John McCreery wrote
And, on the other side of the coin, something I was just moved to
write (the bit in italics is the question to which I am, in a
curmudgeonly mode, responding).
/but what really is the use of any of the humanities as supplying
some economic demand?/
They have, of course, historically played an important role in
producing audiences for high culture and fine art — thus providing
the wherewithal to keep institutions like Sotheby's, the Vienna
Philharmonic, and university presses in business.
The marketing problem faced by the humanities is similar to that
faced by BMW in Japan after selling too many 3-series cars during
the economic bubble. When the bubble collapsed, BMW found that,
when people thought of its brand in terms of the 3-series, they
envisioned a "Roppongi Corolla," i.e., a starter car for nouveaux
riche vulgarians.
Democratizing the humanities and, in effect, adopting the
McDonald's slogan, "We do it all for you" has predictably
destroyed the luxury cachet the humanities once enjoyed. And
claiming to teach critical thinking in big lecture classes with
shrinking reading and writing assignments isn't going to rebuild
the brand.
I'm baffled, as I usually am, by attempts to 'justify' (the teaching and learning of) 'the humanities.' As I've said, boringly, here several times I've taught courses simply called 'humanities,' as well as courses in one of the areas (fields? disciplines?) that make up 'the humanities,' for many years at Reed. (Biographical note: I taught full-time here from 1966 to 1996, and have occasionally taught one philosophy course a year since then.)
Here's a link to the page for Reed's humanities courses. First-year humanities 'hyoom one ten,' is required of all Reed students, except for certain transfers, and because of its interdisciplinary makeup requires the intellectual collaboration of faculty members from almost every division and department, with the exception of science and math.
http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/How studying objects and ideas in the way that's presented here leads to the 'production' of audiences for 'high culture and fine art' (thereby keeping symphony orchestras and auction houses alive) is not clear. Neither is it clear how studying any of the disciplines that make up 'the humanities' might do that—is the audience at Sothebys largely made up of historians and philosophers? I'm pretty sure John does not think this; but then just what is the link between 'the humanities' in general, or the disciplines that make them studied individually, and the creation of audiences for, or producers of, the sorts of things covered in the /Times'/ Fine Arts section?
When the great Arab philosophers preserved, edited and translated Plato and Aristotle, what they did was something called 'scholarship.' I'd call it studying the humanities. Had they not done this—had Plato and Arisotle been lost to the West—what we now think of as 'the humanities' would be radically different from what is now taught and studied, or at least talked about, under that heading today. 'We' owe a lot to Dante's virtuous pagans. It would be a shame to think that the most important thing we owe them is a ready supply of moneyed art consumers.
The recent, usually ideological, fascination with 'outcomes,' in higher education, has as a subtext, the question, 'What's the good of it?' where the good of it is parsed in terms of what graduates of which schools and departments can achieve as 'useful' members of an industrialized society. In this setting, the humanities don't stand a chance; and if someone were to argue that studying the humanities (any of them) could clearly be shown to have such a purpose, the very idea of studying them would be lost.
It may be appropriate to note here that in the US, McDonalds' slogan is 'i'm lovin' it'—clearly the right answer to someone who asks a student why she is studying Homeric Greek.
Robert Paul, studying the life of Arkady Renko, somewhere south of Reed College
