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Should the Humanities be saved?

by Lynne Rudder Baker

IT'S NO NEWS that relations between universities and the public are at an all-time low. The professoriate, especially, has been under fire in recent years. Beginning in 1987 with

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, we've been treated to a barrage of books with such titles as ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education and Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education.

These attacks have resulted in an erosion of public confidence in the entire enterprise of higher education in America, but perhaps especially in the humanities such fields as history, classics, and literary and religious studies, along with my own discipline of philosophy. The erosion is sufficiently advanced that the question, "Should the humanities be saved" should we continue to promulgate and extend these bodies of knowledge? is a serious one. And while we in the academy should own up to faults and shortcomings and move to address them, it is dangerous to allow false and misleading statements to go unchallenged.

At present, it seems to me, at least three major, external threats demand attention and require response. These include a public-opinion threat reflected in the general broadsides against higher education; a "market-model" threat embodied in economic and cultural forces that devalue the humanities; and an intellectual threat issuing from popular conceptions of science, especially of Darwinian biology.

WIDESPREAD MISCONCEPTIONS OF what actually transpires on campuses may underlie this threat, but Mellon Foundation secretary Richard H. Ekman put it mildly when he recently referred to a public mood "undeniably critical of higher education" and dominated by such issues as "the perception that faculty spend too little time in the classroom."

Since it is unseemly to trot out the ways in which faculties work hard, the oft-heard charges that we are pampered, selfish, and lazy go largely unanswered. But repetition breeds credulity. Recently the chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, James F. Carlin, pronounced faculties "overpaid and underworked" to an approving audience of members of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. In the face of this perception of professors as social parasites, I want to defend them as contributors to the public good.

First, consider time in class. History, literature, and philosophy are not set bodies of fact to be delivered like canned goods to each new class. It takes hours to fully understand a text in the humanities, more hours to prepare a lecture on it. If you are at all conscientious, you don't just stand up and decant the conventional wisdom, or your own last year's lecture, on Machievelli, Raphael, or Kant; you offer a fresh perspective. Depending on what you are teaching, and at what level, six hours in the classroom can easily require thirty hours of preparation.

Would anyone suppose that Dan Rather works only two and a half hours a week, because that's all the time he's on the air? It is equally mistaken to assume that time devoted to teaching is limited to time spent in front of a class. Planning courses, preparing assignments, reading and commenting on papers, grading, advising: these activities, which students have a right to expect from us and which even those of us with graduate assistants perform, take enormous amounts of time. We all could spend more time in the classroom, but not without serious cost to our value as teachers.

And teaching is not the only work we do. Almost all university professors of a certain age engage in professional service: the equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce for the academic professions. If everyone stopped doing these things, the professions would collapse. (Then we really would have no standards.) In addition, we have departmental duties: the supervisory committee, the admissions committee, the curriculum committee, the speakers committee, the placement committee and so forth. Even perhaps particularly in the best-run departments, these necessarily take a lot of time.

"What is ironic is that the mounting criticism of faculty and their work loads does not comport with the facts," wrote Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teachers College, last year. "The realities are these: Faculty members are working longer, not shorter hours. The first study of faculty work load, conducted in 1919, found that professors worked 46.8 hours a week. Research in the 1970s showed roughly the same length for a faculty week (44 hours). By 1992 that number had risen to 53 hours. Faculty at research universities worked the longest week (56 hours) and those at two-year colleges worked the shortest (47 hours)."

Moreover, the responsibilities of a university professor are not limited to teaching, professional service, and departmental duties. We want to be, and are expected to be not just disseminators of information and maintainers of institutions, but discoverers and creators of knowledge. Let me address here the so-called "summer vacations," about which there is considerable resentment. Yes, summers are nice; you structure your own time. But they are also many professors' most productive time of year. Without summers and sabbaticals, there would be no fresh thought in the classroom, no new courses, no research, no books no original contributions to knowledge. Most professors I know work through the summer, taking two-week vacations just like our friends in the business world.

There is also, of course, the issue of the worth of these contributions. "At least 50 percent of all non-hard-sciences research on American campuses is a lot of foolishness," Chairman Carlin has said. It is difficult to know where to begin to respond to such an approach to scholarship. But surely, the dissimilarity between discovery in the humanities about the nature of linguistic reference, say and in the sciences about, say, the rings of Saturn should not suggest to us that nothing worthwhile is discovered or created in the humanities.

I think that negative attitudes about humanities research derive in part from misrepresentations in the popular media. As represented in the press, humanities departments have fallen into disarray, with traditionalists struggling to embalm "the canon" and postmodernists, deconstructionists, and feminists struggling to demolish it. In my experience, these are straw struggles in which few are actually involved. Most academics recognize that the traditional canon is not sacrosanct, and consider its expansion a good thing. Most also consider it self-defeating to suppose that reason and logic are sources of oppression cunningly devised by dead white males.

In my opinion, the controversies labeled "the culture wars" have been overblown. While there have been painful episodes, on the whole the new kinds of inquiry are more salutary than destructive. The fresh intellectual breezes stirred by feminists, African Americans, and others expand our understanding of justly canonized white male European thinkers. Last year at UMass I attended a remarkable conference on seventeenth-century women philosophers and their recently unearthed writings. Knowledge of the tradition was enriched; nothing was lost. It is difficult to see how anyone could consider research on Elisabeth of Bohemia or Sor Juana de La Cruz a waste of time. What about research on the development of the sonata form? The role of the chorus in Sophocles? The causes of the English Civil War?

One defense of scholarly endeavor in the humanities is that it improves teaching, and no doubt it does. But relevance to teaching is not the only justification for research. What draws people to these disciplines? Certainly not high salaries, compared to what they could earn elsewhere. UMass has produced philosophy Ph.D.s who were unable to secure good positions in the academy but became wealthy in the fields of technology, investment banking, or law. So what does attract us to teaching the humanities at the college level? The company of post-adolescents? Maybe, but more likely the love of learning, the thrill of finally getting an argument straight, the satisfaction of contributing to a tradition that harks back to Plato, Thucydides, and Homer.

Finally, there is the public-opinion issue of tenure, which critics have called "an absolute scam." I agree that tenure is a flawed arrangement. No doubt there are tenured professors who do not work very hard, who do not exert themselves in the multiple ways that I have described; but there are not many of them. Recall the evidence that the number of hours worked by faculty members has actually increased since 1919. Most professors, at every level, work hard. In any case, I see no way to debate tenure except in comparison with a proposed alternative. The most frequently proposed (and used) alternative is to hire part-timers.

Yes, part-timers are cheaper, and they keep the institution flexible: With mostly part-timers, a college could disband its history department if it wanted to.

But, as even critics of tenure concede, a university that abolished it would have difficulty attracting top faculty, and that would surely affect its quality as well as its stature. And tenure gives stability to a department and an institution: it is in part to revisit old mentors that graduates return in later years. At this point, my attitude toward tenure is the same as Winston Churchill's toward democracy: It's the worst system we have except for all the others that have been thought of.


I HAVE BEEN WRITING AS if intellectual excellence were actually a goal of higher education. That assumption is questionable at least for public higher education, which is increasingly viewed in terms of vocational training.

Here is a verbatim account of an exchange I overheard between two young store employees last year:

The first: "I'm majoring in business administration, with a minor in accounting."

The second: "Boring."

The first: `Not at all; it's how to make a lot of money."

If universities think of students as customers, student demands shape what we offer. And if what they demand is skills that will land them jobs that make a lot of money, well . . . the humanities seem pretty marginal.

My apprehension finds support in statistics. A U.S. Department of Education study shows that of a million bachelor's degrees awarded in 1991, 250,000 were in business, 12,000 in foreign languages, 7,300 in philosophy or religion. This reflects a trend. In 1966, bachelor's degrees in the humanities were a fifth of the total awarded. In 1993, they were just over a tenth.

The student I overheard is a satisfied customer, right in line with the market model of higher education. Claiming that faculty contracts don't give administrations enough power, the chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education has said: "Clause after clause says the faculty run the academic side of the institutions. That's like telling General Motors that the president can't be involved with making cars." This analogy would occur only to someone with a market model in mind.

One way to apply the market model to higher education is to suppose that what we produce is students. The consumers are employers, who reflect demand by hiring or not hiring our graduates. Another way to apply the model is to assign the role of consumer to the students, who demand various courses taught by people with various skills.

Both applications come to the same thing: the only value recognized is immediate market value, based on the entry-level job prospects of graduates.

What is the specific impact of the market model on higher education, especially on the humanities? For one thing, as faculty retire, their "slots" can be reallocated to more popular areas. Not only are resources moved to the more vocationally-oriented parts of the university, especially to business and technology; also, the share of budget supporting academic mission continues to decrease, while the percentage supporting nonacademic units athletics, student affairs, development, administration continues to grow. According to Digest of Education statistics, between1976 and1989 the number of administrators on American campuses grew by 43 percent, and the number of "nonfaculty professionals" by 123 percent. Although university staffs as a whole are growing, the relative presence of secretaries, janitors, and faculty is actually shrinking. At UMass Amherst today, there is a full-time administrator and two full-time staff for every full-time faculty member; the faculty are only a quarter of the workforce. And according to a study published by Princeton in 1997, "As the university becomes increasingly bureaucratized to meet financial pressures, the humanities preeminently a teaching sector are unlikely to prosper."

The market model has insinuated itself into every aspect of our thinking about higher education. Twenty-five years ago, American colleges and universities were classified in terms of academic mission: research universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and so on. An updated taxonomy, proposed by the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement at Stanford, sorts institutions by market niche: brand-name institutions (Harvard, Berkeley, Williams); mass-providers (most public universities); and convenience institutions (nonprofit and for-profit institutions, such as the University of Phoenix, that define themselves in terms of market-responsiveness and user- friendliness).

Brand-name institutions offer traditional, high-quality education to full-time, residential students, mostly of the traditional age. Convenience institutions offer courses aimed at supplying part-time, nonresidential, often older students with credentials useful in the workplace. Both brand-name and convenience institutions are secure in their market niches.

In between, however, the mass-providers that embody traditional academic values such as curricula in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as in professional and technical fields occupy very unstable ground. Chester Finn, a former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education now at the Hudson Institute, predicts that as costs rise, more students will seek either the affordability of a convenience institution or "the future earnings that come with a prestige degree." The mass providers, without much convenience on the one hand or much prestige on the other, will have trouble surviving.

Finn's recommendations to mass-providers are appalling indeed: faculty at such institutions should impart knowledge, not create it; they should concentrate on pedagogy rather than research. Finn further imagines a vertical integration of institutions, with a name-brand research university at the top, a dozen mass-providers next, and a couple of dozen convenience institutions below. "The research professors at the big-name university could provide cutting-edge knowledge and professional development for faculty members on the other campuses," he says, "while heavy-duty teaching (such as the remedial kind) might be shouldered by the non-research faculty members."

In other words, Finn recommends that most professors be employees hired to perform tasks that exclude contributing to knowledge. I ask again: Who would enter such a profession? Finn is ready with an answer: Perhaps academic professionals will not be needed. Since it will be clear that mass-provider faculty "are teachers, not scholars who do original research," they may not need Ph.D.s or full-time appointments, and they certainly won't need tenure. It will be natural, says Finn, for mass-providers to recruit people "with successful careers in business or the professions." In this bleak picture there is no role for the humanities whatsoever.

Even if people with Ph.D.s in the humanities were hired to teach some courses in this brave new world, what kind of people would they be? Would those with first-rate minds and options continue to seek doctorates? Think of the perennial difficulty of recruiting good students to become primary and secondary teachers. Should Finn's vision come to pass, I predict that we will soon hear the same complaints about the caliber of teachers in college that we now hear about primary and secondary teachers; the intellectual caliber of faculties would surely deteriorate. But, of course, the market is indifferent to such concerns.

Recently Business Week examined an example of the market model in action. In an article entitled "The New U," the University of Florida was described as remaking itself, in fiscal desperation, as a corporation. "Defying traditional academic notions, departments now vie openly for resources," stated the author. "English professors must demonstrate, in essence, that Chaucer pays the bills as effectively as engineering or business classes. . . . professors worry that creative writing and other courses requiring very small classes will cost their department funding under a system that strictly measures productivity." (I can't help thinking of the football coach at Florida, who is among the highest paid in the country.)

What has happened to our conception of education? When colleges and universities were the province of the elite, there was agreement about the goal: intellectual excellence, with the humanities central to the curriculum. Democratizing higher education, one would have thought, would mean making available to the many the education that had been the privilege of the few. Instead, higher education, at least in the public sector, is being recast in a model that has little to do with intellectual excellence and much to do with certification. In a university that lacks regard for intellectual excellence that sees its mission largely as just another social service agency there will be little place for the humanities. Of course there should be education for students whose aim is a credential certifying their possession of a marketable skill; clearly, there is demand for programs oriented toward future employment, and public institutions should meet this demand. But the point at which we look to nothing but demand to determine what a university should offer is the point at which the market becomes the enemy of excellence.

"Meanwhile, The Ivy League is Rolling in Clover," was the title of a companion piece in the same issue of Business Week. I am confident that the humanities will remain strong at the elite colleges and universities to which prominent critics of higher education send their sons and daughters, to the tune of, on average, $32,000 a year in tuition. I recently heard an admissions officer at Amherst College emphasize that students there are not trained for particular careers; the goal of an Amherst education is a supple and well-stocked mind that can be applied to various fields. Why shouldn't those benefits be equally available to public university students? It is the most disingenuous kind of elitism a phony egalitarianism, really to cast the humanities aside at public institutions, while they retain their central roles for the privileged. True egalitarianism in education means that we make the best available to everyone who can do the work.

So the real question is: Should the humanities be the preserve of the wealthy? Should the Ivy League be the custodian of culture? If the answer is no, then we should do everything we can to convince our fellow citizens that, as successful as capitalism has been in producing wealth, there are goods beyond wealth; and the worth of these goods is not determined by the marketplace. Elite institutions, says Business Week, "remain insulated from market pressures in part because they have established an aura of quality call it brand strength or snob appeal that keeps students coming, despite the price." We need to convince others that public universities also should strive for that quality, and hence enjoy some of that insulation.

If the market model does take hold, I think that there are two possible outcomes: In the first, the humanities just don't make the cut (except, of course, for the elite). In the second, the humanities remain in name only, not as serious intellectual disciplines but as "service" courses such as freshman composition or the textbook history of the United States.

We already have an example of how the first outcome might look, in the for-profit University of Phoenix, which, with 50,000 students, is advertised as the largest private university in the nation. A franchise operation, with fifty-eight sites in twelve states, the institution is growing at 20 percent a year, with projected expansion to 200,000 students in the next decade. Its facilities are located just off highway exit-ramps, and consist of an office building or a few floors of one. The library is entirely on-line. Every student in a given program takes the same courses in the same sequence; there are no electives. Faculty do not prepare their own courses; uniform syllabi are issued every three years.

The University of Phoenix is the paradigm of a market model of education. It is the principal subsidiary of a profit- making company traded on the NASDAQ exchange. It caters to working adults who take classes at night; the instructors are "practitioners" without Ph.D.s accountants, business people and paid by the course. You can earn a degree solely by distance learning, without ever meeting another student or a professor. According to UP president William Gibbs, "The people who are our students don't really want the education. They want what the education provides for them better jobs, moving up in their career, the ability to speak up in meetings, that kind of stuff. They want it to do something for them."

The University of Phoenix is just one example. There are other for-profit universities offering pared-down, job-related training. There is the entirely electronic International University; there is Knowledge Universe, a company aiming to capture "a $10 billion slice of the education market, from toys to advanced degrees"; there is Knowledge TV, which offers college courses to people around the world, and which its founder, cable entrepreneur Glenn R. Jones, calls a "cyber-university." These are all businesses.

Arthur Levine of Columbia is one of those within the traditional academy who predicts that in a few generations we will "still have some number of residential colleges and some number of research universities, but most of the rest will disappear." Non-elite institutions, Levine suggests, "will be reduced largely to examining and certifying students for workplace readiness." These dire predictions are based on the market model.


IN ADDITION TO THREATS POSED by a low public opinion of classical higher education and by the rush to the market model, there is a third threat to the humanities today one that is less immediate, but in the long run more dangerous. For unlike the first two, the third is a serious intellectual threat, a frontal assault on humane values.

Let me introduce this threat by means of an analogy. In our relentlessly secular institutions, many follow Nietzsche in taking for granted that what any religion claims is false. With this as a premise, the questions become: What kind of people believe religious doctrines? How could otherwise sensible people believe such patently false things, or bring themselves to participate in such hocus-pocus? What (probably contemptible) purpose do religions serve? In a secular world, in short, theology is replaced by the psychology of religion.

Many humanists share these attitudes toward religion, but our own disciplines can be targets of the same kind of thinking. The humanities are viewed by popular writers on evolutionary biology in the same way secularists view religion. An example is Steven Pinker's recent book, How the Mind Works. The arts, says Pinker, are "not adaptive in the biologist's sense of the word." Even more damning, "the more biologically frivolous and vain the activity, the more people exalt it. Art, literature, music, wit, religion and philosophy are thought to be not just pleasurable but noble. . . . Why do we pursue the trivial and futile and experience them as sublime?"

Thus does Pinker reduce the humanities to the question: Why do people do such silly things? Just as in our secularized universities there is no room for theological inquiry, so, too, in the brave new world of pop biology, there is no room for humanistic inquiry.

Pinker gives especially short shrift to philosophy. "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors," he writes, "not to answer any question we are capable of asking." Suggesting that "our minds lack the equipment to solve the major problems of philosophy," he adds that this is "equivalent to observing . . . that monkeys cannot learn long division."

In the long run, this third threat to the humanities will require a serious intellectual reply. No simple unmasking or citation of statistics will do; for the threat of ideological Darwinism is not based on misconceptions as is the public- opinion threat or on misconstruals of the enterprise as is the market model threat but on a perverse interpretation of an admirable theory. Although I cannot work out a thorough reply to ideological Darwinism here, I am confident that, properly understood, biological inquiry is not inimical to humanistic inquiry. At the risk of sounding glib, let me distinguish their domains in this way: biology tells what we have in common as a species; the humanities focus largely on our experience as individuals. It is from the humanities that we learn about the subtleties of betrayal, hardness of heart, crushing disappointment, love, malice, courage, good and evil the things that matter to us as we live our lives.


WHILE THE HUMANITIES do not directly or automatically launch students into lucrative careers, they do possess to some degree the narrow instrumental value demanded by the market model. A writer for the Boston Globe suggests that the liberal arts, "more than many vocationally specific undergraduate majors," are often "pathways to executive, professional and leadership positions." Even in the near term, liberal arts degrees give entry into careers in communications, education, management, journalism, human services. The Globe quotes the president of Bradford College, a CEO and consultant for twenty years, as saying that a liberal arts education is career-relevant in its development of higher-order skills such as problem-solving, reasoning and analysis, and such values as discipline, teamwork, and commitment to continuous learning.

The humanities are also of broader instrumental value: They contribute to the public good. Where else but in the humanities are new generations to learn to respect language to use it with precision, to recognize and abhor fraudulent discourse? "To foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative, a democracy that genuinely takes thought for the common good," writes philospher Martha Nussbaum, "we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs." It bodes ill for democracy, she notes, when citizens vote on the basis of sentiments absorbed from talk-radio and never submitted to scrutiny. Nussbaum also remarks on the value of art and literature in representing human possibility and developing moral imagination. "The people of the United States need the arts precisely because they will be called upon to vote," she writes. "The arts cultivate capacities of judgment and sensitivity that can and should be expressed in the choices a citizen makes." The humanities thus develop our capacity for citizenship.

But the importance of the humanities is not just instrumental; the humanities are intrinsically valuable. When we consider the various societies known to us, we judge them not solely or even largely by their wealth, military strength, or technological accomplishments. We judge them by the achievements that we now call the humanities. Sparta was militarily and technologically superior to Athens, but it is the great Athenians philosophers, poets, playwrights, historians, architects, sculptors who are still admired and studied after thousands of years. The culture that had an inestimable influence on subsequent civilization is Athens, not Sparta.

The value of a humane education was brought home to Dartmouth president James O. Freedman when he discovered he had cancer. "I have been struck," he has written, "by two realizations first, that life is a learning process for which there is no wholly adequate preparation; second, that although liberal education is not perfect, it is the best preparation there is for life and its exigencies. With it we are better able to make sense of the events that either break over us, like a wave, or quietly envelop us before we know it, like a drifting fog. . . . When the ground seems to shake and shift beneath us, liberal education provides perspective, enabling us to see life steadily and to see it whole.

"It has taken an illness to remind me, in my middle age, of that lesson. But that is just another way of saying that life, like liberal education, continues to speak to us if we have the stillness and the courage to listen. That reminder is worth more than gold."

Should the humanities be saved? Without a doubt. Will the humanities be saved? That remains to be seen.


Lynne Rudder Baker has been a professor of philosophy at UMass since 1989. Her field is metaphysics and the philosophy of mind; her third book is under contract with Cambridge University Press.