In Defense of Poetry
Marjorie Perloff One of the most common genres in writing about academia today is the epitaph for the humanities. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Weisbuch–an English professor at the University of Michigan and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation–declares: Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities–it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it–is supported by dismal facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities fields has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty research has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the humanities and in other fields has widened, and more and more humanists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries…. As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turning out more and more graduates who cannot find jobs, the waste of human talent becomes enormous, intolerable. More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We have lost the respect of our colleagues in other fields, as well as the attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We are living through a time when outrage with the newfangled in the humanities–with deconstruction or Marxism or whatever–has become plain lack of interest. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.1 Devastating as that last comment is, it’s all too accurate. Even the current boom in the economy cannot accommodate the best of our new humanities Ph.Ds. Weisbuch does also offer some “solutions” (he calls them “Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities”): (1) gather data on our departments, finding out where our graduates get jobs so as to insure better planning; (2) practice “doctoral birth control,” using Draconian means to cut down the number of entering graduate students; (3) “reclaim the curriculum” by having all courses taught by full-time faculty members rather than adjuncts; (4) “create jobs beyond academe for humanities graduates”; (5) “redesign graduate programs so as to accommodate the new community college market, where teaching skills are more important than scholarly expertise”; and (6) “become newly public”–that is, to make better contacts with the so-called outside world. 2 The trouble with such practical solutions is that they assume that we humanists have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable–that we simply need to convince those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us. But that assumption is untrue. What are the humanities? Consider the answer provided on the web site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): What are the Humanities? The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evident in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on “The Many Realms of King Arthur” at your local library, that is the humanities. When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England midwife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil War, that is the humanities too. What a wonderful justification, this last, for being a couch potato! And this vacuous statement is not an aberration. Just look up the “National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965,” which brought the NEH and NEA into being: 1. “The arts and humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” What can “belong” possibly mean here? I as citizen do not “own” specific art works and philosophical treatises the way I might own stock or real estate. And how does this compare to the sciences? Does microbiology–or protein chemistry–”belong” to all the people of the United States? 2. “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” At best, this statement is blandly patronizing. Imagine someone claiming that “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to the humanities alone, but must give full value and support to those great branches of intellectual activity, the sciences and social sciences”? But further: the assertion that arts and humanities somehow make us better persons and citizens is, at best, implausible. Hitler, let’s remember, was so enraptured by Wagner that he attended performances of Lohengrin at the Vienna Opera House ten times in 1908. 3. “The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” Do the arts and humanities foster diversity? I know of no evidence for this proposition. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are generally held to be classics of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. They aim to define the poet’s unique genius, but the last thing they foster is “respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.” But if the NEH’s claims for the humanities are, to say the least, questionable, they are also quite typical. At Stanford, where I teach, the official Bulletin contains this description: The School of Humanities and Sciences, with over 40 departments and interdepartmental degree programs, is the primary locus for the superior liberal arts education offered by Stanford University. Through exposure to the humanities, undergraduates study the ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of the human experience, past and present, and so are prepared to make thoughtful and imaginative contributions to the culture of the future. The language used here is revealing. Whereas the social sciences (according to theBulletin) teach “theories and techniques for the analysis of specific societal issues,” and the “hard” sciences prepare students to become the “leaders” in our increasingly technological society, the humanities “expose” students to the “ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of human experience.” Exposure is nice enough–but also perfectly dispensable when leadership and expertise are at stake. Indeed, the