Beyond a “Rhetoric of Crisis”:

Beyond a “Rhetoric of Crisis”: Contemporary Challenges in Strategic Planning & The Critical Role of Humanities Centers in the 21st Century • Gregg Lambert, • Dean’s Professor of Humanities • & • Corri Zoli, Ph.D. • Grants & Research Consultant • Syracuse University

Introduction: From “crisis rhetoric” to changed reality Context and Trends in Funding (“Just the Facts”)—CorriZoli • Data Collection on Humanities Health and Performance • Decline in Federal Funding for the Humanities • Student Participation: Undergraduate and Graduate Humanists • Current PhD Workforce • The Political Economy of the Humanities (“From Practice to Theory”)—Gregg Lambert • “Crisis?” “What Crisis?” • The Quagmire of Defining the Humanities • Redefining Research: The Three Models. • From Critical Practice to Practical Theory: Framing the New Mission of a Humanities Center

AAAS Report, Making the Humanities Count: The Importance of Data (2002) Robert Solow notes: “The humanities community knows deplorably little about what is taught to whom and by whom, how long it takes, where graduates and post-graduates go, what they do when they get there, and how many of them there are, which the sciences have long benefited from...

Lack of national data collection on humanities health and performance (like Science and Engineering Indicators every other year by the NSF) • Anti-data bias: Why? • Anti-science source in poststructuralist critiques of foundationalism so that an epistemological ground-clearing exercise became an institutional prescription • An anti-assessment attitude prevents our involvement in an ongoing conversation with our 3 largest stakeholders: educational institutions, the public, and government policy makers. • Institutional elitism – the humanities have often distinguished ourselves in the pursuit of academic elitism – not publicly engaged scholarship with real communities—despite our declining status with respect to scientists and social scientists, and despite our theoretically egalitarian rhetoric. CONTEXTUAL FACTORS AND INDICATORS

Five Observations: • There is a severe decline in federal funding for the humanities: 140 million in 2007 vs. NSF 6 billion • That gap was not made up by private foundations or university-sponsored research: in 2002 the humanities share of all foundation funding was 2.1%; in 2006 spending on humanities R&D by universities amounted to 0.45% of the amount dedicated to S&E • Undergraduate and graduate humanities degrees have declined since the 1980s:amounting to 8% in 2004 of the share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded; 2% of all masters degrees awarded; and 8% of all doctoral degrees awarded, placing the humanities 2nd to last in field rankings (the arts award fewer doctoral degrees) • Jobs in humanistic occupations: Total 2.53 million, 2% of all employment in early 2000s • Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) data shows median years from start of grad school to doctorate award is greater than in all other fields: 9.2 in 1979, 9.7 in 2004 • SED data show that in 2004 the proportion of humanities Ph.D.’s leaving the university with a job commitment was 56% HUMANITIES INDICATORS PROJECT (2009)

NEH BUDGET ALLOCATION 1996-2007

The Political Economy of the Humanities • Anatomy of a Crisis: Competing Definitions • The State of the Humanities • Three models of research • From Critical Practice to Practical Theory

Crisis? What Crisis? ?

Crisis unexpected (i.e., a surprise), creates uncertainty, and seen as a threat to important goals. Creative: the need for change. If change is not needed, then the event is a failure The Four Characteristics of a Crisis

The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.” New York Times, Feb. 24th 2009

Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason. Rockefeller Commission Report

The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters. We cannot reasonably expect, that a piece of woollen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation, which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected. The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science. Profound ignorance is totally banished, and men enjoy the privilege of rational creatures, to think as well as to act, to cultivate the pleasures of the mind as well as those of the body. The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become. 18th Century Definition: David Hume

Question of whether there has been a “de-funding” of the Humanities & the Arts culturally, or rather, a “de-legitimation” of the “professional” humanities disciplines in Higher Education? • Whose “rhetoric” is this anyway? (i.e., does the crisis rhetoric of professional and academic humanities accurately describe the situation in K-12, or in increasingly globalized cultural knowledge and production generally?) • Who is the “human” in the “humanities”? (i.e., the subject of the inquiry, the one who wants to know) • The Slippery Slope Hypothesis: The import of “French theory” into traditional Liberal Arts education from the 1970’s, carrying particularly “anti-foundational” and “anti-humanist” sentiments, has been viewed by some to precipitate a “broken contract” with the Nation. Critical Theory is a knife that cuts both ways. The Unresolved Problem of “De-Legiitimation” in Humanities

CAUTION! BEFORE ASSEMBLING – How Not to Define the Humanities “Center” (institutionally, politically, globally) The Critical Role of the Humanities Center in the 21st Century

Three models of Research: considering humanistic inquiry as having three modes that are not mutually exclusive and maintain a flexible approach that is conditioned by initiative and by user: • Traditional Disciplinary research—Viewed as pure, disciplinary, homogeneous, expert-led, hierarchical, peer-reviewed, and almost exclusively university-based (i.e., the trickle down theory of use). • Transdisciplinary research: vs. static inter-disciplinarity, transforms disciplinary frameworks and assumptions in the process of knowledge production (eg. Perpetual Peace, TdMS) • Publically engaged research or “scholarship in action”: integrating knowledge production with community needs in order to create the capacity to solve increasingly complex problems; introduces user as an active participant in the creation of new research agendas. (eg. Mellon Forum on Public Scholarship) The Critical Role of a Humanities Center

The Mission of a Humanities Center is • to provide shelter disciplinary research in a time of institutional volatility; • To temporarily house new forms of inquiry and new research topics that cannot be readily accommodated in existing disciplinary frameworks or curricula (always keeping the need for new models of assessment in mind; • To actively construct a nexus of connectivity between the local university culture, the surrounding community and local cultural institutions, bridging the divide between creation and analysis in the arts and humanities. • To visibly network the physical location of the Humanities to regional, national, and international nodes in an increasingly global university-world brain, reinforcing the continued importance of conferences and colloquia, even in new digital formats. The Critical Role of a Humanities Center

Finally, Collaborating across units, disciplines, Colleges, and institutions is extremely difficult and often subject to the law of entropy • Re-thinking fiscal habits and proclaiming the gospel of cost-sharing • Busting the Myth of External Funding as the Holy Grail, the perfect solution to the humanities problem of resources. • Creating regional and multi-institutional Humanities Corridors to share resources and talent – undo the compound culture of the university • Seeking “Radical Inter-Disciplinarity”: Reframing initiatives and proposals to develop new approaches to familiar issues (i.e., digital humanities) and seek funding from less traditional sources (not NEH, NEA) but from NSF. • Never saying “no” to a good idea because of ever-present funding constraints. That is the job of Deans, not Directors. • If all else fails, start over from 1.

Beyond a “Rhetoric of Crisis”: