How the Humanities Sound

Humanities enrollments are down, programs are getting cut and popular news sources are filled with advice on how not to respond.

Adam Kirsch thinks we should stop worrying about the decline of the humanities in universities because they’re doing fine elsewhere. Stanley Fish says that we should stop offering justifications for the humanities because they’re weak and they betray the university’s true purpose -- contemplation. To Justin Stover, the humanities don’t need justifications because they’re fundamentally indispensable to universities.

I understand these reactions, in part. Academic humanists can exaggerate the social significance of falling enrollments or lose faith in their work too quickly. When this happens, it’s good to be reminded that universities are not the only institutions that support intelligent thought about the human condition, and that traditional academic work still has value.

But there’s also another, better response. Instead of giving up on universities or doubling down on their traditional practices, we should look more closely at what they’re already doing. When we do, we see scholars and departments using core humanities practices like writing and teaching to engage with the world in all sorts of important, dynamic ways.

To see this, one need look no further than Being Human, the monthly humanities podcast I’ve hosted at the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center since 2015. Created to document Pitt’s Year of the Humanities, Being Human features monthly, in-person interviews with scholars or artists who visit Pitt’s campus. Conversations are typically 30 to 45 minutes long and focus on the public value of the guests’ scholarly or creative work.

Being Human’s roster of guests illustrates the strong connections that already exist between humanities departments and other disciplines and communities. People become eligible as guests on Being Human when a humanities department at Pitt invites them to campus, but only about two-thirds of my interviews have been with humanities professors. I’ve also talked to writers like Nuruddin Farah and Michael Chabon, filmmakers (Kazuo Hara), performance artists (Rhodessa Jones), museum directors (Eric Dorfman), and professors from outside the humanities like Rafael Campo (medicine) and Anne Kelly Knowles (geography).

Most of the humanities professors I’ve spoken with regularly engage with audiences outside their academic field. Petra Kuppers and Andrea Brady are practicing poets; Jeffrey Williams and Leonard Cassuto regularly write about academic politics and culture; Ursula Heise recently made a documentary film about endangered species in urban spaces; Laura Snyder gave a TED talk on her book The Philosophical Breakfast Club.

It’s true that I’ve tended to choose Pitt’s most interesting visitors as guests, but I haven’t had to look hard to find them. The fact is, Pitt’s humanities departments are deeply engaged with the world outside the university, and they’re not unique in this regard.

A number of guests, including Christopher Fynsk, Peter Holland and Marcia Chatelain, have focused on the public value of teaching. Margaret Homans, a professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University since the late ’70s, named teaching as the primary way she affects the wider world. She also recalled an important experience she had as an undergraduate during the earliest days of co-education at Yale. In a class designed for English majors, her professor brought in a copy of an early essay on feminist literary criticism because he thought it would be important for the women in class to know that this work existed. Homans recalled that the experience “sparked something in [her] head” and helped inspire her career. You don’t need to be an English professor to have had an experience like that.

Many guests have described the way their research contributes to contemporary political debates. Rudolph Ware uses his research on Qur’an schools in West Africa to counter the idea that Islam is a fundamentally political religion. Jane Ward frames her work on gender, race and sexuality in opposition to those who equate queerness with suffering. Anthony Bogues offers his research on black radical thinking in the Caribbean as proof that intellectual work can contribute to political change. Indeed, if I had to choose a single quote to sum up Being Human’s message, it might be Bogues’s comment that “it is important for us to think about the humanities as a way in which we can understand the world as something that we do. That we make. Whether for good or bad. We make it.”

It’s notoriously difficult to demonstrate how humanities research changes the world outside the university, but even here Being Human provides some clues. Rob Nixon employs the concept of “slow violence” to describe the long-term damage wrought by phenomena like nuclear radiation and climate change. During our interview, Nixon and I discussed how the phrase has provided a vocabulary for understanding cumulative, attritional violence in other areas, such as brain injuries and domestic violence. Fred Moten's coauthored book The Undercommons has had a similar effect, lending its name to a network of activists who work to bring change to the American university system. These are just two examples of the way that humanities research always works in the world: by giving people language to understand their surroundings and inspiring them to make change.

Of course, Kirsch is right that universities aren’t the only places where the humanities live. But the great work that goes on in museums, libraries and performing arts spaces is no reason to write off universities. When I teach public humanities classes, I invite my students to think of universities as part of a network of people and places committed to the value of imagination, reflection and creative expression. Universities should be supported for their potential to contribute to networks like this and appreciated when they do.

Skeptics might point out the difficulty of conveying complex messages in difficult financial times, or in a moment when information moves so quickly. Some might even point to the recent success of groups and individuals who define themselves as anti-intellectual and disavow many of the humanities’ core values. I asked Ed Ayers, professor of history and former president of the University of Richmond, how we should value historical research in a country that has regularly made icons of anti-intellectual figures like Henry Ford and Donald Trump. Ayers replied that “Make America great again” is a historical claim. We’re using history -- and language -- all the time. Our job as humanists is to use it to honor, rather than diminish, the broad range of human experience.

Another way to put Ayers’s point is to say that there’s no magic formula that will clarify the value of the humanities. Instead, it involves a constant effort to introduce complexity and imagination into our lives, particularly in settings where these qualities are undervalued or unwelcome. My goal on Being Human has been to show that university humanities departments do this work every day -- and to help make that work audible.