Humanities Scholars Debate Whether Anyone Is Listening to Them
by RICHARD BYRNE
The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 20, 2005, Friday
Philadelphia — In recent years, concerns raised by humanities scholars
in the United States about the dire state of academic publishing have
deepened into an even more basic re-examination of the mission of
the disciplines themselves: Are the humanities — via publishing or
pedagogy — attempting to reach a wider public? Is anyone listening
when they do speak?
Such questions were raised again this month at the annual meeting
here of the American Council of Learned Societies, in a panel on “The
Humanities and Its Publics” organized by Pauline Yu, the organization’s
president. The discussion enlarged the debate by bringing in the
perspectives of scholars embroiled in public debates elsewhere in the
world and representatives of organizations that straddle academe and
the public sphere.
David Marshall, a professor of English and dean of the humanities
and fine arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, gave
a brief survey of what he deemed to be a “misalignment” between the
humanities and the public. Mr. Marshall noted that increased public
interest in cable-television channels such as the History Channel and
the Discovery Channel signaled an “appetite” for humanistic discourse
that remained generally unsatisfied by academics. He also said that
the unexpected re-emergence of religious belief as “a central issue
of our time” had posed a conundrum for the humanities.
The first presenter was Ivo Banac, a professor of history at Yale
University and a member of Croatia’s Parliament. Mr. Banac focused on
the very close attention that various audiences in the Balkans had
paid to his own scholarship on the former Yugoslavia. Mr. Banac’s
1984 book, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History,
Politics (Cornell University Press), was used as a political football
in the years preceding the disintegration of that nation, where it
was championed, attacked, or ignored by various political and ethnic
factions.
“Debates connected with history and culture are a significant moving
force in southeastern Europe,” Mr. Banac observed. Scholars involved
in such debates, he noted, “have a tremendous responsibility not to
capitulate to nationalist pressures … idealizations, or populism.”
Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics in the
Divinity School at the University of Chicago, placed responsibility
for the “perceived public deficit in the humanities” squarely on the
academy’s side of the fence.
Decrying an academic culture that proffers mainly “critique” to the
public, Ms. Elshtain offered a model of scholarly public engagement
as practiced by figures such as the 19th-century social activist
Jane Addams as an alternative to the status quo. Among the services
provided to working-class Chicago residents by Addams’s central
project, Hull-House, were night classes, an art gallery, and a library.
“If we speak clearly and honestly,” said Ms. Elshtain of the public,
“they will listen. They are out there.”
Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation, urged the audience to grasp opportunities “to move from
the pastoral grove to the cities of urgent events.” Mr. Weisbuch,
who will become president of Drew University in July, argued that
the United States was undergoing “a cultural boom and academic bust
simultaneously,” and that “it is not the world that has refused the
humanities; it is the humanities that have refused the world.”
“Reconsidering that choice,” he concluded, “should be the chief duty
of a new generation of scholars.”
In the discussion period following the presentations, one questioner
wondered if the “idea that things are complex” was being lost in the
rush to clarify and amplify the voice of the humanities in public
debate. Ms. Elshtain acknowledged that much of the “moral nature of
art” resided in “moral dilemmas” that “are not solved at all.” But
Mr. Banac cautioned that “there are certain terribly important
controversies that cannot be left to ambiguity.” Citing the Armenian
genocide of the early 20th century as an example, Mr. Banac said that
“we have to be able to say that certain things happened, and assign
a certain responsibility.”