THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION PART THREE

This is now the third installment of a series of posts ostensibly devoted to the defense of the Humanities in higher education, and I have yet to say what I mean by the term "the Humanities," nor have I said why I think it is that they are worth defending. It is time to address both of those foundational questions.

By The Humanities I shall mean an array of disciplines including Philosophy, History, Literature, Classical Studies, and Literature, both in English and in other languages. I shall include as well several disciplines usually assigned to the Deans of Social and Behavioral Sciences in American universities, such as Anthropology and Sociology, at least as they have been pursued in earlier times. I exempt Economics from this discussion, partly because it is doing very nicely and needs no defense from me and partly because in its contemporary incarnation [or should I say deformation], it seems to show so little concern for human beings. I exclude as well Political Science simply because I do not believe it rises to the level of a discipline. Arbitrarily, I shall exclude the non-literary Arts, because they raise a variety of special considerations that it would take me too long to explore. I hope it is clear to readers of this blog that by setting the Arts to one side, I do not in any way mean to denigrate them or question their centrality to the human experience.

What then is the value to us of humanistic learning and study? For some of us, it is a great joy, a constant challenge, a source of deep satisfaction. But although that may be a good reason for we happy few to engage with the Humanities, indeed to commit our lives to them, it is not by itself a good reason to ask that scarce tax dollars [or Euros or Shekels or Renmimbi] be used, in a time of budgetary exigency, to provide us with a living.

Let me here insert several pages from an essay I wrote some years ago, and delivered as a talk at Marist College last year. [I have the strangest feeling that I have already posted this essay on my blog, but I cannot find it in the list of past posts, and I have by now posted so many hundreds, indeed thousands, of pages of material here that I have somewhat lost touch with what has and has not appeared in this venue. Forgive me if I am repeating myself.] One word of explanation: The title of my essay was "What Good is a Liberal Education," but it applies as well to the somewhat more limited subject of the Humanities in higher education. I began by considering three traditional defenses of humanistic education.

The first of the three defenses I shall consider of liberal education is the oldest, and perhaps the most traditional: liberal education as the appropriate education for a gentleman. [Not, please note, for a gentlewoman - that consisted of skill with the needle, a bit of music, and the elements of oeconomics, which is to say the management of a household.] A study of the classics, it was thought, would give men of high estate the proper finish, or patina, that would allow them to move gracefully in polite circles. A command of Greek and Latin, like a well-turned leg and a well-filled codpiece, was an evidence of good blood lines. It was even suggested that a familiarity with ancient tongues and literatures might deepen a young man's understanding of human affairs, although that was, to be sure, more of a tutor's hope than a realistic expectation.

The fundamental presupposition of this conception of liberal education is, of course, that the young gentlemen who are to receive it have inherited their position in society. As gentlemen, not forced to work for a living but supported by the inherited wealth of their extended families, they are free to treat education as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental good. This construal of the intellectual and aesthetic life has exercised a great appeal to many of those who make their lives, and their livings, as scholars, writers, and teachers. Somewhat less obviously, it underlies the familiar disdain exhibited by the liberal arts faculties of modern colleges and universities for the faculties and students of the vocationally oriented branches of higher education - medicine, law, architecture, business, nursing, engineering, hotel administration, and the rest.

The traditional defense of liberal education as the appropriate finishing for a gentleman has a curious American variant, traceable to the exigencies of frontier life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As one can see in such classics of frontier literature as Owen Wister's THE VIRGINIAN, it is the woman who is idealized as the bearer of culture, not the man. In the myths and popular fiction of our recent past, the mother teaches the young boy to read, nags and pleads until her husband brings an upright piano out to the homestead, drags the family to church on Sunday, and maintains minimal standards of polite behavior - table manners, courtesy between the sexes - as a defense against the relentless encroachment of the wilderness. The spinster school teacher is, in this version of frontier life, the connecting link to a valuable cultural heritage, left back East, but still remembered.

The second justification for liberal education is a more recent entrant into the debates about educational philosophy. I have in mind the familiar claim that liberal education is the gateway to integration into American society and economy, the engine of upward mobility in a competitive capitalist marketplace, the stepstool that will enable the smart, the ambitious, the hard-working to begin the climb up the pyramid to its favored upper reaches.

This theme is repeated endlessly in our popular literature, and not without a certain measure of truth. Indeed, my own family history is a perfect exemplification of the story. My great-grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1880 as Abram Zarembovich. Forced to change his name to Wolff by an unsympathetic immigration official, he settled on the Lower East Side of New York and raised my grandfather, who without formal education beyond some secondary schooling became a leader of the Socialist Party. His son, my father, seized the chance for a free college education at City College of New York, and continued on to do graduate work in Biology, before beginning his career as a teacher. And here I stand, the fulfillment, odd as it may sound, of my family's aspirations - a college professor who actually writes books! Not many men have the great good fortune to satisfy their parents' deepest hopes while doing something so unworldly as philosophy. It is, I suppose, the way some Catholic priests feel who come from Irish-American backgrounds, except that I don't have to give up sex.

All of this can be summed up, in the slang terms common to American corporate life, by saying that the role of liberal education is to draw a sharp, immediately discernible line between the suits and the shirts - between those employees of large companies who wear suits, are paid salaries by the month, never get their hands dirty, and sit in offices with their names on the doors [along with their professional counterparts, the doctors, lawyers, professors, architects, etc.], and the many more employees who wear shirt sleeves, or the female equivalent, are paid wages by the week, get dirty and sweaty, and work on factory lines, or in office secretarial pools, or in stockrooms, but not in offices with their names on the doors.

We understand these distinctions intuitively and recognize them immediately, even in a university, where local customs dictate a style of dress that might fool outsiders - but never insiders - about class position. After all, when was the last time on a college campus that you mistook a janitor, a groundskeeper, or a secretary for a professor?

There is, finally, the justification for liberal education which I have always associated most immediately with the University of Chicago under the guidance of Robert Maynard Hutchins, but which has been given expression, in one form or another, in Harvard's General Education and Core Curriculum programs, in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course, in the Great Books curriculum of St. John's College, and in countless other curricula and institutions besides: the conception of liberal education as an initiation into the two millennia long Great Conversation.

When I was a boy, I found in my parents' attic, buried under a mound of ancient science textbooks, a slender volume entitled "Heavenly Discourses," by Charles Erskine Scott Wood. This consisted, as the title perhaps suggests, of a series of imaginary conversations in heaven among famous men and women of the western cultural tradition who could not, under normal historical circumstances, have encountered one another here on earth.

The book made an enormous impression on me - so much so that my very first college paper, written in the Fall of 1950, was an imaginary heavenly discourse, featuring John Stuart Mill, T. S. Eliot, Zarathustra, and Carl Sandburg, on the issues posed by Ortega y Gasset's REVOLT OF THE MASSES. [As you might perhaps guess, Sandburg won.]

The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.

A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.

INSIDE BASEBALL

I shall continue with my musings about the Humanities and higher education a bit later today, but every so often I like to reflect on the passing political scene. In general, I operate on the premise that people who do something for a living tend to think about it and to behave with regard to it in a recognizably rational fashion. The evidence does not always confirm this assumption, but it does seems to me sensible to suppose, for example, that if I am in the shop of an antique dealer looking for bargains, the shop owner probably is more likely than I am to spot a real bargain lurking among the tschatschkes and reprice it accordingly.

My faith in the rationality of professionals has been tried in recent times by the Republicans. Professional Republican politicians are in the business of winning elections, or so I have always thought. And save when you have a Supreme Court in your pocket, winning elections requires getting more votes than your opponents. So let us see. The Republicans have long since conceded the Black vote, which goes nine to one for the Democrats, even though the Black community tends to be conservative on social issues. The Republicans have done everything in their power to alienate the Hispanic vote, which is the most rapidly expanding demographic segment of the American electorate. They have done nothing at all to win the Asian-American vote, although one would have thought they might have a shot at making some headway there. They have as much as told the LGBT vote to take a hike, and now Peter King has opened Congressional hearings designed to convince the three million American Muslims that they cannot find a home in the GOP fold. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, Republican governors have launched a frontal assault on the union vote, always more likely to vote for the Democrats but not yet so overwhelmingly as the Black vote. And now, having more or less run out of people to alienate, they have decided, in Wisconsin, Florida, and elsewhere, to take on the perennially most popular employment category -- teachers.

Will someone explain to me the deep, subtle, as yet unrevealed rationale for this strategy?

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

Faithful readers of this blog will recall the fun we had some while back with what logicians call The Fallacy of Composition. I invoked it to explain why education is not the solution to the growing and disastrous income inequality in the United States, and then several readers spent a good deal of time and effort correcting my errors in the explanation of the Fallacy [although they graciously conceded that the thrust of my argument was undiminished by those errors.] Now, as Marinus notes, no less a notable than Paul Krugman has worked his way around to the same conclusion, although not, as it happens, for the same reason. [See his column in the NYTIMES today.]

Krugman points out that many of the relatively well-paid jobs now held by college graduates are either (a) replaceable by automated computerized systems or (b) easily outsourced to comparably well-educated but much cheaper workers located elsewhere in the world. [My favorite example, which he does not cite, is the outsourcing to India of the task of reading MRI and XRay results, with no noticeable delay whatsoever. I find it genuinely weird that a technician in Chapel Hill can perform an MIRI scan on my sinuses -- say -- and a little later receive back from Mumbai or wherever the report that I seem to have a blocked sinus over my right eye.]

Krugman then goes on, I am delighted to say, to draw the correct conclusion, which is that if we want to improve the wages and living conditions of American workingmen and women, we need to do it from the bottom up by labor solidarity and collective bargaining. Here is the money quote, as they say in the trendier blogs:

"So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen."

Right on! I take this to be a bit of fallout from the demonstrations now taking place in Madison, Wisconsin and elsewhere across the American MidWest. Do I sense something blowin' in the wind?

THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION PART TWO

Let me continue with the reflections I began yesterday. First, some additional facts and figures from the Wikipedia article I referenced. According to the same Census Bureau figures I was citing yesterday [the Wikipedia article is well footnoted, so that one can hunt up the original documents], in 2009 somewhat more than 55% of the adult population 25 or over had had "some college." This figure includes both people who had attended Community Colleges, whether or not they earned Associate's Degrees [a two year degree, for those reading this from overseas], as well as the many people who had enrolled in a four year college or university program but did not completed it in order to earn a Bachelor's Degree. Note that this is almost twice the number who had actually earned a Bachelor's Degree.

Several observations: First, this means that close to half of all adult Americans have no post-secondary educational experience whatsoever [leaving to one side vocational programs and the like.] No clearer and sharper marker of a class divide in American society could be imagined. The more than forty percent of adult Americans [eighty million plus] who have never so much as entered a college classroom are for the most part invisible in the public world of communication and entertainment. Professional basketball and football players, of course, with very rare exceptions, have enrolled in four year colleges. [Recall the practice at the start of professional football games of introducing the players not only by their position but also by the college they attended.]

Second, these facts have profound implications for the role of the Humanities in the public life and discourse of American society. When I was young, it was understood that only a small fraction of the high school population would go on to college. Hence, secondary education was supposed to introduce teenagers to some simulacrum of the life of the mind and the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. Indeed, in the successful campaign to require young people to remain in school at least until their sixteenth birthday, this was one of the principal arguments that was used to justify so revolutionary a social change. Students back in the forties, when I was going to Forest Hills High School in Queens, New York, were required to take a Civics course that made at least a stab at explaining the functioning of the American political system. We were also exposed to Music Appreciation, and although it left something to be desired [I still cringe every time I hear "Night on Bald Mountain"], it was for many in the class the first time they had ever heard "classical" music. Elevated and well-meant discourses on the importance of the Humanities for the life of a citizen of a democracy are unintentionally misleading when they unthinkingly assume that what they are talking about concerns the entire population. At best, they are referring to the potential educational experiences of between a third and a half of that population. Left unsaid is the implication that the half to two-thirds of Americans who will never go to college can never really be citizens in the full sense of the term.

As I continue this discussion about the future of the Humanities, I will have to spend at least some time trying to think about how what is of lasting value in humanistic education can be brought to the entire population of America, not merely to the fortunate upper half or third.

Although the focus of this discussion is not the extreme economic inequality of American society [that is deserving of its own extended discussion], I do wish to introduce into these remarks a few facts and figures on the relation of education to income, before setting aside the Wikipedia article and moving on to other aspects of our topic. As I am sure you all know, there is a very striking correlation between formal educational attainment, as measured by degrees earned, and both weekly median weekly wages and annual household income.

A brief word of explanation about the nature of the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] data. The Household Survey that the BLS carries out on a regular basis generates information about weekly wages and salaries for a very large number of employment categories. Because of the nature of the survey, these data do not also tell us how many weeks a year the respondents work, although the BLS does also generate data on the numbers of workers employed full-time in a given year. It requires some adroitness to extract from the data a usable snapshot of the American economy.

At any rate, herewith some bits of data that paint a quite stark picture of the difference in life experiences of those who do and those who do not succeed in earning post-secondary degrees. These data are from 2003. I have not taken the trouble to go online and seek out more recent data, but that does not really matter for the points I am trying to make. Nothing has changed very dramatically in the intervening years.

The median annual income of someone with only a high school degree was in 2003 $28,763 for men and $15,962 for women. [Median, recall, means that half of all persons in the category earned more, and half earned less. Averages are always skewed upward because of the existence of a certain number of outliers at the upper end of the scale.] The median household income for persons with only a high school degree was $36,835. [From which we can conclude that on average, more than one person in the household was in the labor market. I assume this means that the highest degree earned in the household was a high school diploma. In the household I grew up in, for example, both my father and mother worked, but only my father, who earned an M.A. in Biology, had a college degree. My mother was forced to drop out of high school and go to work before she graduated. Despite that fact, she spent many years as the secretary to the City Editor of the old Herald Tribune newspaper. My sister and I, both of whom earned doctorates, always thought that she was the one with the brains in that marriage. but I digress.]

The median income for men with a Bachelor's Degree was $50,916 and for women $31,309. The median for men with a doctorate was $73,853 and for women $53,003. Median household income for households with a Bachelor's Degree $68,728. The median for households with doctorate was $96,830.

Think for a moment about the actual life experiences of people living in a household with an annual income of $36,853 as compared with those living in a household with an annual income of $68,728. The first family is going to be living very much from paycheck to paycheck, with virtually no cushion for the hard times when one of the wage earners loses his or her job. medical expenses are going to be a major problem. Two wage earner households will be juggling the use of the single aging car on which both depend. Children will be able to look forward to hedged chances, at best, for a college education even if they are star pupils, and almost certainly they will be forced to take on crippling student loans if they do go on to seek a Bachelor's Degree. Housing costs will gobble up a very large fraction of the monthly income, and it will be almost impossible to save for retirement. The second family's life chances are dramatically better, although they too will think of themselves as constrained by their limited resources. Two cars will certainly be an option, as will college for the children, at least at the local State College campus. What is more, starting with birth, the children are far more likely to be exposed to an array of experiences intended to prepare them for college and acquaint them with that possibility. I can tell you from my experie3nce directing a school-to-college program for minority high school students in Springfield, Massachusetts that one of the biggest obstacles we faced was the fact that the parents of those kids did not even think of college as a possibility. It was simply not on their radar.

The income differentials are not merely the consequences of the differences in educational attainment. They are also a determinant of those differences for the next generation. Hence the class structure and inequality of American society is, as we like to say in Marxist circles, reproduced by the social relations of production. [I love talking that way, even though in this case it doesn't really add much to the discussion.]

Well, enough for one day. Tomorrow, perhaps we can begin to talk about what is happening to the Humanities in American colleges and universities. Later on, if I keep this discourse going, I want to return to the questions raised here about what role, if any, the Humanities can play in the lives of the non-college bound majority.

PANDERING TO MY BASE

Political commentators on the left, in which group I include myself, are generally rather contemptuous of Republican politicians who pander to their base by pretending, by winks and nods and code words, to share the off-the-wall nuttiness of the birthers and their fellow crazies. Just this past week brought us the spectacle of Mike Huckabee, first spinning a weird narrative about the effect of the Mau Mau movement on young Barack Obama, growing up in Kenya, and then attacking Natalie Portman, on the occasion of her Oscar success, for bearing an "out of child wedlock." [He really did say that, honest.]

Well, in my own small way, I am, I fear, prone to a bit of pandering to my small base. Some of my blog posts spark a spirited and lengthy comment thread, and that does, I admit, prompt me to post similar materials in hopes of evoking more comments. Other posts, even ones of which I am rather enamored, stimulate little or no response. One of my most favorite all time students, who is now embarked on a wonderfully successful career, publishing book after book, keeps urging me to post recipes from my Paris apartment and details of my private life, so I do my best to satisfy her taste in blog posts. The occasional "tutorials" I have attempted, on how to study society or the thought of Karl Marx, seem to draw an interested audience, so I cast about for another topic on which I might hold forth for multiple posts.

At the moment, my mind is focused on the subject of higher education. I have already put up on this blog my draft proposal for a center or project devoted to the study of the fate of the Humanities in higher education. I am going to carry on with that topic for a bit, sorting out thoughts that are not yet fully formed. I hope this will spark some interest, even though it will contain no recipes and very little personal information.

Meanwhile, for those following events in the Middle East, as I am, let me strongly recommend two sites as worth regular visits: Al Jazeera English, and Juan Cole's Informed Comment [Google both to get their urls.] In a remarkable recent speech, no less a personage than the United States Secretary of State criticized American network and cable news for the vacuity of its coverage of the Middle East upheavals and actually commended Al Jazeera in English.

So, to higher education. Let me begin with some statistical measures of the exposure of Americans to higher education. These figures come from a rather well written and quite informative Wikipedia article on "Educational attainment in the United States." The lengthy article is full of useful information, but I am going to devote this post to the first and simplest set of data -- the percentage of adult Americans who have completed high school and the percentage who have earned a first or Bachelor's Degree. Here are the numbers: In 1950, roughly 32 % of Americans 25 or over had completed high school. A bit more than 50% of Americans 25 to 29 had completed high school. In that same year, only about 6% of either group had earned a bachelor's degree. Over the next half century, both of these figures rose pretty steadily, so that in 2000, close to 85% of both groups had completed high school, and just under 30% of both groups had earned a first or Bachelor's Degree. In the following years, the proportion of the population over 35 who had finished high school crept up a bit, and the proportion earning a Bachelor's Degree continued to rise slowly.

Now, there are all sorts of interesting data in the article breaking these figures down by race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as details about average weekly earnings, average household income, and so forth. There is even a fascinating final section that introduces the usually taboo subject of class and ties it to the data in the article. But I want to pause at these initial data and reflect on what they tell us about the real America, not the America portrayed on television or talked about in political speeches.

Even now, after fifty years of steadily increasing exposure to higher education, SEVEN IN TEN ADULT AMERICANS DO NOT HAVE A BACHELOR'S DEGREE. And this is as true of young Americans in their later twenties as it is of the entire population, including senior citizens who went through their young adulthood at a time when a college education was much less common. That means that almost the entire array of good jobs is closed forever to that seventy percent. They cannot hope to be doctors, lawyers, architects, college professors, high school teachers, elementary school teachers, corporate executives, or dentists, and their chances of being considered for a wide range of other jobs is small to nil. Wall Street, advertising, medical technicians, insurance company executives? Not likely.

These are not a ragtag group of left-behind sad sacks who somehow goofed off and so never got that BA. These ARE America. There are a bit more than two hundred million Americans 25 or over, and roughly 140 million of them do NOT have Bachelor's Degrees. In short, the norm in America is not to have a college degree.

I would imagine, judging from the comments, that everyone who reads this blog either has a first college degree or is on track to acquire one. Indeed, a rather large fraction of my readers have doctorates, I would guess. And yet nationwide [leaving aside the visitors from abroad], fewer than 3% of Americans 25 and older have earned doctorates.

In short, working class America is America, by any reasonable interpretation of the data. That puts the protests in Wisconsin in a somewhat different light, I think.

I shall continue with this line of thought tomorrow.

A REPLY TO MICHAEL

Michael asks what a program or center or institute for the humanities, like the one I sketched in my previous posts, might actually do to address the concerns I voiced there. Let me spend a little time offering some preliminary answers.

My friend and former student in the Duke Philosophy Department remarked, when I adumbrated this idea to him, that it was a losing battle. I suspect he is right, but someone who brazenly describes himself as an anarchist, an atheist, and a Marxist ought not to be dissuaded by the prospect of a losing battle. I have been fighting losing battles all my life. So, what might I hope to accomplish by this endeavor?

First of all, it would be useful to gather together what has been written on these subjects and try to frame a comprehensive world-wide overview of developments in higher education over the past decades. I have been relying in my own thinking on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, for the most part, and although I have a fairly wide-ranging array of anecdotes and experiences, they are no substitute for systematic investigation. This could usefully result in publications or on-line summaries made available to all those around the world whose concerns are similar to my own.

It would also be useful to make explicit the important differences between American universities and their counterparts elsewhere in the world. For example, we here are accustomed to the notion that a student should devote at least some time as an undergraduate to a broad range of introductory courses designed to give him or her a foundation in "General Education" or "Liberal Education." But that is very much an idiosyncrasy of the American tertiary educational system. Elsewhere in the world, it is customary for students to be admitted not simply to a university but to a course of study, to which they devote themselves entirely during their pursuit of the first degree. There are a wide range of such differences among tertiary institutions that bear directly on the prospects of the Humanities.

Speaking now primarily of the American case, there has developed a deep divide between the way in which the natural sciences are funded and they way in which the Humanities are funded. For a long time now, scientists have been accustomed to seeking external grant and contract funding as a regular part of their on-going budgets. For them, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are the bedrock of their financial survival. They have long since accepted the idea that they must craft their research agendas and proposals so as to match the funding priorities of the NSF, the NIH, or other agencies and foundations. When I have talked about this with colleagues in the Humanities, I have found many of them resistant to the idea of shaping their research to secure funding, believing that to do so would be a corruption of their scholarly work. Humanist scholars may need to adapt to the realities of current funding opportunities if they are to survive in the Academy. This would not be the first time in history that humanists accommodated themselves to the wishes of wealthy patrons! I think of Haydn composing more than a hundred chamber works for the little known and rather uninteresting instrument called the Baryton simply because his patron had managed to master the wretched object. Or Bach, who for years composed a cantata weekly, asking not what the ideal assembly of voices and instruments would be but rather who was in town that week and could be called upon to perform.

Let me give one personal example that may stand as an illustration of the sort of creative search for funding that I have in mind. When I began my twelve year tenure as Graduate Program Director of the doctoral program in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, it was immediately obvious to me that the most important thing I could do for the program was to find sources of funding for the graduate students. Unlike better endowed universities, UMass was woefully short of money for graduate study, and since we were a new program, older and better established departments in the Humanities had already laid claim so the available money for Teaching Assistantships. A thorough search of lists of foundations revealed that there was almost no money available to support graduate study in the Humanities. Foundations simply assumed that it was the responsibility of the home university to provide that funding. But there was money available to support the educational needs and aspirations of minority undergraduates. So I created a teaching and mentoring program for UMass incoming minority freshmen, using our Afro-American Studies doctoral students as the tutor/mentors. I was then able to secure more than a million dollars in external funding for the program [which, by the way, was extremely successful.] With this and a number of other dodges, fiddles, and supplications, and the fortunate assistance of a sympathetic Dean of Graduate Studies [later Provost], I was able to provide full funding for every student in the program for twelve years. This was not the way I would have liked to handle things, but it was a solution to an otherwise intractable problem.

It would also be useful to develop powerful and plausible defenses of the Humanities as a component of the life of the mind and the public life of a democratic community. It is not an accident that the most penetrating critiques of the economic, political, and social orthodoxies dominant at any given time have so often come from the ranks of humanist thinkers. That fact may not recommend the Humanities to the powers that be, but in a rich and complex society, it may serve to encourage financial support from some quarters.

Well, that is a brief indication of the sorts of things a new center might be able to do in order to address the increasingly parlous state of the Humanities in tertiary education. A losing battle, no doubt, but one worth fighting. And besides, it might give me something to do as I move into my eighties.

THE STATE OF THE HUMANITIES

As I think I have mentioned on this blog in the past, for some time I have been deeply concerned about the condition of the Humanities in universities world wide. Earlier today, I drafted a brief statement that might serve as the basis for a conversation with some folks at the UNC Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts and Humanities. I post it here and invite comments and reactions.

A Proposal to Establish a

Program for the Defense of the Humanistic Disciplines

in Higher Education

Robert Paul Wolff

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and

Afro-American Studies

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Organized centers of humanistic learning have been a feature of Western civilization since the founding of Plato's Academy in the fourth century B. C. In the middle ages, wandering bands of scholars and students established what we now call universities not only in Europe but in the Islamic world as well. By the late nineteenth century, the German university had become the model for scholars everywhere, serving as the template for the transformation of American colleges into modern universities. By the middle of the twentieth century, Oxford and Cambridge had replaced Berlin and Freiburg as the premier centers of humanistic learning. When I was a young student at Harvard in the fifties, a chance to spend a year or two at Oxbridge was a prize to be cherished. In the later twentieth century, American universities became the gold standard worldwide for higher education, and students flocked to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Madison, Chapel Hill, and New York to enjoy the inspiration and excitement of world class intellectual communities.

Originally, Philosophy formed the core of what students learned at university, to be joined by theology, law, medicine, languages, literature, history, and, later on, by mathematics, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, physics, chemistry, and biology. Although the roster of disciplines embraced by the university grew steadily longer, it remained well understood for most of this two and a half millennia long tradition that the Humanities stood at the core of higher learning. It is worth recalling that when Newton wrote the Principia, what we call science was still referred to as Natural Philosophy, while the economic treatises of Adam Smith and David Ricardo were classified as a part of Moral Philosophy.

The last third of the twentieth century was the golden age of the American university, and like all golden ages, it has faced the danger of decline. For several decades now, the core Humanities in university education have been under assault, both from without and from within. Emphasis on the immediate vocational rewards of an increasingly expensive education have driven students away from languages and literature, philosophy and history, classical studies and linguistics, and drawn them toward programs, departments, faculties, and schools that held out the promise of immediate employability. The dramatic contrast between the experimental sciences, capable of securing major external funding, and the Humanities, much less able to attract grants and contracts, has resulted in a hollowing out of traditional departments. Doctoral programs have been cancelled, independent departments brusquely conflated, teaching loads increased, and tenured faculty replaced by part time contract instructors without benefits or security of employment. At the same time, university governance has experienced an influx of trustees and administrators from the world of business with very different ways of measuring success and failure in an institution. Nor are these changes confined to the American higher educational scene. Quite to the contrary, they are a world-wide phenomenon, occurring in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, as well as in North and South America.

Many of these changes have occurred quickly, under pressure of budgetary exigency, without adequate reflection on their implications for the core mission of the modern university. There is a serious need for sustained, thoughtful, fact-based investigation of the changes taking place, their causes, and their justification or lack thereof, as well as for creative proposals for accommodations to external pressures and demands that hold out some hope of preserving into the present century the accumulated wisdom and valuable educational tradition of the past two thousand five hundred years.

For all these reasons, I should like to enter into a discussion with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill for the purpose of exploring the possibility that the concerns sketched here might be addressed in a program associated with the Institute. Rather than attempt an outline of such a program, I would instead welcome the opportunity for conversations to see whether this idea resonates with folks at the Institute. I have already had several fruitful conversations with Pete Andrews and David Dill of the Public Policy Department, and would welcome the a chance to continue the conversation at IAH.