Many are the woes of academe. To enumerate, much less discuss, all of them would take up more space than I allot to my longest blogs. So I shall address the few which have manifested themselves in areas near to my studies and scholarship. English language and literature is my general field, with Shakespeare my specialty. After discovering and disclosing a grammatical error—isn’t that what you think English teachers do?—in one of my girlfriend’s favorite books, she, a little irritated, declared me “a fucking English PhD.” We laughed about it then and laugh about it still, but her jibe does raise questions, among many others, about the field of English, the merits of humanities, and their purposes in colleges and universities.
Whatever lofty language describes the purpose of colleges and universities, the fact is that their purpose has been almost exclusively vocational. From the beginning, in the tradition of England’s two oldest universities, Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209), Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) educated men to be priests or ministers. The later evolution of schools, up until about the mid-nineteenth century, expanded the curriculum to include law and medicine; then the humanities: philosophy, history, and (national) literature; then the sciences and engineering; then it was too late for Katy to bar the door. The Morrill Act (1862), which established land-grant universities, marks the shift in America. The founder of Cornell University (1865) declared, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
As late as the mid-1970s, most non-sectarian colleges and universities subscribed to the concept of a well-rounded education, at least in colleges of arts and sciences and often in vocational colleges. The concept was embodied in distribution requirements across major academic domains for the first two years of matriculation. One reaction to the Vietnam War was the erosion of those requirements; they are weakened or non-existent today. Ever since, with the emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and health, with their favorable reputation and higher salaries for graduates, the humanities have suffered, not only by scornful comparison, but also by shrinkage in enrollments, faculties, offerings, and budgets. In how many movies in the 70s and 80s were the inept identified as English majors?
In large part, with the rise of technical or professional studies, the humanities came to be seen as increasingly remote from the concerns of their times and pathways to remunerative careers. What could an English major contribute to questions of, say, foreign affairs or environmental policy? My parents were appalled when, the day in 1958 when I arrived at Cornell and was then enrolled in engineering physics, I said that I intended to transfer to arts and sciences. I did not want to make spaceships or nuclear weapons. Ironically, after my graduate studies, I became a consultant doing lots of defense work, some of it concerning Reagan’s SDI and nuclear weapons.
Ten years later, the humanities found themselves on the outside looking in on the social turmoil created by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements. Students who sought deferments from the draft entered graduate schools, brought their politics with them, and imposed their politics on the subject matter of their fields to make the humanities relevant, so they thought. But these politically motivated graduate students and their faculty sympathizers defeated themselves by a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Their politics were ideological templates for analysis and, worst of all, for class discussion and student grades—the teacher’s way or the highway. Yet they were not very good at politics. One distinguished professor wrote that Macbeth, who became king by force and fraud, was nevertheless legitimate because he had been formally declared so by a council of thanes ignorant of his conduct.
The humanities departments, especially English departments, brought upon themselves what ails their departments by trying to be relevant to selected domestic issues of public concern. Mission impossible. Political approaches to such issues are contrary to the nature and purpose of the humanities. Politics is about governance, its policies and practices, and the power to effect them; it seeks answers to public issues. The humanities are about human nature and human experience; they seek insights into the human condition and learn to appreciate others without necessarily approving what is learned. The idea, centuries old, is “that nothing human is alien to me.” Yet, for half a century, humanities departments have dedicated themselves to exploring the distribution and deployment of power by race, gender, or class—the fashionable triad of leftist issues, more the stuff of culture wars than major community concerns—and weakened the study of what people have thought, felt, and done in different cultures, times, or places—and disappointed many students.
Despite this distinction, I offer an instance showing that study in the humanities can provide insights into issues requiring answers. In 2003, almost no one doubted that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. The inference was that his refusal to let inspectors into the country meant that he had something to hide. I knew that the only thing which he had to hide was that he had no program. My reasoning: Hussein had domestic and foreign enemies; refusing inspectors created the impression that he had nuclear weapons; he used that impression to deter his enemies; he was bluffing. How did I know? I imagined myself in Hussein’s position as I had learned to do in analyzing characters in novels and plays. This instance does not imply that reading in the humanities is a sure, not to mention the only, way to such insights, but it can help. (Some CIA work assesses not only an enemy’s capabilities, but also its intentions, quasi-literary analysis of his decision-maker’s character and motives in the circumstances.)
The decline of English departments (and, I assume, other humanities departments) is not likely to be reversed simply by reforms in critical approaches and curriculum offerings; it will require help in promoting the idea of the humanities and the importance of educational well-roundedness. C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” made the humanities and the sciences appear adversarial. Snow was right to say that humanists need to know more about the sciences. He failed to say that scientists need to know more about the humanities, though many in his time did. In the early 40s of the Manhattan Project, scientists with a well-rounded education became increasingly alarmed about an atomic bomb as their work came closer to producing one, but, working in secret, they had no influence on decision-makers. It took the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to alert humankind of the threat of nuclear weapons. Today, a few computer scientists among thousands are warning that artificial intelligence might be dangerous by becoming capable of developing itself independently, perhaps without serving human interests or purposes. Unlike nuclear weapons, it is proliferating without the restraint of a dramatic incident to prompt restrictions on its development and deployment; its danger might be realized only when it might be too late to take corrective action. The humanities might contribute to public discussion of its possible threat to the stability, even the survival, of societies by the introduction of this and other, especially biomedical, technologies. To put it too starkly, today’s scientists understand the technologies but not the consequences; humanists understand the consequences but not the technologies. We need both and the ability of each to understand the other.
Which implies that colleges and universities need to return themselves to the older tradition which promotes well-roundedness. The concept is not hard to understand or difficult to implement; if there is a will, there will be a way. The problem is that leaders of colleges and especially universities have surrendered to a corporate mentality, not sustained their academic orientation. Too many regents or trustees are appointees with corporate backgrounds rewarded for campaign contributions and without experience in education and an appreciation of its unique nature. Chancellors and presidents are expected to play the politics of funding and thus, as we have seen recently, making their colleges and universities vulnerable to financial extortion. They have shown themselves submissive because they do not respect the distinctive role which colleges and universities play in the country’s welfare and thus lack the convictions required by courage to defend academic freedom, including the freedom to criticize the society in which they exist. If colleges and universities were committed to a well-rounded education, the various departments of technical studies might be almost equally involved with departments of humanistic studies in addressing issues of public moment.
The passivity of college and university leaders contrasts with the activism of students, mostly from the humanities. Indeed, the public’s perceptions of colleges and universities are largely shaped by the political activism more common in the humanities than in the sciences. Student protests involve controversial subjects not widely shared by the public, but they can prevail, as they did during the Vietnam War. Whatever else might be said about the protests about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, they constituted a threat to the Trump administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Using antisemitism as a pretext but lacking funding leverage on the humanities, the Trump administration has attacked scientific research programs by withholding their funds in a roundabout way to attack the humanities. It knows that the source of criticism of its policies, programs, and practices most commonly arise in departments promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anything which appears to be “woke” (whatever they mean by the term). So it seeks to control college and university policies and practices in enrollments, curriculums, and instruction, with the humanities being the primary targets. If more of the public itself had received a well-rounded education, it might have a greater appreciation not only of the humanities, but their benign influence on thinking about current issues of public concern.
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