Metapsychology, an online review of newly published academic titles, features a review of What Science Offers the Humanities by Asian Studies professor Edward Slingerland. Slingerland’s book stands as one of many interventions in the long debate over “consilience,” the harmonic convergence of speculative and empirical modes of knowing. (Engine of Souls offers some interesting riffs on this concept, tying it to Frank Herbert’s Dune of all things. I guess one need no longer ask, “The worms … the spice — What is the connection?”)
Coined in 1840, but given contemporary currency by biologist Edward O. Wilson, consilience has proven an exceedingly fraught issue, partly because of the complexity of the factors involved (basically, a whole slew of unsolved mysteries of human cognition), and partly because deeply entrenched interests have clear incentive to see that it’s never resolved. Many careers, many egos, depend on consilience’s forestallment (a shame, really, considering the concept resonates so strongly with so many, if Consider Bookhling‘s florid endorsement is any indication). So-called institutional legitimacy rests on clearly marked disciplinary borders within which are incubated methodology, terms of art and other arcana. From such hermetic environs academic disciplines are born.
It may just be the case, however, that such disciplinarity (an ugly, unnecessarily abstract term, I know), has outlived its usefulness. Conditions might now be such that this practice has become not just a hindrance, but a positive liability, especially when considered in light of the consumer model taking over American universities.
This consumer model posits students as rational, freely acting clients who wish to engage the university in a business transaction, one which has the effect of transforming matriculation from an experiential good (an activity engaged in for its own sake) to a financial and temporal investment in market-value-enhancing credentials. The actual duties of matriculation — attending lectures, passing exams, satisfying curriculum requirements — become a kind of kabuki theater, the conclusion a forgone one, provided the student adheres to the choreography.
As a client, the student retains a contractual right to satisfaction, and the university, as the contracted party, finds itself obliged to deliver satisfactorily that service. This means that, when it comes to curriculum and course content, the student finds herself empowered to an unprecedented extent. Students essentially vote with their feet and their checkbooks, their tuition become just so many shopping dollars. Those programs students flock to win favor over those students shun, an assessment which shakes out in terms of graduation rates in those programs.
University humanities programs have of late been graduating fewer majors each academic year. This trend no doubt involves many factors, but chief among them is the fact that it’s really hard to see how pursuing a humanities degree returns value on tuition capital outlay, a consideration which in turn influences funding that, as Brad Johnson of an für dir sich points out, remains consistently inadequate. (As a holder of a humanities degree or two myself, I can attest to having the question, “So what are you going to do with that?,” put to me more times than I care to count. I always sense that implicit in that question is the judgment that I did something foolish with my money. My store may lie in Heaven, but it’s likely that, given the decisions I’ve made concerning my education, the store will go out of business before I can get there.)
Honor roll: university humanities headed for the big flush.
And it’s not as if humanities programs have responded particularly smartly or nimbly to the universities’ creeping consumer model. No, beholden as they are to their hairsplitting and doctrines, they can simply find no place in this new market. This recalcitrance may be attributable to certain proud holdouts among the tenured faculty, those still clinging to heady Maoist dreams of 1968 (a tip of the hat to Timing Error); but it may also be attributable to the disciplines themselves. The marketability of a literature or art history degree is an extremely tough sell. About the best such degree can offer is status in certain ever-shrinking circles or wan validation of one’s repudiation of the rat race.
Edward Slingerland draws a similar conclusion. Reviewer Ralph Harrington, Ph. D., summarizes Slingerland’s assessment thusly:
Students motivated by love of art, literature or language are put off the academic study of these fields by militant theoretical indoctrination; humanities academics are locked into self-perpetuating games of linguistic theorization that have no engagement with the real world; the humanities have shut themselves away both from the world of everyday life and the realm of other disciplines of human knowledge, above all the natural sciences. Why is this, and what is to be done?
The needle which the humanities must thread is a difficult one, indeed. The consumer model adopted by many American universities demand that their clients, students, gain satisfaction from the service rendered; which in Harrington’s example means “students motivated by love of art, literature or language” having this love undisturbed by their instructors. Problem is, precious little in “love” can be turned to account, academically speaking.
And even if it could, it’s not exactly certain it should. It’s all fine and good if, for instance, my child enters the university believing that storks bring babies to parents. But if she leaves the university still believing this, I might wonder what all the time and expense was for.
In other words, students’ professed love of art, literature or language does not oblige instructors to limit themselves to only the sort of teaching that leaves this love undiminished (whatever sort of teaching that might be). After all, this seeming innocence conceals within it all kinds of assumptions — perhaps consciously made, perhaps not — which betray privilege, security, affluence and other similar advantages necessary for the cultivation of this love. To call students’ attention to these implications is not to murder love, but is simply to establish the fact that their love does not really proceed from any ineffable affinity or oogy vibe. This is what humanities instructors mean when they talk about “challenging students’ assumptions” — an incredibly valuable service by any measure.
So much about value hangs on perception, however. If value means knowledge which leads to personal growth which leads to wisdom, then, the humanities are a veritable Croesus, But if value means fungibility in market relations, then the humanities are a veritable Raskolnikov.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
August 13, 2009 at 22:18
Exactly when or where–besides in Plato’s Academy and the pot-addled “brains” of liberal arts graduates–has education ever been pursued for its own sake?
August 14, 2009 at 06:37
Well, I would say tentatively that, from at least the High Middle Ages through the Renaissance to at least the middle decades of the twentieth century, education was considered a sort of experiential good. I can say with some certainty that it was common for prosperous middle-class fathers to send their sons to schools or to tutors to get the sort of education usually reserved for their aristocratic “betters.” This education’s curriculum was heavily oriented to what we now call the humanities — classical humane letters and whatnot. It was more bourgeois fathers’ hope that their sons would acquire a sort of gentlemanly, erudite polish rather than a set of marketable skills from their matriculation. Admittedly, the ultimate goal in many cases was quite venal; this “polish,” the hope was, would win sons consideration in affluent circles. But the curriculum contents didn’t necessarily reflect this social goal.
Only when later reformers like T. H. Huxley, H. G. Wells and the like began demanding that curricula admit more science, did one see course content and pedagogy begin to reflect directly the demands of the larger economy, which required constant technological innovation as a way of sustaining a margin of profitability for industrial capital (Marx discusses this at length in volume 1 of Capital) — and this instrumentalization of higher education proceeded apace, gaining further impetus with the Bayh-Dole of 1980, which conferred unprecedented patent rights to universities, but then used these new rights as a pretext to cut state funding. This meant that universities had to survive by reinventing themselves as research-and-development “outsourcing solutions” in order to generate patents and thus profits.
And, of course, the fact that the United States today isn’t nearly the locus of innovation it once was hasn’t done much to change this trend, because it now reflects the fact that some 21 percent of the economy is FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). For the life of me I cannot understand why most American universities have business schools, which have more in common with other trade and tech. schools than they do with other university departments. There’s nothing particularly scholarly about business schools; they’re devoted more to the immediate concerns of perpetuating the rat race. But they attract and graduate a lot of students, which means they attract a lot of tuition dollars. So they’re here to stay. . .
August 16, 2009 at 13:58
That isn’t very convincing. Under your analysis, what made education in days of olde an “experiential good” rather than a positional one was solely the intent of the educated (through their parents) and perhaps the educators.
Even today there are people who educate themselves for no other purpose than to learn, and for these people, education is a good in itself. But so what? Speaking sociologically, the indivual intent does not absolve them. Quite the contrary, it actually proves their own false consciousness. These poor fools are revealing their belief in meritocracy, and the so-called classless society. But even if they have overcome that false consciousness, does their intent, anecdotal and unfalsifiable as it is, somehow transform a positional good into an experiential one?
August 16, 2009 at 17:51
Hmm … if, as you say, a hegemonic meritocracy always already constrains learning to a status of a positional good, then I guess we can never see our way to establishing learning as an experiental good, in a pure sense.
Your objection appears to suggest that we have only two options: buy into a game which we are at any rate compelled to play, or … I don’t know … go off and live in jelly jars.
August 17, 2009 at 13:23
Isn’t the idea of learning for its own sake—the quasi-spiritual pursuit of knowledge without ends or consequences—the very definition of living in a jelly jar? Now, I never said that all learning is only or always a positional good. Among other things, learning has been and continues to be simultaneously an experiential good and a positional good, like the vacation abroad that is not only an enriching experience, but also an opportunity to prove to others that we are cultured, virtuous, and financially comfortable. But education is supposed to do something more than enthrall or give us a sickly sweet sense of superiority: it should have a positive effect outside the realm of the educational experience itself. It seems to me that, at a minimum, an education should improve our ability to understand the world and to get along in it. If enrollment in humanities programs is on the decline, it is probably because these programs fail to provide useful skills, or fail to provide those skills to a degree that is commensurate with the cost of that education.
Though I once voiced similar concerns and complaints about the banking or consumer model of education, I now find those complaints and concerns repellant. Academics and university administrators like to talk about the banking model of education because it absolves the institution and professoriate from any blame for declining enrollment (a code word that professional educators use to mask their crass but practical concerns with revenue) and the growing demoralization within the humanities. But the cost of this absolution is laying the blame for all the problems of the humanities on their students, who had no say in the organization, structure, or curriculum of the university, and who are, in fact, powerless to change it. In any other context, this critique would be met with incredulity and laughter, but in the academy it is greeted with nods of approval and knowing looks. How would you feel about a general who blamed his battlefield failures not on himself, his officers or the superior strength of his enemies, but on the supposed attitudes of his freshest recruits.
When a student pays a small fortune or goes into debt for an education, doesn’t she raise a valid point when she asks what value she is getting for her money? Doesn’t she have a right to ask whether she is wasting her time and money, and whether she will leave the university with few skills, fewer prospects, and a debt-load that is so overwhelming that she will spend the next two or three decades paying off her indenture?
Such questioning is at least as old as Plato. Though it may seem like the mark of the philistine, these questions seem like a crude example of the critical thinking that academics esteem so highly. Strange that critical thinking is not so beloved when aimed at academics themselves. If the humanities are rudderless and purposeless and viewed with disdain, the fault is probably not with the students who continue to ask such questions, but in the professors and administrators who have either failed to understand and acknowledge the legiticamy of these questions or been unable to provide a satisfactory answer.
August 17, 2009 at 13:45
Point taken, Werner. I guess I can only say with Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.”
My thesis is precisely that the increasing bottom-line orientation of universities has enfranchised students to an unprecedented extent. They exert tremendous influence on curricula, university structure and the like. Everything from the dumbing-down of course content (student-centered learning), to student retention, to the closing or hybridizing of certain programs and departments (mostly in the humanities, it bears mentioning) reflects precisely the shopping-dollar demands of students, directly or indirectly.
Of course, the sort of enfranchisement this involves is the rather paltry one of market determinations — a notion that we can push the world in the political direction we’d like to see by shopping with our convictions so as to create or depress demand in line with one’s personal politics. But university administrators have shown themselves rather willing to submit to this kind of influence. So students’ political power grows apace.
And I should say that your notion of university’s obligation to train students in a sort of general critical awareness accords with my own notion of “experiental good,” which I distinguish from a notion of positional good in which education is consumed in order to signal one’s status to others as a way of claiming a perch somewhere in the pecking order.