In a nutshell: W. Robert Connor’s piece on “The Shrinking Humanities” is fair and reasonable, but may mask more sinister prejudices against postmodern perspectives in the humanities.
Very interesting piece by W. Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation in Inside Higher Ed today entitled “The Shrinking Humanities,” on the relevance of Renaissance humanism to the humanities in academia today. Connor reports on a recent “Justifying the Humanities” forum in which successive speakers traced the origins of today’s academic humanities either to the American university of the 1930s as a mere matter of disciplinary organization, or to the Cold War imperative in the 1950s to help American students identify with the concept of Western Civilization via Great Books courses. “By the time the final distinguished speaker began his remarks I feared that we would be told the humanities were invented yesterday in sudden meta-post-Postmodernist fabrication.”
Now, Connor’s glib comment about these varying historical analyses gives short shrift to the fact that each is in its own context accurate, and that in fact there is also a need to consider the impact of postmodernism on humanistic scholarship and teaching. That being said, he does go on to acknowledge that the disciplinary shape of the humanities in American higher education is indeed of recent pedigree and has changed over time in response to historical circumstances. His main point, however, is that this short-sighted view of the humanities as a twentieth-century American invention, whether post World War I or post World War II, overlooks the Greco-Roman origins of the humanities and their embrace by Renaissance scholars, and thus risks “losing sight of what motivated the great era of humanism.” The humanities as we know them in the modern American university “did not, then, drop out of the sky into the unknowing laps of American academic bureaucrats.” Rather, he argues,
Leaders of colleges and universities in the early 20th century consciously and deliberately evoked the tradition of Renaissance humanism in an effort to develop some equivalent amid mass education in the modern world. We may argue about how successful they were, but they saw the challenge.
This challenge remains with us today, he argues, and our response to it should continue to be informed by the tradition of Renaissance humanism, from its beginnings in Bologna, Florence, and Padua in the early fifteenth century, to the establishment of the Scotstarvit chair of humanity at the University of St. Andrews in 1620, to the institution of the literae humaniores as part of the examinations at Oxford by 1800. Otherwise, he claims, we run the danger of, to use his term, “presentism.” He concludes,
If this root of the humanities is severed by ignorance, neglect or hostility, it will not be surprising if humane learning begins to look a little withered, and if students find what they have learned soon wilts and leaves them without the perspective and depth of understanding that a rigorous and wide-ranging education in the humanities should provide.
While I do not disagree with Connor’s conclusion, I cannot help thinking that his very measured argument disguises a contempt for postmodern concerns and approaches that others have voiced much more crassly. That is, while he never mentions contemporary concerns about race, class, gender, and sexuality, or the corresponding theoretical frameworks of critical race, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory that address these concerns, it’s not too long a path from his reasonable defense of Renaissance humanism to the kind of whackadoo attack on modern scholarship in the humanities that we heard from Joseph Edelstein earlier this fall.
In any case, do read the Connor piece. It is informative and, as far as it goes, not at all whackadoo. And while you’re at it, check out his latest newsletter. It’s filled with sort items about which I would really like to see longer discussions.