Roundtable Book Club - Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

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Permalink Reply by Kim Anderson on May 13, 2011 at 10:34pm

I struggle with this question "how to make a case for the humanities." Mostly because, as a non-academic I want to scream that people everywhere, every day are "doing" the humanities. Granted, usually not very well. And a return to a focus on liberal arts education could no doubt improve that situation. Still, I think our insistence on "doing" the humanities a certain way, may get in our way.

This conversation is focused on Nussbaum's book, "Not For Profit" and I share her concerns about the state of humanities education.But I pause at the suggestion that we should be arguing the humanities case because it's good for business. Not because that isn't true, it might be, and her and others arguments make sense. But I believe  it's an argument that a capitalist system will never really buy. It's too long game, and not easily quantifiable on the bottom line.

The case for the humanities has to do with basic human dignity. It has to do with the quality of life we want in our country, in our communities and in our personal lives. People able to think critically may indeed be more profitable for corporations, but if we cede the battleground to that criteria, I think we lose. 

I have watched the arts and humanities communities turn more and more to business models, and quantifiable results evaluations in order to respond to our current political culture. And it makes me want to weep in frustration. Because the conversations I have with people of all economic and cultural levels in Montana, and what I know in my heart, is that the humanities aren't quantifiable on any business growth chart, or economic indicator, they're important because we're human and feel a need to talk, read, think about our roles in our communities, our world, our inner lives.

I think we all need to work to change the prevailing political model, rather than fit our argument to their idea of what a "successful" human being is.

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Ken Egan on May 14, 2011 at 2:21pm

Great comment, Kim.  So maybe we should shift our appeal from doing the humanities to nurturing/supporting/building what's already going on?  Something like, "Look around--the humanities are happening all the time.  Let's build on that."  Okay, not very snappy--but in the right direction?

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Permalink Reply by Gerald A Fetz on May 17, 2011 at 9:18am

I agree wholeheartedly with these comments that both of you, Kim and Ken, added to our discussion in the last couple of days! I do think that we "professors" and other humanities "professionals" spend a lot of time and energy trying to articulate why the humanities are important, even essential and critical, for individuals, citizens, societies, students, etc., but it is clear that we aren't winning the battle with a large segment of our population, both off-campus and on. I am convinced that these attempts (such as Nussbaum's) are VERY important, especially for us who work in the trenches, think about these issues on a daily basis, attempt to improve humanities education in formal and informal situations, but they also don't seem to be having much influence on many who are in the positions of setting educational policy, developing curriculum, and otherwise setting agendas where the humanities could and should be front and center but are relegated to the back row or absent altogether.

Back to your insightful comments: we do have GREAT STORIES and we should both tell them and get others to tell them more often. Our stories --whether from literature, from history, from philosophy, from personal experience, etc.-- are more likely to affect and influence our culture and those who seem not to "get it" about the humanities than our Cassandra cries, even than our laudable attempts to articulate why the humanities are important. I'm not sure we do a very good job of this on college campuses or in schools in general, although there are certainly teachers who do so very effectively and transform through their work and passion and love of history, literature, ideas, their students. We should support them however we can, help them and other teachers be more effective. And, my own plug for the work of public humanities and the state humanities councils-- the work that they and you all do in providing humanities-soaked experiences for citizens of all kinds is absolutely essential to all of this. Bravo and keep up the great work. And may it grow.

 

My next posting in a day or two will focus on a few other recent books that should be of interest to thos of us who are reflecting on ways in which we might make the humanities apprear more relevant, exciting, and important than currently appears to be the case. Enjoy the sunshine on this lovely Montana morning. 

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Permalink Reply by Gerald A Fetz on May 21, 2011 at 10:18am

This posting will be brief--it's a beautiful Saturday morning here in Missoula! First, just a quick follow-up on my last comment above. One suggestion for how to get "stories" about why the humanities are important, not just for those of us in the Humanities "professions," but specifically for the broad range of people who are not, is to collect them--anecdotes, testimonials, stories of all kinds. One example: a few years ago I was on a fundraising trip to Seattle for the UM Honors College, and one of my former students, a 40-year old who was in a high management position at Microsoft, organized an informal dinner in a restaurant and invited seven or eight other UM grads. They were all in important positions in Seattle businesses, most of them had business degrees from UM. I asked them why they thought they had been so successful and had been promoted so quickly in their respective companies. I said: "UM's Business School must be very good." To a person, they said "yes, it is, but that's not why we have done so well. And each of them said it was "because they had experienced wonderful and challenging and eye-opening humanities classes at UM, classes that taught them to read widely, challenged them to think and write clearly and critically, classes that exposed them to literature, history, philosophy." I asked then if their co-workers, those who were passed up for the positions these UM grads were promoted into, didn't have that kind of background. They told me that most of those co-workers had had much narrower undergraduate backgrounds and, even with MBAs, didn't seem to have the kind of skills and backgrounds and creativity that their companies needed in the higher levels. My former student who had organized the dinner had been in one of my Introduction to the Humanities courses for all three quarters of the sequence twenty years before. He cited that course--the content, the lively discussions, the many writing assignments--as his best example. Others mentioned history courses, literature courses, philosophy courses, writing courses. I mentioned this experience in Seattle with UM grads to the Dean of our Business School, and he said that didn't surprise him, and, perhaps more importantly, he said that he tells undergraduates that if they intend to get an MBA in Business, they should get an undergraduate degree in a humanities or social science major.

 

And to make good on my promise of suggesting a few recent books besides Nussbaum's that might be of interest to those who spend a good deal of time pondering the issues, the "crisis," that Nussbaum raises and that we have been reflecting about in this discussion, here are a couple.

Sections of Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges' "Empire of Illusion. The End if Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," is a wide-ranging analysis of our society and some of the things that he finds wrong with it. One can see readily from his title that it is both polemical and hard-hitting. It's a pretty depressing analysis, which he tries to "save" near the end with an assertion "that all is not lost, however," but the book's strength lies in its analyses of those parts of our American (and Western in general) society and culture that are superficial, subject to substituting entertainment for substance, material goods for ethics and thinking, yelling at one another rather than striving for civil discussion about important matters.

 

Another hard-hitting book the title of which gives away its appproach and suggests the polemical tone of the book is Jennifer Washburn's "University Inc. The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education." It deals at some lengthy with some of things that I termed the "over-professionalization" of the curriculum and that Ron Perrin termed its "commericialization." It, too, is worth reading.

 

Finally, at least for this posting, I want to mention Marjorie Barber's new book, "The Use and Abuse of Literature,"  which is a wonderfully thought-provoking discussion of why literature and reading and discussing and thinking about literature is important in our technological age, but she also talks about how technology can be used to make this happen more broadly. I haven't read the entire book yet, but will keep reading it over the next couple of weeks. So far, so good.

 

And now to get outside and enjoy this wonderful day.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Perrin on May 26, 2011 at 3:17pm

Hey all,  I'm finally starting to catch up with you and the discussion. While I havn't finished the Nussbaum I do have a few random observations.

First, the term I used to desciibe what is happening to higher education was "commodification," not commercialization.  The latter is far too general to get at what I think is at issue here.  The former refers to the process by which higher education has become a commodity, that is to say, something whose value is determined with the exchange of goods and services. To qualify as a commodity something must, therefore, have exchange value.  It must also have some use value but with the increasing commodification of higher education its use value becomes merely a feature of its exchange value.  Put somewhat differently, its use value is subordinante to its exchange value.  In this sense, as a commodity, a college degree has value only if it can bring a

price in the market place. 

Absent that it might still have some use value but that would be little different than the value of a hobby.

 

t

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Permalink Reply by Gerald A Fetz on May 26, 2011 at 3:33pm

Ron--my apologies for mis-quoting you. I should have gone back and checked your earlier comment. I think that "commodification" does aptly describe what has happened in many ways to higher education in the US. I also think, however, that it has also become "commercialized," in that clothing (in our case, Griz gear), memorabilia, junk magazines have largely replaced books in our "book store;" we have sold exclusive rights to Coca Cola to sell its products on campus; we sometimes twist our priorities to suit a donor , a contract funder, a grantor, etc. But, again, I think you're right about the "commodification" of degrees, and that's why, I suspect, fewer students than earlier are willing to select a major (history, philosophy, languages, English, Liberal Studies, etc.) that many have become convinced don't have much market value when it comes to getting that first high-paying job. And, once again, our society seems to have come to view a college or university degree primarily as "training" for that job, not as education for life, for citizenship, for meaningful work, for the essential background for the professions.

Nice to have you back in the discussion.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Perrin on June 1, 2011 at 3:04pm

Hey Jerry,  I thought I had sent you a longer reply but I seem to have some trouble transmitting the whole of my remarks.  At any rate they were about my irritation at Nussbaum's repeated references to critical thought as though everyone understood precisely what that involves.  It is more than the willingness to question tradition or pursue a Socratic dialogue.  It would have been helpful if she had noted the importance of identifying tacit assumptions that more often than not "support" the truisms of tradition.  Assumptions about, for example, what is the definiing characteristic of  human nature, e.g. Aristotle "some men are by nature slaves." and how such assumptions seek to legitimize a particular political order,e.g. Adam Smith, "man has a natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange."  Beyond that the critical theory I cut my philosophic teeth on is motivated by an interest on human emancipation. Here the model is Plato's Allegory of the Cave, not just any instance of Socratic dialogue.   I'll admit that with this I am assigning philosophy a privileged seat at the humanities table but I wouldn't for a minute want to discount the crucial role of literature, history, and all those other perspetives Nussbaum highlihts, for good reason, e.g. the ability to walk in others' shoes. 

 

One further thought:  While it may seem at odds with the spirit of liberal/tolerance that we in the humanities so value I cannot but conclude that it is up to those in positions of leadership and influence in academia to be a bit authoritarian and insist that, like it or not, the students at every level must study the humanities.

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Permalink Reply by Ken Egan on May 31, 2011 at 5:01pm

Thanks so much for leading this crucial discussion, Jerry.  This is one of those threads that folks will return to often as they mull the fate of the humanities in our schools, colleges, universities, and public.  We NEED good books, good ideas, good conversations.   These are not luxuries--they're public utilities, every bit as important as water or electricity.   

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Permalink Reply by Tyler Pankratz on December 6, 2011 at 4:54pm

 

Would we have writers and free thinkers or people that dedicate their whole lives to making something for everyone to enjoy without the humanities? We might, but probably not to the extent or variety that we have right now. I think without the humanities the world would be a boring and dull place. I also wonder if we do sacrifice our humanities for more and better technology, what the results would be. We might advance a lot faster and have a better understanding of some of the problems that we are facing right now that need those technological advances as soon as possible.

 We don’t have to go to the schools that don’t believe as we do because we can make that choice. There is always going to be the people that conform and "go with the flow", just as there will always be those who don’t give a damn and are going to do whatever they want to do or whatever makes them happy. So I agree and disagree. I don’t think we can totally be to one side of this argument if we want to survive and advance. I believe we need both humanities and technology, and as much as some people might think and argue about it, we will never lose either one of them.  

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