Humanities for the Wealthy / Labor for the Poor
For
some of us, the endless “crisis of the humanities” is mountain impossible. Efforts to climb and conquer it fail. Others deem the crisis to be no more than a
challenge. They adroitly climb and enjoy
the spectacular view from the summit.
The difference between success and failure is not skill. It is the possession of wealth needed to
change the conditions for climbing and resolving crisis.
When the Arts and Humanities Division at Harvard
University noticed a drop in the number of students who elect to major and
complete degrees in the humanities, it recognized an opportunity to examine reasons
for crisis. After a thorough survey of
the humanities in Harvard College, the undergraduate sector, from the 1960s to
the present, and a comparison with conditions at its peer institutions (Princeton
and Yale), the Division issued three reports in June 2013: “Mapping the Future, “ “In Brief: The
Teaching of the Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future, “ and “A View from the Mahindra
Humanities Center.” These reports are of
interest for the intelligence that informs them and for the recommendations
about a deeper investment in undergraduate teaching. Had similar reports about
the crisis of the humanities been issued by the University of Mississippi or
the University of Utah, they would probably have been accorded minimal
notice. But they came from the “magic”
deep pockets of Harvard. The public worship
of origins and the virtues of wealth in the United States do make a difference.
For
these reasons, the language and rhetorical strategies of the three reports
merit scrutiny. They actually say less that we can consider new or newsworthy than
the contextual ambience promises.
Time and again we have heard the language used, for
example, by the authors of “In Brief…” in Item V on recurrent binaries. Addressing
the uncritically assumed difference between Great Books and Popular Culture,
the writers assert that “We do not recognized the opposition, and instead feel
that we should only teach works that we think are great.” The socioeconomic
import of the pronoun “we” is chilling. The Harvard “we” reifies and essentializes
the rightness of power as a matter of normality rather than as a matter of
intention. We have the power to determine the strategic location of “opposition,”
and we can use the tactic of only teaching “works that we think are great.” The operative words here are we and great. We
is contextually well-defined or delimited.
Great is contextually undefined; it is messy and mysterious. The
linguistic boundaries evoked can segregate we from you and they. Few of us need a book entitled Ideology for Dummies to get the message.
The
voices in the three reports wear Prada from Milan not from New York as they
echo a few conclusions about the impoverished souls of today’s Harvard students
from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the
American Mind (1987). Once again, the
flawed dynamics of democracy are blamed for intellectual poverty. The blame is exquisitely masked in remarks
about the integrative potential of
the humanities in “A View from the
Mahindra Humanities Center,” the subaltern report written by Homi K. Bhabha. Nevertheless, Bhabha’s minority utterances
betray the hegemony of power as he proclaims:
The integrity of humanistic
disciplines lies in their ability to integrate a wide variety of human
experiences and articulate them as frameworks of scholarly knowledge. It is for this reason that the humanities
have an important pedagogical role to play within the university while
appealing more generally to an informed public beyond the campus (1). A segregative
white flag waves in the breeze. The informed public actually needs a pedagogy
that manufactures frameworks of utilitarian knowledge, but that need stands remotely outside the
purview of Harvard College in its desire to revitalize rigorous and critical teaching
for its undergraduates.
The
three reports do bring the past of Eurocentric great books and the specter of wealth
into the present, providing rueful
entertainments if we contrast how Harvard addressed the challenge of the
humanities with how Dillard University succumbed to the crisis of the
humanities within the past three years. Like Harvard, Dillard recognized that the
number of students who completed majors in the humanities (and the social
sciences) was steadily declining. Under
the leadership of Marvalene Hughes, financially impoverished Dillard murdered its
noteworthy tradition of the liberal arts and the humanities in a gamble that it
would be more successful by serving a population of millennial students
interested in STEM and mass communications. Who wins?
Who loses?
Dillard and its peers do not have the options
Harvard can afford, and their yet unwritten reports for such accrediting agencies
as SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) will likely articulate a pessimistic mapping
of a future. Robust, mind-nurturing humanities in higher education will
increasingly become the prerogative of wealth.
The poor, bereft of invigorating humanities instruction in classrooms, will
perhaps be given the option of reading the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics (1909) or the 54
volumes of the Great Books of the Western
World (1952). They will be trained to content themselves with the pleasures
of labor. Ah, humanity and humanities. Ah, America.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 21, 2013
