Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Utility and Markets

Eleonora Belfiore, Anna Upchurch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137361356
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This collection of essays by scholars with expertise in a range of fields, cultural professionals and policy makers explores different ways in which the arts and humanities contribute to dealing with the challenges of contemporary society in ways that do not rely on simplistic and questionable notions of socio-economic impact as a proxy for value.

Part I

The Humanities and Their ‘Impact’

Introduction

The two chapters that make up this section act as an introduction to the general issues explored in the book as a whole and thus play a scene-setting function for this varied collection of contributions. Eleonora Belfiore’s chapter, entitled ‘The “Rhetoric of Gloom” v. the Discourse of “Impact” in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock?’ offers a critical account of the apparently contradictory nature of the growing body of writing on ‘the state of the humanities today’. The chapter identifies two main groups of publications. One is the wealth of books, articles, and pamphlets that have been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, which explore the perceived crisis of the humanities in contemporary society, both within and outside of the academy. These works lament the demise of interest in and commitment to the study of the arts and humanities, and some even suggest that their very extinction might in fact be imminent.

In the second group of publications, Belfiore observes that a different set of arguments, centred on bold and even exorbitant declarations of the impact and utility of the arts and humanities on the national economy and the health of wider society, have flourished over the past twenty or thirty years. Declarations of the benefits that accrue from the cultivation of the humanities began to burgeon precisely around the time in which the humanities were at their most beleaguered and were fretting over matters of survival in an increasingly marketised higher education sector, with the attendant popularity of more applied, business-oriented areas of study among university students, who are preoccupied with questions of employability.

Belfiore suggests that the two strands of writing are in fact more tightly connected than they might look at a first glance, for the positive rhetoric of socioeconomic impact has its reason d’être in the anxious attempt to provide a compelling ‘case for the arts and humanities’ at the greatest time of their perceived crisis. Belfiore suggests that both the ‘rhetoric of gloom’ and the ‘discourse of impact’, therefore, share the same troubled origin and point equally to the great challenges the humanities face today:

a.an image problem linked to widespread perception of humanities scholarship as dry and aloof erudition, expressed in obscure language and bearing little relation to the actual concerns of those (the majority) not familiar with abstruse French theories;

b.the charge of ‘uselessness’, moved to the humanities, that inevitably follows from the problem of poor public perception; and

c.the consequent confidence problem.

Dr Jan Parker’s reflection acknowledges these challenges; as a classicist, a humanities teacher, and the editor of academic journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Parker confronts the reality described by Belfiore daily. In Chapter 2, ‘Speaking Out in a Digital World: Humanities Values, Humanities Processes,’ Parker provides a detailed analysis of the sort of questions and challenges that humanists worldwide are facing, with a particular emphasis on the need for engagement with the realm of the digital. The chapter canvasses the range of discourses and defences that are being worked on by humanists in response to the need to ‘make the case’ for the value of their work – from the pragmatic and evidence-based claims of ‘utility’, to the aggressive distinguishing of the humanities from other agendas, disciplinary domains, and methodologies, to the global, value-laden, idealistic attempts to articulate why the humanities matter today. Parker’s conclusion is that we must develop and use the whole range of these arguments. In particular, practicing humanists must exemplify the skills that the humanities claim to develop and hone – including communication skills and narrative and rhetorical skills – to address the various audiences and interest groups that the humanities need to influence if they are to survive and flourish.

1

The ‘Rhetoric of Gloom’ v. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock?

Eleonora Belfiore

Times of financial hardship are always especially difficult for the arts and humanities, within academia and outside, for it is in periods of austerity and contraction in public funding that the spiky question of the ‘value of the humanities’ raises its ugly head, demanding at least robust engagement, if not a final resolution capable of satisfying, once and for all, those who see arts and humanities education as self-indulgent frills to be forgone in times of financial restraint. Being accustomed to be called upon to justify their existence in the curriculum and their claims on the public purse, arts and humanities scholars and practitioners at these times usually have feelings of being beleaguered, undervalued, and misunderstood, or even ‘under fire’ (Pinxten 2011).

Considering the apparent cyclical nature of recessions and financial crises – and the funding cuts and drastic policy reforms that usually accompany them – it should perhaps not be surprising that a lively rhetoric of doom and gloom should run through so much of both older and contemporary literature on the state of the humanities. A brief review of the field yields the expected results, even when restricting, for reasons of space, our backward glance to the postwar era. The collection of essays edited by English historian J. H. Plumb in 1964 with the title Crisis in the Humanities sets the scene nicely, and gives a taste of what is to come. In the decades since the 1960s, anxiety over the perceived loss of credibility and the negative image of the humanities has been growing consistently in the West, and numerous scholars have recently been reflecting on the ‘dangers’ facing the humanities (Menand 2005) and their perceived ‘uselessness’ (Bérubé 2003). They have been pondering ‘the fate of the humanities’ (Hohendahl 2005) and painting a picture of the ‘humanities in ruins’ (Szeman 2003).

The hardship faced by the humanities in higher education institutions in the West (and especially in the United States) from the 1990s onwards is also a recurring theme (Bérubé and Nelson 1995). A quick literature search, therefore, would encourage one to agree with Louis Menand (2005: 11) when he suggests, ‘It is possible to feel that one of the things ailing the humanities today is the amount of time humanists spend talking about what ails the humanities’. American scholar Geoffrey Galt Harpham has argued that ‘the perennial crisis in the humanities’ is ‘one of the most stubborn dilemmas in higher education’ (Harpham 2011: 21); he suggests that the causes for this state of affairs might have to do with societal and cultural changes beyond the academy:

Sometimes the crisis – whose dimensions can be measured in terms of enrolments, majors, courses offered, and salaries – is described as a separate and largely self-inflicted catastrophe confined to a few disciplines; sometimes it is linked to a general disarray in liberal education, and sometimes to the moral collapse and intellectual impoverishment of the entire culture. (Ibid.: 21–22)

Whatever its cause might be attributed to, Harpham’s final verdict on the present state of the humanities is that, ‘Once considered an affliction, crisis has become a way of life’ (ibid.: 22). The English literature scholar Thomas Docherty (2011) identifies the underlying problem as a ‘culture of mistrust’ that has developed around the institution of the university as a whole. This mistrust, he argues, has a long history and is thus deep-seated in contemporary society, going well beyond the characterisation popularised in some parts of the press of ‘arts or humanities intellectuals as dangerous subversives plotting against ordinary lives’ (ibid.: 1). Unsurprisingly, then, some have even wondered whether we should simply bid ‘farewell to the humanities’ on account of the ‘collapse’ of their very raison d’être (Wang 2005).

The volume of publications dissecting, analysing, and critiquing the present state of the university and the disciplines within it has reached such a peak over the past twenty years that Jeffrey J. Williams (2012), professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, has recently suggested on the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education that it amounts, arguably, to a new field of study, that of ‘critical university studies’. This new field has contributors from a range of disciplines, although Williams argues that a significant proportion originates from literary and cultural critics. The qualification of ‘critical’ here refers to the largely oppositional nature of this new body of writing:

Much of it has condemned the rise of ‘academic capitalism’ and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt. (Williams 2012)

The tone of the publications that make up this new ‘genre’ ostensibly corroborates the point made by Stefan Collini in a recently published and much cited book, What Are Universities For? (2012), in which he reflects upon the broader question of the condition of the university as a public institution, as well as the more specific one of the status of arts and humanities scholarship within it. In the book, Collini suggests that ‘in present circumstances, any invitation to characterize the work of scholars in the humanities is almost immediately construed as a demand to justify it’ (61). Collini attributes this peculiarity of the debate surrounding the academic humanities to ‘an inescapable element of defensiveness in all attempts to vindicate one’s activity – an assumption that the demand issues from unsympathetic premises and an anticipation of resistance or dismissiveness on the part of those who do not share our starting-points’ (ibid.). What makes this state of affairs problematic is the fact that ‘justification involves some kind of appeal to shared values’ (ibid.: 84), so that the collapse of consensus over such values is precisely why the humanities are constantly expected to make the case for the value of their very existence and continued financial support on the part of the state.

The challenge of making the case in a context of financial austerity and an unsympathetic government has acquired dramatic prominence in Britain, following radical reforms in the way teaching in the higher education system is funded. In December 2010 the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government, elected in May of that year, put to a vote in Parliament a new set of measures and cuts to block grants for teaching allocated to higher education institutions in England.¹ As a consequence of these measures, all funding to arts, humanities, and social sciences teaching was cut. The new policy was a result of the ‘Browne Report’ of 2010, which set out a series of highly controversial policy recommendations, which the government eventually endorsed and implemented. Such a fast and sudden policy change, which effectively turned higher education into a ‘lightly regulated market’² (Collini 2012: 178), has given rise to what sociologist John Holmwood (2011: 1) refers to as ‘the perception, in the United Kingdom, of a crisis in the idea of the public university’.³ It is important to note that whilst the perception that Holmwood refers to here has been indeed widely felt in the sector, this is not the only possible interpretation of the educational reforms, which indeed were widely supported by vice-chancellors and senior university management. For instance, Sir Robert Burgess, vice-chancellor of the University of Leicester, upon publication of the Browne Report, commented that ‘Lord Browne’s recommendations are comprehensive and fair’, and Patrick McGhee, then vice-chancellor of the teaching-intensive University of East London reacted with similar enthusiasm:

The Browne review marks the end of a two-tier system that until now has disadvantaged part-time students. It signals the start of a new, modern era of higher education that promotes opportunity, flexibility, quality and the crucial role of part-time in delivering future economic growth and social mobility.⁴

Things, of course, are more complicated than press releases usually indicate, and Sir Steve Smith’s (2011) reflection on the process that led to the Brown Review – which will be discussed later in this chapter – indicates that senior HE leaders saw the Browne Report as a not ideal but acceptable proposition, in the face of the challenges to higher education in times of austerity. Whilst it is important to acknowledge this split of opinion in the assessment of the Browne Report and its implications for the sector, it is fair to say that the predominant response among academic staff has been one of dismay, as well documented in the literature reviewed here and in the Introduction to this volume. It is the widely shared perception that the 2010 education reform in England took a particularly heavy toll on the arts and humanities that is interesting for the purpose of the discussion on hand.

Furthermore, as the arts and humanities, alongside the social sciences and other non-lab-based areas of teaching, saw their funding for teaching cut altogether, these developments compounded the already long-standing feeling among humanities teachers and researchers that the new measures revealed a lack of perceived value in arts and humanities teaching, giving rise among many to the impression that they are now seen as an ‘optional extra’ (Collini 2012: 187).⁵

‘Impact’ and the rhetoric of great expectations

In light of these widespread symptoms of malaise and perception of beleaguerment, it might seem surprising – and most definitely contradictory, at least prima facie – that the past ten years should have seen the rise, in parallel to this flourishing rhetoric of doom and gloom, of a more positive (if often instrumental) idiom in debates surrounding higher education policy and funding. According to this alternative view, which has been embraced – in Britain and beyond – by governments and research funding bodies, the humanities have a contribution to make to the national economy (by virtue of their natural affinity with the cultural and creative industries) to the social cohesion of the country and to the policy-m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Reframing the ‘Value’ Debate for the Humanities
• Part I   The Humanities and Their ‘Impact’
• Part II   Utility v. Value
• Part III   The Humanities and Interdisciplinarity
• Part IV   Meaning Making and the Market
• Part V   Digitisation, Ethics, and the Humanities
• Index