A rchive Date
[ 08-03-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Education ]
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[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=030806B
Autumn of the Humanities
By Uriah Kriegel: 10 Mar 2006
We have recently witnessed something of a debate on the "science gap" between American universities and the rest of the world. We did not witness, however, any debate on the state of humanities in American universities. This is not because "all is well" in the world of the humanities. On the contrary, they are in a much sorrier state than anything imaginable in the sciences. It is just that the humanities have been satisfied with the status quo, and their decline has remained opaque to themselves.
Over the past couple of decades, the humanities have been taken over by a very distinctive trend. One aspect of this trend is the proliferation of mini and crossdisciplines, such as AfricanAmerican Studies, Women Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and media studies. These disciplines have been founded on the premise that some aspects of our understanding of the world have been filtered through the mainstream of society and history, thus missing out the perspective of traditionally marginalized groups: blacks, women, gays, etc.
The premise is correct, and in principle could have led to a greater and better understanding of phenomena traditionally perceived solely through mainstream lenses.
But in practice research in these disciplines has been conducted by and large by angry people bent on exposing the manifold fashions by which the mainstream has oppressed the margins: in essence, how heterosexual white men have oppressed and delegitimized all other perspectives. That is, these disciplines have become platforms for people who are fundamentally interested more in changing the world than understanding it. To be sure, changing the world is as worthy a cause as any. But it is not a cause that necessarily coincides with the advancement of knowledge.
Another facet of the same trend is the changing complexion of research within the traditional disciplines, such as history, literary criticism, political science, and the like.
A typical study coming out of a talented young historian nowadays would make an impressive case for the proposition that, say, women were mistreated under the Ottoman Empire. Archives the world over would be carefully and competently scrutinized, the existing literature would be surveyed intelligently and diligently, and the opinions of established experts would be consulted extensively and skillfully.
Only one problem: of course women were mistreated under the Ottoman Empire - everybody knows that - and you don't need a 800page volume to get it. Commonsense and elementary knowledge of human history would suffice to make that deduction. Again, the fixation with highlighting historical oppression comes at the expense of actually gaining new knowledge.
The trend was set by a cluster of ideas emanating mainly out of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These philosophers' work is often subtle and insightful (more so in Foucault's case), but that of their herds of followers rarely is, and can be summarized by two complementary principles: look for the power structure, and do not indulge in fantasies of "objective truth."
You want to understand why astronomers refer to certain phenomena as "black holes"? Look to the astronomers' bosses' skin color and forsake any notion that this may somehow have to do with the intrinsic properties of the phenomena in question.
The two "principles" have thus spawned an entire generation of studies that amount to little more than nonsense. Worse, they have propelled a fundamental change in attitude toward nature and the spirit of research among our academics, supplanting the basic wonder at the world that animated previous generations of scholars with a ubiquitous and deepseated cynicism. If everything is power and nothing is truth, such a change in attitude was inevitable.
Our universities have a double function, involving not only research, but also teaching. The correlate of the above trends on the teaching side of academic function has been the transformation of our universities from institutions of education to institutions of certification. Few students in a regular humanities class are motivated by curiosity and the desire to learn and understand. It's hard to blame them: they lack role models who do. In the absence of such motivation, the only rationalization they can make of their need to sit in classrooms for four years is the prize at the end of the road: the practical dividends of holding a BA, preferably from a top university.
Lawrence Summers, Harvard's outgoing president, understood all that. He understood that the advancement of knowledge across the humanities has been systematically sacrificed on the altar of what is essentially a political agenda, as have been the traditional incentives of wonder at the world, fascination with its inner working, and the determination to understand them all.
His first display of "insensitivity" at Harvard was his confrontation with Cornell West a brilliant man producing worthless work over the question of just what West has contributed to our knowledge and understanding in the past decade. That confrontation sent shockwaves throughout the humanities. A threat has presented itself to the status quo, in which a simple formula guarantees a lifetime of comfort within the walls of academia, namely: find an instance of oppression the details of which have yet to be thoroughly canvassed and documented then canvass and document them thoroughly. From that moment, Summers was doomed. There are simply too many interests at play, and too many interested parties, for a single man to overhaul the state of the humanities in American academe.
What can be done about this state of affairs? There is no easy answer... and quite possibly no answer at all. As long as upper middle class parents are happy to fork over forty thousand dollars for a year of oppression studies at Harvard, the status quo will go unperturbed. Read: as long as consumers collude with providers, what they consume will be certification, not education.
Uriah Kriegel teaches philosophy at the Universities of Arizona and Sydney.
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