Losing history

Losing history: reflections on Humanities Watch’s fifth anniversary

When, at a college sustained by the spirit of the American Friends Service Committee, whose volunteers helped re-build Europe after two World Wars, would the teaching of the history of these wars be considered useless?

When, at a college founded in 1837 by a group known for its anti-slavery activities, and whose campus is a site of the Underground Railroad, would the teaching of the history of Civil War be considered useless?

When, at a college that proclaims its commitment to diversity and racial equality, that was the first co-educational institution of higher education in the South, would the teaching of the twentieth-century civil rights movement and women’s history be considered useless?

That time is the present one.

To say that we live in strange times may be an understatement, self-evident to even the casual observer. But to make this claim, even this observer would note, requires an understanding of history and of the historical context that shapes this understanding. The college where I have worked for over a generation has justified the elimination of historical subjects, and the discipline itself, by providing historical arguments about the need to do so. Strange times, to be sure, when useless history is nonetheless the basis for determining what is useful. This is a paradox well-known to those conversant in the history of Taoism and to others, who have seen the use of the useless. In our strange times, when we discard what we deem useless while still employing its worth, the paradox becomes a contradiction.

Pay as You Go

The financial conditions of this college, like that of many others undergoing stress and re-structuring, have been created over years of events and decisions. The analysis of these past decisions remains to be done – should it ever be deemed useful to do so – while the way forward is the one trumpeted by journalists (historians of a sort) working in the offices of financial magazines. Teach those subjects that provide ROI, return on investment, ones that offer students a secure stream of income immediately after graduation.

For determining the future, the arguments go, one need only look at the recent past, the last 5-10 years, in order to see the way the economic winds are blowing. A college must navigate these choppy economic times by becoming nimbler, and this requires fewer personnel, especially those endowed with the privileges of tenure, since these privileges isolate faculty from the pressures of financial and demographic change.

2020 thus heralds the mindset of a more structural administration. Deliberative consensus yields to executive decisions; collaboration among various groups in an academic community – faculty, administration, staff, alumni/ae, students – becomes secondary to the determinative ideas of a few people. These people may remain at the college for a short time, and their transit exemplifies their vision of things: wandering administrators and wandering scholars who come together in temporary communities to meet the perceived needs of the moment. The mindset makes use of history, more recent events, to dispense with history.

Tenure, then, that imagined redoubt protecting free speech and independent inquiry, a word that conveys a “holding” and endurance, dissolves like a sandcastle under the waves of these executive judgments. Administrations depart from, or ignore, long-held arrangements by claiming different, legally-secured authority, which free them from historical precedent and entanglements.

Yet for those that take a broader view of this moment, the break from tradition has its own historical example and warning. Like fifteenth-century popes, these administrators seek an unfettered degree of authority over the messier, more quarrelsome process of conciliar debate and deliberation. The papal victory came the price of their reputation and power, for these depended, in the end, upon their ability to persuade and command respect, which was anchored in fidelity to historical agreements.

Dithering and withering

The “crisis of the humanities” is therefore a signal for the larger crisis in higher education. When administrators can decree what is useful or what is useless on the basis of recent historical calculation of income and expenditure, and cull their faculty accordingly, then others may reasonably ask about the underlying implications. Is a college now a training facility for employees in the current workforce, or should it provide something more, in accord with its stated mission to offer a “transformative education”, guided by time-honored testimonies? Or since an institution’s mission should express its current operational ends, perhaps the college’s mission should change, in order to reflect the administrative calculus: it offers its students a preparation for the present workforce, if a preparation, at least in theory, bolstered by a liberal arts faculty.

Yet the crisis of the humanities remains an apt phrase. The history of this crisis, so often cited and repeated that we have ceased to examine it more closely, has convinced students, parents, and educators that the humanities, and perhaps the liberal arts generally, are relatively useless; this history has enabled those currently in command to slate the humanities for elimination. The irony, of course, is that it is history that presides over history’s demise, perhaps a history of “data” over a history of “facts,” to use Jill Lepore’s distinction, but history nonetheless.

The crisis has its historical echoes. Poets and thinkers have often lamented the cultural state of their times. In the 1930s, Yeats wrote of “that high horse riderless / Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode.” Albert Camus, in the 1950s, stated that “a part of me has despised this era without measure.” And in the 1970s George Steiner spoke of living in a “post-culture.” What are we to say of the present age?

If we take history seriously, we inquire into multiple causation and agency. What is our role in this history? What are we to say? The great strength and vulnerability of the humanities is that it attends to the personal voice, rather than to the statistical collective of the social sciences or the impersonal forces of the natural sciences. It is through this attention, this concentration, that the humanities distill the truths of human experience. And so we may read and hear them at every age, in their ongoing relevance.

We can listen to John Donne’s words in his sickness:

… all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

The bell doth toll for him that think it doth….

            Who now hear the bell? Do they now think it tolls for them? Is it a bright, summoning sound, or a distant, muffled noise from a far-away land? How do they respond to the bell – with silence or with speech?

For a related post, see here.