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Humanities on the free market
Will the academic humanities survive the twenty-first century? Frank Donoghue says no. Do they need to? No again. In fact, the humanities could well be better off without the academy.
In the economic climate of the last 40 years, traditional universities—not just for-profits—are becoming both research-and-development labs and vending sites for multinational corporations. The state of affairs bears most directly on universities in the public sector, as documented in Gaye Tuchman’s meticulous and depressing ethnographic study, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Since the 1970s, public higher education has ceased to be considered a civic responsibility and has become another kind of entity. James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996, acerbically characterized the trend during his tenure: “We used to be state-supported, then state-assisted, and now we are state-located.” He’s right. Today the University of Michigan receives about 8 percent of its operating budget from the state.
Thus universities have had no choice but to function increasingly as corporations and to form partnerships with corporations, and this turn of events fundamentally alters their institutional dynamic. Research was the first to feel the effects. The Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 stipulated that federally financed research done by faculty members that results in patents belongs not to the professors but to the universities that employ them. Of course, the legislation is only relevant to applied sciences—areas like hypertension studies, for example. But the prospect of marketable products (patents) makes universities an appealing investment for corporations, in particular, because those corporations now have to negotiate only with upper-level administrators, and not with an assortment of free-agent faculty members.
More generally, Bayh-Dole also inaugurated the era of earmarked corporate donations. That, in turn, is important because such sources of revenue are all that’s keeping state universities afloat. Ohio State, for example, ranks third in the country in bringing in corporate donations. Elite private universities, by contrast, rely much more heavily on alumni donations. Top recipients of those funds were Washington and Lee University, Bowdoin College, Princeton University, and Cornell University.
The shift in the material base of the university leaves the humanities entirely out in the cold. Corporations don’t earmark donations for the humanities because our research culture is both self-contained and absurd. Essentially, we give the copyrights of our scholarly articles and monographs to university presses, and then buy them back, or demand that our libraries buy them back, at exorbitant markups. And then no one reads them. The current tenure system obliges us all to be producers of those things, but there are no consumers.
So, will the humanities survive the 21st century? My guess may surprise you, in light of the trends I’ve just rehearsed: Yes.
Intelligent popular novels continue to be written; the nonfiction of humanists who defy disciplinary affiliation (Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Garry Wills, among others) will still make best-seller lists; and brilliant independent films (like Slumdog Millionaire) will occasionally capture large popular audiences.
The survival of the humanities in academe, however, is a different story. The humanities will have a home somewhere in 2110, but it won’t be in universities. We need at least to entertain the possibility that the humanities don’t need academic institutions to survive, but actually do quite well on their own.
Some people may argue that, even if the humanities flourish outside academe, some group will have to train the new generation of public humanists how to read and write. Perhaps, but I see no compelling reason that those trainers must be college professors. There were many great poets, playwrights, and novelists in the United States long before 1922, when the University of Iowa became the first university in the country to accept creative projects as theses for advanced degrees. Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, persuasively charted the migration of humanists from the world of literary magazines to academe. As working conditions in the humanities wing of the university continue to erode, what’s to stop those humanists from migrating again?
When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the 21st century, we’re really asking, “Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?” That’s not really an intellectual question but a self-interested professional one, because we humanists would like to see ourselves as stewards of the curriculum. In reality, though, we are not, nor have we been for the last two generations. Curricula change over time, and the humanities simply don’t have a place in the emergent curriculum of the 21st century.
Donoghue teaches English at Ohio State; his latest book is The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.
Ironically, if faculties could get behind the idea of a strong core curriculum, they would be ensuring the place of the humanities in the university well into the future–as a vital part of every college student’s necessary two-year general education in the liberal arts. They would have to live with the fact that it’s really no longer terribly viable to major in English or art history or philosophy–let alone to vastly overproduce PhDs in those fields. We’d see the shrinking and perhaps consolidation of departments–and the shrinking and consolidation of majors and graduate study. We’d also, perhaps, see those fields become more oriented around rational vocational training for careers in things like high school teaching. And that is a very good thing.
The decline of the academic humanities tends to be talked about as a tragedy. But it’s not a tragedy to adjust in ways that serve students well. It’s only a tragedy for those wishing to occupy tenured positions in moribund fields–and that’s not a tragedy at all. It’s a reality check.
The financial part of his argument isn’t obvious to me. Although humanities may not be getting corporate donations, they also don’t need expensive lab space, equipment, and supplies. Surely a proportionate allocation of tuition dollars, plus whatever endowment and state support exists at a given university, is enough to pay for the direct costs of humanities professors and (cheap) adjuncts, plus a fair allocation for facilities??
If the above assertion is *not* true, then maybe the reason is humanities professors spending a very high % of their time on research rather than on teaching. Or maybe the administrative burden charged against these departments is excessive…probably excessive against *all* departments, but the better-funded science & business departments can more easily bear it.
“They would have to live with the fact that it’s really no longer terribly viable to major in English or art history or philosophy…”
This always irritates me. When, exactly, *was* it viable to major in English or art history or philosophy? One can make all sorts of noises about the changing economic order, etc. etc., but people have been cracking jokes about English majors driving cabs since… well… since there have been cabs. It’s not like we *just* discovered that an understanding of Restoration drama doesn’t translate directly into a career in trading commodity futures.
Clearly higher education is changing, becoming more corporate, etc. But I don’t see why that has to be the death-knell for the humanities within academia. I don’t harbor any illusions that throngs of students will flood into the universities to study post-structuralism, but I’d like to think that there will still be a place for students who want to talk about books, ideas, etc. And even if I’m on the wrong side of the great, unstoppable Hegelian movement of history, so be it. I enjoy what I do.
Peter, The issue is the changing ratio of college debt to earning potential. When you and I went to college, it was a LOT cheaper in adjusted dollars. And I don’t know about you, but when I decided to major in English, I never thought twice about whether that would lead to a job that would allow me to make ends meet. I knew I wasn’t on a high income track, but I didn’t have to worry that I was on a track to perpetual debt or near-insolvency. Today, as the New York Times noted in a striking article last spring, a great many humanities majors are carrying more student loan debt than they will ever be able to get out from under. They should either be attending less expensive schools or majoring in something that will pay dividends–but they aren’t, and schools that carry on as though an English major is just as viable as an engineering major, just as worthy of six figures in debt, are not being responsible. The bursting of the law school bubble is placing additional pressure on humanities majors–making a decent income with a law degree, and having lots of choices about how to use that degree, are no longer the “sure thing” they once were.
I’m glad you enjoy what you do — but it’s really not about that. It’s about the economic relationship of your job–of the courses you teach and the students you train–to the public you serve. Higher ed is making that an increasingly non-viable arrangement when it comes to the humanities. That doesn’t mean the humanities are not valuable. Far from it. Nor does it mean there won’t always be a place for students wishing to talk about books and ideas. But it does mean that, as I noted in my post, studying the humanities as an undergraduate major or as a grad student is verging on an endeavor that only the independently wealthy can afford to do. And it suggests that, to avoid that fate, the workable option for the academic humanities going forward may be something along the lines of spearheading general education, preparing teachers, and offering enriching minors and electives for science and social science majors.
If faculties could get behind the idea of a strong core curriculum, they would be ensuring the place of the humanities in the university well into the future–as a vital part of every college student’s necessary two-year general education in the liberal arts….
As I pointed out a couple weeks ago, at my school the humanities are still very much a part of the gen-ed curriculum. We require students to take three out of four of the following: music, visual art, theatre, literature. Each student takes three out of those four, but because of the “basket” style of the requirement, no single one of these classes is technically a “required class,” which apparently led ACTA to misleadingly describe my school as simply not requiring the humanities. I suspect the same is true of many other schools, and to the extent that outfits like ACTA are driving these laments about the death of the humanities in academia, well, the reports are probably premature.
At my own college, humanities majors continue to hold their own. One reason is that we have a huge teacher-ed division, and would-be secondary-ed teachers don’t major in education. They have to major in English, theatre, music, whatever. That keeps our numbers up. But plenty of other students major in English/Liberal Arts, English/Creative Writing, etc.
I’d say that at the upper-division and graduate levels, the future of the humanities in academe rests ultimately on student choices. The shift to corporate/grant funding might not have as much effect as some are saying. As state support dwindles, what becomes most important at the undergraduate level in the humanities is tuition. Any program that can keep up its FTEs will do fine, even without six-figure grants. You don’t have to make the big bucks, just break even. If you’re in a discipline that just doesn’t attract grant money, what you do to survive is recruit students. In the humanities, that was much easier when the wave of idealism in the 60s pumped the numbers up, and much harder when the pragmatism of the 80s brought them down. These cultural trends are complex and overdetermined and hard to predict long-term. Who knows what 2110 will bring? Not me. Not Frank Donohue.
Erin…”When you and I went to college, it was a LOT cheaper in adjusted dollars”..and the question of WHY it is so much more expensive now really needs to get seriously analyzed. Have average instructional costs (in adjusted $) gone up? Seems unlikely, with all the underpaid part-time instructors. Have classes gotten much smaller? Are professors spending a much higher % of time on research vs instruction than they used to, so that a higher overall payroll is needed for a given number of students? How much of the problem is due to administrative overhead plus the edifice complex? How about subsidies for athletic programs?
A serious and detailed look at these questions might yield some interesting results.
“I’m glad you enjoy what you do — but it’s really not about that.”
With apologies, it’s not about the humanities either. It’s about the price of a college education that is out of control. Today it’s the humanities that don’t (always) pay dividends. Soon it’ll be computer science and biomedical engineering. I think we agree on that.
And lest I appear to be selfishly indulging myself by hoodwinking students into majoring in the humanities, I do recognize that students are burdened with debt and I understand the human cost of not being able to get out from under student loans. This is why I advise students to think about life after college and to consider teaching careers and/or to combine a humanities major with another more “practical” minor. To some, it may well seem that I’m in denial. I just don’t believe that abandoning the entire enterprise would be doing my students a service.