Humanities in a Time of Crisis
Steven Knapp
President, The George Washington University
December 3, 2009

Five years ago, the Association of American Universities issued a comprehensive report titled Reinvigorating the Humanities: Enhancing Research and Education on Campus and Beyond.  The report opens with an analysis of the challenges facing university-based work in the humanities, from doubts about its utility to the effects of the “culture wars,” to low levels of student participation in humanities majors compared to business and professional fields, especially if one looks beyond the relatively narrow universe of selective institutions.  Without quite endorsing the notion that the humanities are in crisis, the authors note that these factors are viewed in that light by many observers, and then go on to remark, a bit sardonically, “With current economic and world crises filling public consciousness, the crisis in the humanities pales a bit” (p. 4). 

Well, if that was true in 2004, how pale must any crisis in the humanities look today!  In fact, hearing that reference to “economic and world crises,” you may have wondered what the authors could possibly have had in mind; in 2004, the economic crisis now gripping the world was not yet a twinkle in the eye of the most dire practitioners of the dismal science.  If it was hard to get a hearing for the plight of the humanities in 2004, how much harder to be heard above the din of anxious voices that warn of a depression unlike anything the world has seen for some seven decades?  How can one even utter the word “humanities” these days without being accused of fiddling while not just Rome but Rome and all its far-flung provinces burn?  To make the case in a time like this will require an unusual combination of boldness and tact.

The timing is unfortunate, in part because we have never been better equipped to make the case for the need for public as well as private support for the humanities if this core component of the nation’s intellectual and cultural heritage is to flourish.  For instance, thanks to the assiduous efforts of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, we now have the Humanities Indicators Prototype.  In Introducing the Humanities Indicators, the prototype is described as the first data set of its kind, containing “74 indicators and more than 200 tables and charts, providing broad-based, quantitative information about areas of concern in the humanities community” (p. 3).  It is now easier than ever before to put hard numbers behind subjective impressions, for instance, of declining knowledge of history on the part of high school graduates.  At the same time, there are some encouraging trends, including an increase in the number of high school students who do advanced work in foreign languages. 

When it comes to comparative levels of federal funding for advanced work in the humanities on our college and university campuses, however, the picture is not even modestly promising.  Here the results are aptly summarized by Alan Brinkley, who notes “a dangerous decline in both absolute and relative support for research across most areas of humanistic scholarship.”  He points out the truly vast difference between funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities on one hand and both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

And in fact the disparity he describes has grown even wider.  The Fiscal Year 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act now working its way through Congress contains $30.3 billion for the NIH, $6.5 billion for the NSF, and only $155 million for the NEH.  But those numbers don’t include the additional funds for the next two years in the Economic Stimulus Bill that Congress has already passed: $10 billion for the NIH — again, this is on top of the $30.3 billion in the omnibus bill — $3 billion for the NSF, and zero for the NEH.

Nor do those numbers, striking as they are, tell the whole story about the lack of public support for advanced study in the humanities.  As Brinkley notes, support for humanities research accounts for “only a little over 13 percent of the NEH program budget, or about $15.9 million.  Most of the money supports a wide range of worthy activities,” with “the largest single outlay” going to “operating grants for state humanities councils, which disburse their modest funds mostly for public programs and support of local institutions.”  In short, Brinkley concludes, “Government spending for the humanities, modest to begin with, goes overwhelmingly to projects that are at best loosely linked to scholarly research” (p. 55).

That phrase “at best loosely linked” applies to the situation in more ways than one.  It isn’t just that what the government funds is only loosely linked with humanities research; our greatest challenge in attracting public support for, or even attention to, humanities research is the difficulty of establishing more than a very loose — indeed, a highly tenuous, problematic, and controversial — link between what humanities scholars do and the kinds of benefits that legislators and policymakers seek.  Brinkley remarks at one point, “Academic humanists correctly argue that their work is of great importance to the larger world, as a source of values and knowledge that is of both moral and practical importance” (p. 54).  Note his use of the adverb correctly.  I suspect that everyone agrees that humanists argue correctly that their work is important; correctly — but convincingly?

Here I think it’s worth pausing to note the special challenges involved in making a persuasive case today for public investment in the humanities.  We have now reached a point where every dime Congress spends that does not have a directly stimulating effect on the economy is seen as adding to the rapidly mounting burden of debt that our children and grandchildren must bear, and that will conceivably choke off the long-term viability of the recovery that everyone assures us will begin at some point (perhaps one year; perhaps five!).  The case for the humanities was always hard to make, but now we face an audience that is less patient, more skeptical, and no less ready to score points against perceived elitism than the one we were addressing a year ago.  Given that context, what argument should we be making, this year even more urgently than in the past?

The least promising approach, it seems to me, although one that appeals to humanists who are understandably envious of the largesse enjoyed by their colleagues in other fields, is to point to the ways in which advanced humanistic work either is, or might become, more like work in the sciences, and may even be necessary for the sciences to deliver the social benefits they promise.  I will mention two examples of the sort of science envy — or, to label it more positively, science emulation — that seems to me to point humanities advocates in the wrong, or at least not in an entirely helpful, direction.

First, there is the claim that advanced work in the humanities is essential to the development and/or preservation of a culture of innovation.  I don’t mean to suggest that this claim is untrue, but I also don’t know how to state it in a form that will convince even a moderately skeptical audience.  Not everyone agrees that study of the humanities actually does possess this innovation-enhancing role.  After all, for every English, History, or Religious Studies major who went on to found a high-tech company or to invent a “killer app,” one can find others who never majored in anything at all.  And who knows whether the comparative creativity and flexibility of U.S. engineers is really a function of their exposure to the one or two humanities courses they may take to fulfill their distribution requirements, rather than to the fluidity — at least until recently — of the U.S. financial system, or the habit of questioning authority and received wisdom that is built into American culture and reflected to one degree or another at all levels of U.S. education?

But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that someone has devised a methodology that demonstrates the beneficial effects of exposure to the humanities on the creativity of engineers.  How would that justify the kind of investment in advanced research — in serious and extended works of scholarship and in the rigorous training of graduate and post-graduate investigators — that so sharply distinguishes public investments in the sciences from those in the humanities?

A second version of science emulation is evident in efforts to make humanities research less narrowly discipline-bound and more broadly and actively cross-disciplinary.  The model here is the kind of multi-disciplinary, often multi-institutional big science project that figures so visibly in funding decisions by NASA, the Department of Defense, NIH, or the NSF, including, for instance, the NSF’s Engineering Research Centers.  Perhaps, the thinking goes, humanities scholars can make a case for at least a fraction of such support if they mount compelling projects that bring together scholars of literature, history, art history, and philosophy for conferences and courses on subjects in which their interests overlap. 

But here’s the problem.  When scientists and engineers work together, it’s usually clear at the outset what problems they are trying to solve, what specific questions they are trying to answer, and why the answers depend on the contributions of the different disciplines they represent.  For instance, to take one current example from my own institution, one wants to understand the electrophysiological events that cause ventricular fibrillation, a type of cardiac arrhythmia that kills nearly a thousand Americans every day.  So one brings together physicians and engineers from a range of subspecialties to build the computational models and the monitoring equipment needed to find the answers.  Although new directions of inquiry and the need for additional experts will no doubt emerge along the way, everyone knows from the outset the kind of contribution that each specialist is expected to make, and why that contribution is required for the success of the project as a whole.

Again, what is strikingly different about the humanities case, especially when contrasted with the scientific one, is the absence in the former of even the slightest expectation that the combined efforts of these particular disciplines will yield a solution to some clearly namable and definable problem.  The point isn’t that the humanities groups are less serious or successful than their science and engineering counterparts; its rather that they have an entirely different structure and function.  Their role is not to solve a problem or to answer a particular question but to illuminate the topic; to deepen and at the same time complicate our understanding of it; to advance the conversation about it; to open new and unanticipated avenues of reflection and inquiry into this topic and those to which it may turn out to be suggestively related.

Their role, in other words, is not forensic, diagnostic, pragmatic, or therapeutic.  Their role is humanistic.  And that, in a time of crisis, is the problem.

So now consider a very different way of defending the relevance of the humanities: emphasizing their role in developing a democratic citizenry by fostering moral sensitivity, practical wisdom, and the skills and habits essential to the conduct of rational, civil, deliberative debate.  One can always find examples like the concentration camp commandant who was a reader of Goethe and a lover of Mozart, and in that sense it is surely right to stress the role of serendipity in bringing about whatever actual effect an exposure to complex texts and multiple points of view may have on any particular student.  On balance, however, it’s hard to doubt that a student who has been trained in forming, articulating, discussing, and revising interpretations of any complex social or cultural phenomenon will be better prepared to participate in public life than he or she otherwise would be. 

The fundamental disconnect that we advocates for the humanities have so far not succeeded in overcoming, the perceptual gap we have not yet figured out how to close.  No one really doubts that American society is better off with a vital awareness of its intellectual, cultural, and historical past than it would be if it were locked in a permanent, stultifying amnesia.  And no one will doubt, on reflection, that even local museums are better able to preserve that awareness if they are informed by the best available sources of expertise regarding whatever part of our collective past they are dedicated to keeping alive.  But the experts themselves are mostly hidden from public view, sequestered in the academy, precisely as they must be if they are to have the time and the exposure to teachers, colleagues, and students that they need to become experts in the first place and then to keep their expertise alive. 

How, then, do we close the gap?  Not, I think, by emulating the sciences or claiming a moral or practical wisdom we cannot reliably deliver.  In fact, I doubt we will close the perceptual gap with any kind of philosophical or economic argument, no matter how amply documented by the latest statistics.  (The one exception may be the economic argument that investing in the humanities is cheaper than investing in just about anything else!) What we must bring to the table is not an argument at all but a certain kind of exemplification, a bringing to life and not just a description of the way advanced and organized curiosity revitalizes the past and makes it available to students and the public alike.

“Exemplification” sounds abstract, but what I really have in mind is something very simple: we have to put the legislators and policymakers directly in touch with, immediately in the presence of, the persons who themselves most powerfully exemplify the role of advanced and organized curiosity in making and keeping the nation’s heritage alive.  We could do far worse, I think, than simply taking our best graduate students with us to the halls of Congress, where they can display their passionate and contagious curiosity about their subjects — their excitement about what it’s like to engage in the kind of reflection that, as Fish writes, “poses problems and teases them out to their edges.”  And if you don’t have graduate students, or don’t have any with you, then you could do far worse than to exemplify that excitement yourself, and to invite your Congressional interlocutors to share it.  The truth is that, if you do it right, they will enjoy the experience, and they may even appreciate the respect you have shown them by inviting them to participate in what matters so much to you.  And that experience of participating in what fascinates you or your students will be far more likely than any argument to make the case that the vitality of a nation’s relation to its past really does depend on the robust cultivation of advanced expertise.

This guest perspective is an abridged version of a speech that President Knapp delivered to the National Humanities Alliance on March 10, 2009