Can the Humanities Change?

We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

W.H. Auden, who wrote an entire book-length poem about anxiety, expresses pretty well here what many colleagues in the humanities feel these days. I contributed a piece to Inside Higher Ed that explains this anxiety and discusses what the humanities can and cannot deliver when it comes to their role in higher education.

Would we Rather the Humanities 'Be Ruined Than Changed'?

"Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy.

Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term “kρίσις” to describe a “turning point”; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging.” In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate “sieving.” Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat."

..... READ the full essay at Inside Higer Ed

Denominators: Higher Education, humanities, translational humanities, applied humanities, crisis and the humanities, The Last Professors, Not for Profit, Rescuing Socrates, Cultures of Complaint, Hubris, servile and liberal studies, gentlemen's education, Oxbridge, STEM and the humanities, humanizing STEM, hyperbole and the humanities, ancillarity, anxiety, medical, health, digital, environmental and energy humanities, in science and technology studies, computational media, and music technology