It’s a true fact that in the U.S., the humanities division
of higher education is in trouble.
Students are voting with their feet and staying away from history and
English and other humanistic venues.
I’d like to take a moment to address the problem in a way
that most humanities professors and administrators do not seem to emphasize
and, in some cases, reject. It’s called
practicality.
In one practical move, the humanities need to go back to
classical basics, except I’m not talking about teaching Greek and Latin and
rehashing what used to be the grand narrative of Western Civilization. Many Greek and Roman thinkers and teachers
(the categories are not necessarily exclusive) were empiricists and nascent
social scientists. Aristotle’s writings
on rhetoric reveal a mind keenly aware of how public discourse functions, how
political arguments get put together, and so on. Whereas many English Departments and colleges
farm out the teaching of rhetoric to graduate students and adjuncts, Aristotle
embraced it as essential. I doubt if
he’d have much time for most of what the Modern Language Association represents.
At my own university, the English Department decided to
manipulate the notion of “writing across the curriculum,” which was never meant
as a replacement for first-year composition, and have the faculty at-large
teach in the form of “first-year seminars.”
One problem, of course, is that writing really isn’t getting taught the
way it should be, in most cases. I don’t
blame the faculty who have taken on the seminars. I blame English for jettisoning their
responsibility—not just English at my school, but English across the
profession. A second problem is that
those students who once became interested in the humanities by means of a
first-year composition course now never have the opportunity. A third problem is that enrollments in English courses have plummeted. Of course.
So my first suggestion is to re-embrace rhetoric, not just
at the first-year composition level, but also with new courses in public and
political discourse. In an age when
these two areas of communication are undergoing revolutions, English
departments are sitting on their hands.
It’s ludicrous.
My second suggestion is to find out, in detail, why students
are walking and wheeling away from humanities.
Hire social scientists, if necessary, or even if it’s not necessary, for
we know how humanities types love their confirmation bias. I know I do.
I’d be delighted to be proved wrong by data, but my
moderately informed guess is that students will take ethnic studies classes in
history and literature even if most of them may not choose to major in such
disciplines. African American and Latino
Studies classes at my university continue to attract a lot of students, even as
enrollments in English plummet. It makes sense, at least on first glance, for
just as public/political discourse is undergoing a revolution, conflict and
cooperation between and within ethnic groups is another area undergoing
revolution. Why wouldn’t students—of all
ethnicities—energized by Black Lives Matter and related events and conditions
be interested in ethnic studies courses that dovetail with these phenomena?
Think of students as citizens. That is how Aristotle and Quintillian thought
of them—if you feel the need to seek classical approval. The original seven liberal arts were rooted
in civil practicality. That’s why they
included arithmetic, rhetoric, and music.
How beneficial it would be for students to learn how the blues, for
example, massively influenced later genres of popular music but also the
American culture at large. Ethnic studies courses—in a variety of humanities
departments—think of students as citizens, too, he wrote, climbing on his hobby
horse one last time.
Yes, that’s right, I’m invoking the call for relevant
courses that arose in the 1960s. No, I’m
not suggesting that colleges base their humanities curricula on whatever
students deem relevant. I am suggesting
that colleges look at what’s happening in society, how young people are
responding to some of what’s happening, and adjust accordingly. Besides, ethnic studies have come of
age. Texts are more widely available
than ever. The scholarship and pedagogy
are seasoned.
If, in English, it’s creative writing students want to take,
then offer it—in the forms of poetry, fiction, and screenwriting, among
others. Offer playwriting. Teach journalism. Teach blogging. Teach
magazine-writing, including online magazines (obviously). These are all opportunities to refine
critical thinking and sharpen writing in general. If you, personally, recoil from such courses,
then hire someone else to teach them.
Keep teaching what you teach, but get out of the way. Please.
I don’t want to drift too far from the main point of my
second suggestion, however. Get
empirical. Find out what students are interested in academically and why. Make some adjustments based on the data. You
don’t need to burn your dissertation (although you should stop trying to teach
it) or give up on your pet critical and cultural-studies theories. Just suspend your beliefs and find out what’s
really going on. If necessary, respect your youngers, a radical concept, I
know.
Finally, I’d suggest reaching out across disciplines and
campuses to find unlikely partners. When
I served briefly as the director of the writing center at U.C. Davis (about a
hundred years ago), we were interested in pairing upper-level writing courses
with courses across the curriculum. I made cold-calls to many departments and asked if they’d be interested
in a partnership. I vividly remember
picking up the desk phone and calling someone in in wildlife science. Pretty soon a writing course taught to
students in that field materialized.
I’m not suggesting that anyone ought to turn the cold call
into the primary mode of reviving the humanities, although it couldn’t
hurt. It’s probably more practical and
workable for people in the humanities to reach out across their own campuses,
to walk or wheel or drive to other departments and start with a tabula rasa,
asking how you might collaborate with business departments & schools,
education departments, engineering, sciences, and social sciences. Teach all kinds of professionally applicable
writing and socially vibrant literature courses.
Be peripatetic. Get over yourselves. Get out there and mix with students and
colleagues. Attend conferences outside
your specialty and outside humanities.
Go on the road, see what’s what. Ask
questions (not rhetorical ones). Shut up
and listen. Revive the humanities brick by empirical, grounded, socially alert,
sometimes old fashioned (rhetoric), innovative brick.
