Humanities in the Universities

When I'm teaching Atlantic history one of the things I try to get students to watch out for are false parallels so it may well be that questions are being raised about the role of the humanities on both sides of the Atlantic entirely coincidentally, but I suspect not. My heretical suspicion is that this crisis may easily be resolved because we in fact know how to teach the humanities successfully and even cheaply. The problem is we can't do it within current university structures and within current assumptions about academic careers.

We worked out how to teach the humanities in the twelfth century. Small self-governing colleges have no to low overheads, a tight fit between student demand and teaching capacity without any need for oversight bureaucracies, and generate intense commitment. They integrate teaching and scholarship, or, if you prefer, research, so tightly that one cannot separate one from the other. And there is the rub. Academic careers are research careers and since the late nineteenth century the model for the university researcher has been the research scientist. The kinds of institutions that foster truly excellent scientific research are very different to colleges. We have muddled along for a good century and a half with the tension, but under pressure of rising educational costs and new social demands on the university the strains are telling.

The opportunity here is for a treaty of secession, or a series of them in various kinds of institutions, between the various elements of the university to be negotiated that helped all the elements of the current multiversity more sharply define their role and function. Unbundling the various kinds of knowledge that cohabit in our universities would undermine ways in which we now support one another. We might even suspect that casting off Classics, English, History and Philosophy from the fleets of battleships in the sciences would condemn the humanities to founder. Self-sustaining colleges would also face the challenge of resurrecting a liberal arts heritage that wasn't a total anachronism. Defining a humanities curriculum that speaks in a contemporary idiom would be a difficult task. These problems, and many more, already challenge the humanities, in or out of the current university system. But, on the other hand, if we actually attempted to identify the intellectual heritage of free men and women, and then taught it, I don't think we would lack for students.