Keep Off the Humanities

Intellectuals become quite unnerved when we common folk do our own research in what they call “the Humanities.” Maybe that’s why they keep inventing new branches of it.

This trend was on display at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) annual meeting in Seattle that drew thousands of English professors. “A look at corporate management manuals in the case of those adopting the ‘pinnacle’ of canonical humanities, namely Shakespeare, reveals some of this potential auto-critique,” Donald Hedrick of Kansas State University declared in a panel at the MLA.  “While some manuals adopt Shakespeare for ‘higher wisdom’ through quotations to be used to add ‘culture’ and sophistication to one’s memos, others actually engage in interpreting and considering the plays and characters in such a way as to critique their own practices, even to the point of observing that corporations now suffer a great moral and ethical decline over the business practices of earlier days. “

“ At the same time, we witness corporations increasingly adopting the humanities for their own purposes, as in workshop practices in communication and creativity.  The assault on the humanities may thus be countered by a guerilla offensive in our own territory.”

“At first, to ask ‘What do students need from the humanities?’seems to place students in the very consumerist subject position that critics of neoliberalism’s influence on higher education forcefully reject,” Karin Gosselink of Yale, another MLA panelist, argued. “ However, I would argue that the most progressive and effective transformations within the humanities in previous generations have arisen from identifying and responding to the needs of students.”

“For example, Judith Halberstam points to the movements to institutionalize ethnic, postcolonial, gender, and queer studies and their transformation of the humanities in the last decades of the 20^th century as a model for the responding to the decline of the humanities today.  I suggest that these movements were motivated by the needs of greater numbers of women, minority, immigrant and lower-income college students entering college for the first time.  The study of culture—and the transformation of what it means to study culture—was affected by these students’ desires to use their education to make sense of both the new social position they occupied through their college educations and the historical, social and cultural experiences that shaped their multiple communities. A more direct engagement with the social and cultural mechanisms of neoliberalism in our research and teaching—an effort already under way for many veterans of the culture wars and their intellectual allies—is crucial to meeting the needs of contemporary students who often struggle to articulate their experiences and positions in relation to the neoliberal order.”

By the way, “neoliberal” is not an appellation that MLA panelists applied with affection but it may be the closest many of them have come to conservatism.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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