentally, the humanities aren’t even using the same language. University admin and government talk in research outcomes and targets and productivity: all the concepts centred around quantifiable and tangible outputs.
This isn’t a ‘neo-liberal’ thing; it’s not a question of left vs right; it simply reflects the rise of professional management and quantitative methods.
I don’t think the humanities will be able to make any case for funding other than, ‘we teach X% of students, so we deserve X% of funding’. And even then, you won’t actually get X%, because of the attractions of new labs and particle accelerators, and all the other exciting shiny capital equipment used by other disciplines.
So, what to do? I would say: as far as possible, reduce dependence on government. In my discipline, history, many
people manage to reach an audience outside the academy and support research that way, at least partially. Popular writing, documentaries, TV, guided tours, consulting, and so on: I think these could be attempted more than they are.
Look at how Geoffrey Robertson took the dull world of law and made it exciting with his ‘Hypotheticals’. Why can’t a charismatic philosopher do something similar?
Brett,
I don’t know which third-rate CAE you got your degree in, but in every great world university, Horse Management is a central part of the humanities curriculum.
As skepticlawyer will confirm, the top students at Oxford take a three-part programme known as PPHM: Philosophy, Politics, and Horse Management. Prime Minister David Cameron is a graduate of this prestigious course.
Apropos of Paulus @ 187, I have no idea whether or not his work is academically respectable, but I reckon much of Clive James work is a paragon of how to get people interested in and engaged with you manatees.
I agree very much with the suggestions in Paulus’ last two pars. Popular history need not be bad history (people forget the Gibbon was very popular in his day). I should add that I have long aspired to do for law what Tim Harford does for economics. If it is possible to make the Dismal Science a thing of beauty and joy, then the same can be done for other disciplines.
On the other hand, if one has an arts degree from the good old days then the chances are high that one has read Gulliver’s Travels, from which one has learned that it’s the horses who are managing us.
*that Gibbon
Dyslexics of the World, Untie!
Re Don Wigan and Woodside, it seems that on one hand obscurantists, uneasy at a prospective ending of prelapsarian bliss in a sheltered pocket of twentieth century Australia (“there goes the neighborhood”), have found common cause with refugee activists who seee the move as a variation of the detention centre solution to boat people.
Wait up, wrong thread, how did I get here?
Am supposed to be over at tig tog’s saturday thread, sorry people!
Wrong again, compounding: Kym’s thread.
Yes, Gibbon is an great example of what I had in mind. So, to summarise my argument: it’s not hard, so let’s all do, the funky Gibbon (ooh, ooh, ooh).
Ah yes, horse management (or as we in the humanities prefer, equitational administration) – one of my favourites.
Actually I wanted to add an anecdote from my father who was once an officer in the Indian army. Horse training was obligatory for potential officers and each training session ended with the memorable order: ” make much of your horses!”
and now I suggest “make much of your humanist!”
Quite a lot of Humanities can and do quantify their research output. But it is a question of how it’s measured.
Back to my thesis.
Hah! Just found a reference to Foucault in a work of historiography on the Romans.
Also. this;
Quoted in and translated by Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, 2008.
(bold emphasis is my own)
Tyro Rex at #198, back to your thesis indeed. A thesis submitted and passed is a quantifiable unit.
Paulus — I am suitably chastened. I’ll think twice in future before commenting and revealing my ignorance!
If I wanted to know who to back at Randwick in race five, or indeed where to put my money in the Melbourne Cup, I’d go straight to those humanistic renaissance scholars Fine and Paul Norton. Just sayin’.
This isn’t exactly germane to the argument, but it’s obliquely relevant: file it under “Ways That A Humanities Education Can Make You Crazy, chapter MMCCCCXXVIII….”
The other day I was in a bookstore in Princeton, NJ and despite all the fine academic-style high-toned books (as well as some terrific reprints of the zany memoirs of Ludwig Bemelmans! “Cocofinger Palace Hotel”, indeed) I was gripped with an overwhelming desire, who knows why, to get my hands on a copy of “Measure for Measure” which I haven’t read in at least 15 years, probably much longer than that.
So I finally sat up last night and read it again.
For me, the big question when reading Shakespeare always boils down to “Yeah, sure, great — but how would you actually *do* it?” I never feel that I’ve really understood a play until I’ve done a whole production design in my head. In my view, the best way to interpret a Shakespeare play is a full-on production, not a dissertation. (It’s like that story about the unmade beds in Tales of the Hasidim.)
Measure for Measure always drove me crazy because a) I didn’t quite get it, except in an obvious moralistic way, b) I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and c) these two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
So last night I finally figured it out, by realizing a couple of basic things which maybe you PhD types have long known:
There’s a long umbilical cord which connects Measure for Measure to The Tempest, and this has complex implications;
Certain scenes (esp. the central one between Isabella and Claudio in the prison cell) anticipate the comedy of Chekhov, but in a Newtonian sort of way whereas Chekhov goes full-on Heisenberg;
and you can get away with having the sets made out of light, and nothing more — in fact that’s probably the best way. Paging Jennifer Tipton.
So now I know how to “do” it. Of course I’m busy right now, so it’ll just sit around in the back of my head and drive me crazy until I can get my hands on an empty garage and a bunch of lunatics again, which might take forever. Things the humanities can do to your head in just 358 incomprehensible pages.
p.s. I was also gripped with a desire to read “All’s Well That Ends Well” which I’d never read before, and now I know why — it’s incomprehensible bilge, probably the worst Shakespeare I’ve ever come across. Who knew?
Well, THAT certainly woke me up. I wonder what time it is?
…Apropos my earlier comment, here is my second (rather meatier) contribution to Paulus’ dinner party. Rather than clog up this thread, I thought it best to set out my ideas (and that, at this stage, is all they are) over at our place.
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/24/first-cut-is-the-deepest/
Update: Part Two.
@j_p_z: Which one? Labyrinth?
I’m not so sure about this dinner party.
I can’t shake the suspicion of an ulterior motive.
As a former humanities student, my big regret was doing humanities at all.
I spent 3 years in a cloistered academic environment listening to professors (most of whom had no practical experience outside the ivory tower) parrot their superiors (other professors) using overly complex language.
I had the good sense to quickly tack on a commerce degree before it was too late.