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Columns::April 29, 2002
It’s a girl!
Faculty members look ‘Towards 2010’ an annual symposium
Trumpet virtuoso Fred Mills named first Prokasy Professor
Vehicle registration begins May 1 for university’s new parking system
Academic Assistance changes its name to Academic Enhancement
Convocation opens new academic year
Setting the agenda
Executive director of international education closes out ‘abroad career
Animal, dairy complex named for Rhodes, former regents chairman
Kudos
A better mousetrap
Campus News
Whither the humanities
By Tom Peterson
In two recent articles in this space, Betty Jean Craige emphasized the need for funding research in the humanities, despite their
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lack of commercial appeal, and Lioba Moshi drew attention to the lack of adequate preparation in foreign languages by UGA undergraduates. My remarks here seek to continue in the same vein while acknowledging, as Robert M. Rosenzweig has written, that “the shift away from the traditional liberal arts as the defining core of the education of undergraduates is real and probably irreversible.”
Rosenzweig began his career as an administrator at Stanford in 1962. Later, as provost, he had the task of coping with the anti-Vietnam war movement on campus, witnessing the sometimes embarrassing experiments in self-governance that were made by protesters but also by faculty seeking to respond to world events. He later became the president of the American Association of Universities. Lobbying in Washington for research dollars, he encountered anti-academic prejudice from both sides of the aisle. Given his career, it is not surprising that Rosenzweig’s 1998 book, The Political University, has much to say about the research climate in America since World War II, the political and economic infrastructure that supports it, the importance of faculty governance, the role of administrators in fostering positive change, and the future of the humanities.
The year 1968 was a high-water mark in research funding to faculty who had a sense of “entitlement” that went back to the post-World War II boom. Professors came to expect the good times to continue, but were unaware of the political motivation that lay at the basis of federal support; even now there are faculty who have an unrealistic sense of entitlement about teaching loads, research funding and the like. J. Hillis Miller writes, in Black Holes, “It is difficult for most humanities professors to accept the fact that their prosperity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was as much a result of the Cold War as was the prosperity of aircraft and weapons manufacturers, or as was the space race that put men on the moon.” He cites the formation of the National Endowment for the Humanities as another part of the Cold War effort to be the best at everything. As the late Bill Readings wrote in The University in Ruins, the traditional university on the Humboldtian model has lapsed and been replaced by a corporate model.
As Rosenzweig asserts, “the place of the arts and sciences in undergraduate education has been moved somewhat off center” and attempts to recover the “consensus on values” that the traditional liberal arts curriculum represented are “illusory.” Nevertheless, new areas are opening up: “[Multidisciplinary] programs can be both engaging of student interests and rigorous, two major requirements for a successful educational experience. The proliferation of such programs, a likely eventuality, hardly foreshadows the death of the liberal arts.” William Paulson takes a similar tack, proposing in his 2001 book Literary Culture in a World Transformed: “require every humanities major to be a double major--the ‘second’ field being an empirical one, outside the humanities.” He critiques general education requirements saying “they are not general enough” and that what we need are integrative courses that provide students with “a very general picture of what is known about the physical u
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niverse, organisms and the environment, forms of human society and culture, and the state of the present-day world.”
So in light of the above we ask, whither the humanities? Will small programs be canceled and humanists denied research funding that does not satisfy the brave new world of “lean and mean,” media glut and globalization? Will the spread of English obviate the desirability of fluency in another language? What sorts of majors will tomorrow’s freshmen be looking for? If they study abroad will it be in some English-language enclave? The answers are not clear, but to cite an old existentialist term, there is plenty of responsibility to go around.
Those of us in the humanities gain nothing by voicing our nostalgia for the good old days. We must seek intellectual dialogue across the disciplines. The human ecology of our university depends on the transparency of its moral and ethical practices, and those can only be articulated across boundaries of sensibilities and disciplines, and in language, the stock-in-trade of the humanist. But there is less patience about, and rightly so, for the study of isolated humanistic fields that do not demonstrate their importance in the larger scheme of things.
Tom Peterson is professor of Italian at UGA.
FORUM GUIDELINES
To encourage discussion on issues affecting the university and higher education in general, the Forum section appears periodically in Columns. Faculty, staff, administrators and researchers associated with the university are invited to submit essays and respond to previous essays.
A committee appointed by University Council and Staff Council reviews submissions to determine which are of greatest interest to the university community. Faculty members of the Forum review committee for 2001-2002 are Jonathan Evans (English), Mary Frasier (education) and J. Scott Shaw (physics and astronomy). The staff representative is Melanie Andrews (legal affairs).
Opinions expressed on these pages do not necessarily reflect the views of the UGA administration or the review committee. Articles will be edited to conform with the Associated Press stylebook.
Guidelines for submissions
• Topics should be related to issues in higher education.
• Essays should have broad appeal in the university community.
• Essays should be no longer than 700 words.
• Send essays to Beth Roberts (columns@uga.edu; News Service, A-205 Stegeman Coliseum). |
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