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Article Excerpt
In 1964, the historian J. H. Plumb announced a crisis in the humanities: "Alas, the rising tide of scientific and industrial societies, combined with the battering of two World Wars, has shattered the confidence of humanists in their capacity to lead or to instruct." (1) Plumb's lament would not be the last; indeed, in every decade since 1964, in addresses to professional organizations and in op-ed pieces, on blogs and in commencement speeches, humanists and their critics have warned of one crisis after another. Sometimes challengers from outside--scientists, social scientists, administrators, politicians, or advocates of corporate or utilitarian values--threaten. At other times, humanists themselves come off as the culprits, trafficking in obscurity, reaction, or political correctness. Whatever the cause, those who worry have no trouble finding signs of crisis: declining proportions of students and faculty positions, low funding inside the university, a diminished audience beyond the academy, disorienting shifts in the demography of students and faculty, and dislocating theoretical importations and innovations. (2)
Surprisingly, however, today the humanities in the United States are holding their own in an intensely competitive jostling of universities, departments, and faculty for students and resources. As the Humanities Indicators Prototype sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reveals, humanities disciplines show signs of regained balance, integration, and growth, even if other fields, often vocational, are growing faster. Humanities faculty and what they teach retain authority and respect in public and private institutions, large and small. Many thoughtful and articulate students in the best schools in the country emerge with degrees in the humanities. Faculty and students from around the world come to the United States to share in its broad and robust tradition of humanistic research and teaching. (3)
To understand why the tradition of crisis shapes our thinking and self-perception, even while some of the reasons for worry have abated, we need to understand the many contexts in which the humanities live. They live in departments and disciplines, of course; but they also live in new places, in new forms, and in new combinations.
Though the phrase "the humanities" bears the patina of an ancient Western tradition, just as its creators intended, the aggregation of disciplines bearing that name is only about a hundred years old, taking form in the United States early in the twentieth century. The humanities played a critical integrative role as American universities moved away from training in the classical languages, the teaching of moral philosophy, and prescribed curricula. The humanities emerged as a sort of secular glue to hold together the disparate components of a higher education system assembled from elements of German research universities, Oxbridge tutelage, and French training for civil service. Humanities disciplines evolved alongside the sciences and social sciences, each new cluster of disciplines fostering, challenging, and defining the other. The idea of the humanities developed simultaneously with the machinery of the humanities.
Despite its utility, the concept of the humanities grew slowly and uncertainly until, in the 1930s, it became established in the curricula of elite institutions from the Ivy League to Chicago to Berkeley. Soon thereafter, the humanities began to anchor general education requirements across an ever-expanding range of institutions. World War II galvanized the concept of the humanities in the United States, demonstrating the need for humane understanding in a world descending into chaos. The ideological, institutional, and demographic environment of the postwar United States fueled remarkable growth in universities and in the humanities departments established there. Over the thirty years after the end of World War II, the number of undergraduates in American higher education expanded by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students by almost 900 percent. The baby boom produced an apparently endless supply of students, better educated than any generation before. And two-thirds of them--a larger portion than today--went to college. (4)
As the federal government focused on science and engineering in the cold war, the humanities and social sciences flourished as well. Between 1955 and 1970, in fact, the proportion of students receiving degrees in the liberal arts rose for the first time in the twentieth century. Humanities departments expanded, and thousands of faculty members won tenure. In 1965, Congress, with the enthusiastic support of President Lyndon Johnson, endorsed the humanities. The legislation that created the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) declared that "because democracy demands wisdom" the NEH "serves and strengthens our Republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans." Bringing to bear a model and a rationale not unlike those created to foster science and the social sciences in the cold war era, the federal government became a patron to humanities departments already flush with new students, facilities, and faculties. The NEH and humanities foundations in each of the states would, over the coming decades, invest hundreds of millions of dollars in humanists and their work, giving government sanction to the very concept of the humanities and disseminating humanists' work throughout communities in every...
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