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18/6/2018 Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities

Arguments that they’re useful are wrong, anti-humanistic, and sure to backfire
By Stanley Fish JUNE 17, 2018
 PREMIUM
T
he humanities are taking it on the
chin. If there were any doubts about
this proposition, they have been
dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at
Stevens Point’s proposal to eliminate 13 majors,
Doug Paulin for The Chronicle Review
including history, art, English, philosophy,
sociology, political science, French, German,
and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment,
and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology. One
professor of physics and astronomy (Ken Menningen) approved, declaring that the
university was right to "pivot away from the liberal arts" and toward programs that
students, concerned with career prospects, find attractive. That reasoning might make
sense if Stevens Point were a trade school, but it is, at least by title and claim, a university,
and there is an argument to be made that because the claim is now without support at
Stevens Point, the title should be removed.
The philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott would have thought so. Here is
his account of the university: "It is a place where [the student] … is not encouraged to
confuse education with training for a profession, with learning the tricks of a trade, with
preparation for future particular service in society, or with the acquisition of a kind of
moral and intellectual outfit to see him through life." Note that Oakeshott lists in rapid
succession the most often invoked defenses and justifications of liberal education, and
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Trying-to-Sell-the/243643?key=m1JvRRyygNd0EHj5AaFoO0ti00iCHCUA2K5ZxC8dMYxDxHtupVA2vVdwCkhaYR63d… 1/10
note too that he immediately dismisses them as barely worth thinking about: "Whenever
an ulterior purpose of this sort makes its appearance, education … steals out of the back
door with noiseless steps."
The key phrase in that sentence is "ulterior purpose." It means a purpose external to the
purpose that at once formed and guides the enterprise; it means a purpose that comes
from somewhere else, a purpose from the vantage point of which the educational
institution is judged even though it is in no way central to what those who labor in the
institution think themselves to be doing. When a legislator asks what contribution is
being made by the university to the state’s bottom line or to its tourist industry, or to the
production of skilled workers who might serve in its agencies, he or she is asking the
university to submit to a measure that has nothing to do with the reasons that lead
people to become educators in the first place, the reasons that continue to inform their
actions during the course of a career. The university’s obligation is to be true to what it is
and to resist turning over its mechanism of judgment and decision-making to some
purpose not internal to its proper operations.
The question then is to what internal purpose should a university be true, a question that
requires us to identify the university’s core activity. Aristotle named it in the 10th book of
his Nicomachean Ethics. It is contemplation. "This activity would seem to be loved for its
own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating," as opposed to
"practical activities" which are measured by their effects. Contemplation — turning
matters over and then turning them over again — is "superior in serious worth" because
it "aim[s] at no end beyond itself, and [has] a pleasure proper to itself."
But if both the value and the pleasures appropriate to the university are entirely internal
and reject judgment by any external measure, how are they to be defended when the rest
of the world is preaching instrumentalism, assessment, outcomes, employment statistics,
and metrics? This question has spawned innumerable articles and books often titled "The
Crisis of the Humanities" or "Will the Humanities Survive?" or "How Can the Humanities
Be Saved?" Often these books and essays fail to acknowledge an important distinction:
between the public locations of humanistic performance (poetry festivals, film, theater,
folk festivals, Shakespeare festivals, opera, symphony, chamber music, country music,
jazz festivals, book clubs, art festivals, TED talks) and the academic study of humanistic
performance. Few would deny the value of performing Shakespeare in public, but many
would have doubts about the value of an academic Shakespeare industry, and many
more would question the wisdom of supporting that industry with public funds. When we
speak of the crisis of the humanities, it is important to be clear that even when schools
like Stevens Point are turning their backs on the humanities, they continue to flourish in
almost every town in the country. The difference is that when you or I go to a play or
listen to a concert, we are paying directly for a thing we value; but when our tax dollars or
our charitable contributions to private universities are used to fund English, philosophy,
or classics departments, they may not be things we value at all.
H
ow then can we formulate a justification of the humanities that is general and
powerful enough to satisfy even those portions of the public that have little or
no interest in the subjects humanists study? One candidate for that
justification emphasizes the centrality to our lives of language skills, skills by means of
which we conduct our relationships with family and friends, enter into negotiations with
contracting partners, bargain in the marketplace, participate in political decision making,
negotiate our relationship or nonrelationship with the deity, and give expression to our
pleasures, pains, and aspirations. As Helen Small puts it in The Value of the Humanities
(Oxford University Press, 2013), human culture is a collection of "meaning-making
practices," practices we must become skilled in if we are to make our way. Often this
specification of the particular value of the humanities goes along with a critique of the
limited and limiting skills of calculation that are provided by the hard sciences and by the
more positivistic social sciences.
This line of humanities justification has taken many forms, usually involving pointed
distinctions between body and soul, letter and spirit, techne and art. A number of famous
debates — between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold, C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, Alan
Sokal and the editors of Social Text — participate in a long conversation between those
who believe that science and the scientific method provide the way both to knowledge
and the betterment of mankind, and those who believe that without the informing spirit
of the humanistic perspective, scientific knowledge is a dead letter. (One can see this
opposition in all of its variety as a subset of the larger, perdurable opposition between
reason and faith.)
I confess that I have some sympathy with this specification of the value of the humanities,
in part because much of my academic career has been spent studying the tradition of
Rhetoric, a tradition that obsessively catalogs the ways of meaning making that enable us
as thinking and acting beings. Nevertheless, in the end I don’t think it will sell. That is, I
don’t think that informing the general public that verbal skills underlie everything we do,
even the activities like science that are rhetorically opposed to them, will persuade
legislatures to open their coffers and anoint us as the necessary bearers of both
commerce and civilization. It’s a nice argument, but it’s an in-house argument, and what
we want is an argument that will move the public.
One argument often advanced is the "utility" argument, the argument that the skills
imparted by humanities study are useful to the performance of duties in our everyday
lives. This is essentially a market-value argument, and it is often accompanied by an
assertion that learning to write well is an accomplishment that carries over into any
number of activities. I certainly agree with this assertion, but it justifies only a very small
part of what is taught in humanities courses. It is also more a public-relations gambit
than a serious effort at justification. Justifying support for the teaching of writing is easy.
It is less easy, I might say impossible, to justify in terms of the public good the study of
Byzantine art or lesbian poetry in Texas (a favorite object of attack by anti-humanists) or
animal imagery in the prefaces to Restoration plays. That’s where the challenge is —
convincing the public, and especially those members of the public who hold the purse
strings, that activities like these should be funded by taxpayer dollars. Instrumental
arguments, arguments that assert the utility of humanistic study, become strained after a
very short while; the moment you leave behind measurable skills like the ability to write a
memo or a report or add a column of figures and move to a justification of the skills
necessary to decode a religious lyric written by the Anglican poet George Herbert, the
game is likely to be lost.
I doubt that another popular justificatory argument, described by Small as "the claim that
the humanities have a contribution to make to our individual and collective happiness,"
will fare any better. As Small explains, this is not a hedonistic argument; the happiness
referred to is not to be equated with pure sensual pleasure. Rather, it is the happiness that
follows when your mind and sensibilities have been expanded to the point where you
have a fuller experience of life than you otherwise would have had. As a result, the
argument goes, those who are exposed to texts and other artifacts originating from a
multiplicity of traditions will thereby be more empathetic, more open-minded, and less
likely to impose a narrow partisan perspective on others.
Sounds good, but I’m not sure. Let me take myself as an example. (I know the sample is
small.) For more than 60 years, I have been in conversation with Aristotle, Plato, Cicero,
Horace, Augustine, Ariosto, Tasso, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Ben
Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Blake, Austen,
Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Arnold, Tennyson, Emerson, Melville, James, Yeats,
Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and many more; and it is certainly the case
that as a result I am able to discourse on matters that are opaque to those for whom these
authors are, at best, just names. But has this experience with humanistic texts and the
modes of analysis thought proper to them had the effect of making me into a kinder,
gentler being animated only by the highest motives and alert both to the differences that
distinguish us and the commonalities we share?
I’m afraid that the effect has been more local: Within the practices that mark my
profession I am able to attend to nuances and discern patterns of significance that others,
not trained as I was, would miss. So in a sense my "experience" is fuller than theirs, more
complete; but the fullness is professionally demarcated and cabined; it does not extend to
a general fullness that might be the mark of a generally enlightened mind. I hate to be the
one to tell you, but there is no generalizable benefit to having led a life centered on great
texts. It is sometimes thought that those whose careers are spent engaging with beautiful
and stringent works of literature and philosophy will become, perhaps by osmosis, better
persons than they otherwise would have been. Anyone who believes that hasn’t spent
much time in English and philosophy departments.
18/6/2018
I
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education
t is a short step, indeed no step at all, from this self-congratulatory fantasy — I read
better books so I’m a better person — to what Small calls the "democracy needs us"
justification. The idea is that because they are trained deliberative thinkers,
academic humanists have a special capacity (and duty) to correct those of us whose
education has been less rigorous. This is a line of reasoning that one can find in the
seminal 1915 AAUP statement on academic freedom and tenure. The authors of that (still
relevant) document identify as one of democracy’s primary risks "the tyranny of public
opinion." Academics, because they think on a much higher level (or so the argument
goes), can help us to resist this tyranny and thus "help make public opinion more self-
critical"; academics are needed "to check the more hasty and unconsidered impulses of
popular feeling, to train the democracy." It hardly seems necessary to describe this point
of view as elitist. It says that there is a race of superior creatures who by virtue of having
acquired advanced degrees are entitled to provide guidance and correction to the
benighted many who have only gone to college or perhaps ended their educations early.
I have elsewhere labeled this thesis "academic exceptionalism," and a year and a half ago
a group of historians provided a spectacular example of this form of hubris, when, in a
letter to the American people, they pronounced on the candidacy of Donald Trump and
directed us to vote against him. In effect they offered themselves as all-purpose seers who
knew what ailed us and who came prepared with a remedy — their wisdom. I reminded
the historians (in a piece published in The New York Times) that what distinguished them
from those they purported to instruct in political wisdom was the possession of an
advanced degree, not a possession of some form of moral/political superiority. If a
historian tells me that his or her research reveals the dark side of some policy, I will listen
attentively because that historian will, at least with respect to that subject, know more
than I do. But that knowledge cannot and should not translate into giving me marching
orders when I enter the ballot box. I might factor what the historians told me into a
political decision, but that would be quite different from acknowledging them as my
political guardians.
A less suspect version of the "democracy needs us" argument involves the claim that
students who spend four years engaging with complex, nuanced texts will emerge as
potentially better citizens than those who have not had that experience. This is really the
same specious argument, made less obviously silly by the fact that it is students and not
arrogant faculty members who are at its center. But good citizenship and the knowledge
required both to achieve and implement it are not taught exclusively by colleges and
universities; those who end their formal education at the 12th grade can still manage to
acquire and act on an understanding of civic duty. Moreover, and this is the central point,
good citizenship is an occasional byproduct of what happens in a college classroom; it is
not — or should not be — the chief aim of those who preside over that classroom, and it
is at least curious to defend an enterprise by pointing to one of its unintentional effects.
So is there anything left once the justifications I have surveyed prove to be at best partial
and at worse delusional? Well, what’s left is the position articulated by Oakeshott, a
position I have always held, a position Small names the "intrinsic value" or "for its own
sake" position. This position has the great advantage not of providing a justification but
of making a virtue of the unavailability of one. Justification is always a mug’s game, for it
involves a surrender to some measure or criterion external to the humanities. The person
or persons who ask us as academic humanists to justify what we do is asking us to justify
what we do in his terms, not ours. Once we pick up that challenge, we have lost the game,
because we are playing on the other guy’s court, where all the advantage and all of the
relevant arguments and standards of evidence are his. The justification of the humanities
is not only an impossible task but an unworthy one, because to engage in it is to
acknowledge, if only implicitly, that the humanities cannot stand on their own and do not
on their own have an independent value. Of course the assertion of an independent value
and the refusal to attach that value to any external good bring us back to the public-
relations question: How are we going to sell this? The answer is. again, that we can’t.
What then to do, and who is to do it? This a political rather than an educational or
philosophical question; it’s a question about the levers of power, about what persons or
groups are situated in a way that might make their championing of the humanities
effective, might lead us to receive more funds and more respect. Certainly we cannot
expect some career politician to be preternaturally attuned to our interests. We can’t
assign legislators to read books defending the humanities and trust that they will come
out on the right side, that is, on our side.
The only hope (and it is a slim one) resides in the efforts of senior administrators,
administrators with a firm and unshakable understanding (modeled on the
understanding of Oakeshott, Newman, Aristotle, Max Weber, Immanuel Kant) of the
academic enterprise and a resolve to protect it no matter what forces — political,
budgetary, cultural — are arrayed against it. In academic institutions as in most others,
those at the top of the administrative ladder set the agenda and establish the spirit. It is
no exaggeration, I think, to say that humanities faculties today are dispirited. Only
administrators who assume an almost military stance and promise to lead us into
sustained battle can be the agents of revival. Do you know any?
I
cannot conclude without naming one source of renewal and revival that has
recently offered itself. I am thinking of the digital humanities, which promise both
to improve our traditional interpretive activities and to do so in a way that will in
itself constitute their defense because it will bring humanities activities in line with the
more culturally privileged activities of science and mathematics.
This is fool’s gold, for several reasons. First, the digital humanities cannot make good on
the claim that most recommends them to traditional humanists, the claim that data
mining will provide a surer basis for the interpretation of texts — literary, historical, legal,
whatever. It is true, as digital humanists argue, that a corpus that has been digitized can
then be searched for patterns the naked eye could never discern — frequency patterns,
contiguity patterns, collocation patterns (words that appear together). The problem is
that once such patterns have been uncovered, there is no legitimate route from them to
the interpretation of texts. Given the limited number of letters in the alphabet and the
limited number of ways they can be combined, it is inevitable that pattern-regularities
will emerge. The trick is to determine what, if anything, they mean, and the trick cannot
be performed without a prior determination that someone is using them to send a
message. Without that information, which the data cannot by itself deliver, the patterns
will just sit there conveying nothing but their own shape.
Think of puffs of smoke seen on a distant ridge; they could be just puffs of smoke, they
could be smoke signals. How do you know? Not by just looking at them; it is only when
you are persuaded — not by the data but by extratextual information — that a particular
someone has designed the sequence that you will ask what message that someone might
have wanted to send. Interpretation can’t get started without the prior identification of an
intentional agent, and brute data, no matter how it is sliced and diced, cannot produce
that identification by itself. So when the considerable machinery of the digital humanities
is cranked up, the product it generates is interpretively inert.
But there is an even deeper problem with the digital humanities: It is an anti-humanistic
project, for the hope of the project is that a machine, unaided by anything but its
immense computational powers, can decode texts produced by human beings. For it to
work, the project requires a digital dictionary — a set of fixed correlations between formal
patterns and the significances they regularly convey. There is no such dictionary,
although if there were one the acts of readers and interpreter could be dispensed with
and bypassed; one could just count things and go directly from the result to a statement
of what Paradise Lost means. That is the holy grail of the digital-humanities project, at
least with respect to interpretation: It wants to get rid of the inconvenience of partial,
limited human beings by removing from the patterns they produce all traces of the
human. It is an old game forever being renewed, but in whatever form it takes, it’s a sure
loser.
Finally, the digital humanities are a version of the "hair of the dog" cure and of the axiom
that if you can’t beat them, join them. According to most accounts, the decline of the
humanities goes hand in hand with (a) the society’s high valuation of scientific
knowledge accompanied by a conviction that only what can be measured is worth
knowing, and (b) the growing tendency of both educators and students to support
courses that provide a direct path to gainful employment. The digital humanities check
both boxes: They are scientistic if anything is; and because they look like other, favored
knowledge projects, administrators will bestow on them resources that are withheld from
medieval history or Byzantine art.
Richard Grusin, a digital humanist himself, worries
that "digital humanities projects might serve as something like gateway drugs for
administrators addicted to quick fixes and bottom-line approaches to the structural
problems facing higher education today." When the digital-humanities enthusiasm has
cooled down, the structural problems will still be there, and the humanities will still be in
danger of expiring. Administrators who pour funds and resources into the digital
humanities are complicit in the killing of the humanities. The digital humanities will
garner grants and produce some jobs, but its success will be marked by the further
eroding of the values that the humanities have always stood for.
So the available justifications as I have surveyed them won’t work, and the surrender of
the humanities to their traditional enemies won’t work either, in the long run. Not a
pretty picture, and alas, there will be no turn at the end of this essay to a solution
everyone else has missed. Aside from urging the reinstatement of severe distribution
requirements that have the effect of forcing students into courses they would otherwise
choose not to take — those were the days! — I can’t think of a plan that would return the
humanities to the prominence they once enjoyed. If my fellow humanists can come up
with something, they should speak now, or they may be forever holding their peace
whether they want to or not. If things proceed as they have been, in the end we’ll all go
the way of Stevens Point.
Stanley Fish is a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor at
Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University.
A version of this article appeared in the June 22, 2018 issue.
Copyright © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education
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18/6/2018 Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities

By Stanley Fish JUNE 17, 2018

Richard Grusin, a digital humanist himself, worries

A version of this article appeared in the June 22, 2018 issue.

Copyright © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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