Politics

Defending the humanities

November 08, 2010
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Last month’s Browne report was eagerly awaited by some academics, in the hope that it would allow universities, struggling with funding, to raise student fees. Browne did indeed recommend lifting the fee cap, but the comprehensive spending review has since cut the university teaching budget outside Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) to zero. Universities may thus find themselves even worse off than before, and humanities departments especially so. (Read the pros and cons of this debated here, plus Jean Seaton on why we have fallen out of love with universities here.)

Whatever the real answer to it, “Why science?” is a question it feels foolish even to ask. The question “Why humanities?” on the other hand—as Francis Mulhern observed at a recent conference of the same name at Birkbeck’s Institute for the Humanities—is all too likely to receive the answer "Why indeed?"

The value of the humanities has long been under-represented in public discourse in this country. Attempting to put this right, Stefan Collini kicked off the day’s proceedings with a brilliant call to arms: scholars in the humanities must resist the dominance of economic vocabulary in argument about public goods—that is, measuring the value of Shakespeare in terms of ticket sales at Stratford—and refuse to allow the government’s "quality assurance" vocabulary to colonise their own sense of what they’re up to. Real education involves an inherently risky and unpredictable interaction between minds, he said, so the idea that its quality can be assured is a nonsense.

I found myself wanting simultaneously to cheer and hold my head in my hands. Even my youngest child, who is only seven, has to head every piece of classwork she does by specifiying its “Learning Objective.” So proficient are she and her classmates in quality assurance lingo that all they actually have to write is “LO.”

The idea that school-leavers and their prospective teachers at university form a natural alliance against uncomprehending martians from BIS—in case you didn’t know, higher education is now in the hands of the department for business, innovation and skills—is, I fear, a fantasy, not least because young people spend 13 years in schools drinking in the very same misunderstandings about the value of the humanities (in fact, the value of most things) that Collini was complaining about. Friends of the humanities certainly need to inspire one another, but they must also find ways to talk over the heads of bureaucrats to the wider constituency of their own future students and future colleagues.

But finding words in which to do this is no easy task, in part thanks to the very notion of what it is for something to be valuable—as studying humanities subjects surely is—“for its own sake.” Much of the time when we explain why something is worth doing, we point to some further effect: it’s good because it makes you healthy, say, or because it promotes economic growth. Of course we are entitled to ask, of most further effects, “what’s so good about that?” But the explanations that carry conviction cite further effects where on the whole people don’t bother to ask the follow-up question—wisely (as with health) or maybe not so wisely (as with growth). However, what it means for something to be good for its own sake is that explanations of that sort are out of place.

This is not to say no explanation can be given of the value of such things. Things we pursue for their own sakes—from fly fishing to philosophy—each come with a rich vocabulary which insiders use to judge work within that field. But such insider-speak by its nature won’t be very good at conveying the value of the activity to someone who is not already part of it—a minister at BIS, for example. When talking to outsiders, often all there is to fall back on are generalities like “it’s an end in itself” which, when not carried along by the current of insider-speak they summarise, sound rather lame, and rarely make the standard outsider’s challenge—“yes, but what is it for?”—go away.

Iain Pears, art historian and novelist, proposed a more drastic remedy: since humanities degrees cost less and attract more applicants, humanities should simply cut loose from the sciences. For instance, if a faculty’s budget depended on its fee income minus the costs of providing the course, humanities departments might be better off, no longer having to justify themselves to uncomprehending paymasters. But is a divorce really desirable? Not only does some fertile work in the humanities depend on having scientists around to talk to, but the problem of justifying their research face the sciences just as acutely. If what funding councils want is "impact," will they be any more willing to fund blue skies research in pure science than they will a new monograph on Milton?

Intellectual historian Quentin Skinner was guardedly more optimistic, arguing that there’s no reason why research in the humanities shouldn’t live up to the most “stringently philistine” standards of social utility. His example was Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit. Having developed his “civic republican” political philosophy without any eye to consequences, Pettit was invited in 2004 by José Luis Zapatero, the newly elected prime minister of Spain, to tell the Spanish government what it needed to do in order to live up to civic republican ideals. Not only that, but three years later Zapatero invited Pettit back to judge whether he had stayed on track. So "blue skies" work in the humanities stands as good a chance as blue skies science of making a fundamental practical difference.

The tough question—and again it’s a question for science too—is whether there’s a way to lead the Zapateros to the Pettits without forcing the latter to frame what they’re doing solely in terms of "impact." If not, it looks as if there are just two options: either leave such encounters to chance (which is not going to impress the funding bodies), or risk pulling the broader value of the research out of shape.