Is "The Decline of the Humanities" like "The War on Christmas"?

As an old Humanities professor living with considerable pleasure in the modern world, reading my friends’ suggestions and recommended readings on Facebook and trawling Early English Books Online for research evidence, I am moved to express a few thoughts on the Decline of the Humanities.

            All the phenomena of budget cuts and preferential treatment for income-generating programs are of course real, and our first instinct is to regret them. But then, my first instinct is to regret seeing photographs of Stockholm filled with veiled Moslem women. First instincts sometimes need to be scrutinized, judged with care, and occasionally corrected.

            First of all, we need to be sure that our loudly-voiced regrets are untainted by concern for our own jobs, careers, and profession. I believe, for instance, that there are currently more people writing poetry than reading it; and I believe that there are more people who have profound knowledge of Edmund Spenser’s work than there are young people dying to have that knowledge communicated to them. This is disappointing for us, but the phenomenon will not go away, any more than cost-cutting administrators will go away. The case is altered.

            It began to be altered when ‘the profession’ professionalized itself following the 19^th-century German model, and the ideal book by a scholar was no longer something like Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape but something like A.E. Housman’s edition of Manilius. The process continued when those same monumental editions came to be frowned upon by tenure committees and replaced, as an ideal, by fashionable but largely unreadable articles and monographs with hundreds of endnotes, highly-specialized but blending, in an intellectually dubious way, knowledge and opinion, scholarship and criticism. The tenure committees themselves had much to do with the development, favoring as they did publication of such material and deprecating teaching and ‘popularizing’.

            Another alteration occurred in the 1960s, when political revolt unleashed a storm of opinion that considered apolitical scholarship as dangerously reactionary on the one hand and that brought an entire cultural generation to favor feeling over thought, on the other. One faction of the young (abetted by some of their elders) hounded politically-incorrect professors out of their lecture-rooms; another faction trusted no one over thirty and decided the past was bunk.

            A third alteration, a generation later, sprang from the invention of computers and all that followed therefrom: the Internet, Wikipedia, tablets, smartphones, and suchlike. What this did was to make unbelievable amounts of information available with unbelievable ease – at least to those who, or whose institutions, could afford the necessary hardware and software. It reminds me of my introduction to rock-climbing, and discovering that the nylon ropes, the sticky-soled clinging shoes and the curiously-shaped bits of metal that helped hold us to the rock made the whole process almost obscenely easy compared to the work of an older generation in hobnailed boots with hempen ropes and hammered pitons. This, of course, is still going on; and I am not sure most of us have really caught up with the informational universe in which our students live, move and have their being. It is a universe based, not only on an addiction to screens, but also on a new sense of what information is: no longer a hard-won treasure to add to a store of global insight informed by inherited or acquired values, but an environment at the same time limitlessly vast and easily accessible, where you pick what takes your fancy and discard it when it has served its purpose.

            The fourth and most recent alteration came with, and from, the Great Recession. This made an entire generation of educational administrators realize that much of their business was in essence a luxury trade flying under a democratic flag. As most of them now are products of the Sixties-to-Nineties generation themselves, they have no hard-wired interest in the humanities, and many feel (an older generation would have said “think”) that science and technology, especially in the service of ecology, are of far more use to humanity than classics, philosophy, and the works of Edmund Spenser. Also, their funds are running out. So they cut where they need to, and do not feel especially guilty.

            As in other areas of life, lateral thinking may help reorient us away from lamentation. The culture has changed, and it will not go back to what it was. What can and should ‘higher education’, and in particular what we call the Humanities, do in this new world? I offer a few suggestions.

1.     Literature, particularly literature of the past (and that includes Classics) is not really suited to the majority of current 18-year-olds. On the other hand, all of us have at some time taught mature students in their forties or older who have made sacrifices to come back to university and beg to be taught Shakespeare, Spenser, Ovid and Virgil. Accordingly, I suggest that Literature departments be reoriented toward mature students, and that 18-year-olds be admitted to them, but only on specific application.

2.     Plagiarism is everywhere, and authority is so over. The Humanities are no longer places for examinations and stern evaluation. Some kind of group research project may be a better way of judging how far students have progressed. The concept of a Degree may have to be re-thought, and in programs where real competence is required, Pass-Fail may usefully replace grade-inflated A-minuses, As and A-pluses.

3.     Much reading of, and learning about, History and Literature may in future be done in an adult and associative part-time context. Those guiding such discussion groups or clubs will be more like worker-priests than like Vatican theologians.

4.     It seems not unlikely that for future Humanities scholars, learning to write code and to create websites will be as important a part of their training as phonology, library science or the economics of Ancient Mesopotamia.

5.     There will, it seems to me, be need for far fewer full-time Humanities teachers. This is a situation we should look full in the face and for which we should prepare our profession and our institutions; for if we do not, our institutions will prepare for it without us. It might be useful to institute a numerus clausus in Doctoral programs, as happens in a number of countries with regard to medicine.

6.     We should work much more closely with high schools, with their teachers, and with secondary-education developers. It is at their level that students should learn that the past is not bunk and that history does not begin with World War II. We are, in a sense, the customers of their product; and we should loudly and unashamedly make our vision, and our needs, known to them.

7.     In the same way, we should work with grade-school teachers and curriculum developers. It is at that level that should, and must, be learnt the basic literacy too many of us still have to instil at freshman level. It is we who can help them overcome the last vestiges of the Sixties silliness that equates equality of opportunity with equality of performance.

These are just  few ideas that, to my mind, it is more worth while to pursue than lamentations over business-oriented administrators and semi-literate plagiarizing students. The case is altered, and we live in a whole new world.