ls humanities: Humanities were always applied knowledge

Surveying the perennial crop of think pieces on the state of humanities, one might get locked into the language suggesting that the problem of humanities (and whether you think it is reality or problem of perception makes all the difference) is one of product-market fit. Humanities has a product which, so the story goes, doesn't serve a market of students who are compelled to seek immediate job value in their academic investment. One might divide most such pieces into two categories, those starting from what humanities are rumored to deliver and those starting from what the job economy seems to want. Those assuming that humanities delivers valuable skills (e.g. "critical judgement") can then claim that this is in fact what businesses, democracy, or the world at large need more of. Or, the other direction, one can map the things that business leaders say they want in employees and show that humanities has been delivering such soft skills all along. Fundamental to all of this is the false starting point that the stuff of humanities is, by nature, useless, detached, impractical, and generally not an "applied" knowledge. One must work to apply them to some other domain beyond knowledge for knowledge's sake. This is both a-historical and a gross distortion of humanities in general through the gravitational forces of academic humanities of the past half century especially.

The professionalization of humanities has had some positive consequences but many negative ones. The proliferation of words and publication has been, depending on your tolerance for academic prose, boon or plague. Personally I find the mass of scholarly work yields more cul-de-sacs of inward-looking pseudo-knowledge than real insight, akin to the way that those obsessed with the most recent discussion on Twitter create a hermetically-sealed version of our own present-day reality. It's not just an academic affliction. Any community of professionals can trend towards the palliative pablum of in-group connoisoirship. Academic discourse moves glacially vs. twitter-verse outrage, but they are extremes of the same basic phenomenon.

I like the formulation of the current academic humanities product here: https://mikesturm.medium.com/we-need-a-sales-force-for-the-humanities-7f6d047436b8

The problem is this: when we rely on 18 year-olds to dictate what their education consists of, we narrow the scope of possibilities of that education, and in turn, we narrow the possibilities of what they can do in the future. In broader terms, catering to what consumers want only gives them what they know they want now, but at the cost of all of the things they never knew could enrich their lives. By demanding that higher education look more like job-training, we end up missing the forest of a life full of possibilities for the trees of just getting whatever the job du jour is.

Sturm makes the point earlier that at stake here is the change in the university from the "scholastic paradigm" to the "market paradigm". Others might call that the neoliberal university or some related terminology about emphasis on STEM and professional/vocational training. Whatever we call it, this is the key tension that any faculty member has felt in the way that students face intense pressure about identifying what it is that they get out of college. It's a cost, a product and service, which they must weigh against future economic value. But what happens when the economic value of training in humanistic disciplines is something for three jobs from now, or for civic-mindedness in 2 years, or something activated fully only in retirement?

It is not just that a long-term view of such value is difficult to grasp. If we stick with the short term and with 18-22 year old students (notably, not the majority of those seeking college degrees, despite popular perception), then such students also flirt with the delight in things that have no economic value at all. When education slides into entertainment and, dare I say, enrichment and fun, that's neither a bad thing nor out of character when for students school is both educational and, valuably and inevitably, social. it is always both a learning experience, with perceived ends in jobs and career, and also a community. Both can bring economic ends and joy in and of themselves.

The product-market fit for students is perhaps in that they need (as Strum would have it) well-roundedness. That's fairly similar and consistent with research and arguments that humanities are the place for training soft skills which are, in general, the top demands of employers. See, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0245-6

My question is not at the global level, but at the course level. Courses and curriculum in humanities are determined in the scholastic paradigm, even when faculty and administrators think they are following the market paradigm. They are in fact following a faulty product process, thinking of their features first (e.g. I can teach this course on myth or history of the enlightenment) and then reverse engineering a purpose to drive enrollment. They are not confronting, in general, the problem of needs at the point when students commit to taking a class. They are surviving on sinecure, where distribution requirements protect courses and curriculum. But there is increasing pressure, both from other units of the university and from students themselves in some cases, to chip away at those requirements or open them up for other sorts of things. Is design thinking the next humanities? Entrepreneurship? Business? Communication? Can all of those claim to teach the soft skills that humanists might likewise claim, but more directly, with a cleaner through-line to job skills and direct applicability?

Humanists are failing utterly at product-market fit. That doesn't mean it's a bad product. In fact, it could be a superior product. It also doesn't mean that meeting student needs is some sort of debasement. As a Chronicle piece advocated a number of months ago, humanities has a marketing problem: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-have-a-marketing-problem?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

Here’s the problem: The organization of the undergraduate curriculum around departments and majors suggests, unfortunately, that the main reason to get an education in the humanities is to master a disciplinary field. You major in “history” because you want to know how to “do” history; you major in “English” because you want to learn how to think about literature, or rhetoric, or creative writing. But the vast majority of undergraduates do not want to become professors. They do not need a curriculum that prepares them for subject GRE tests. They do not need (and want less and less) a curriculum that organizes itself around the needs and demands of institutionalized disciplines, as though the only reason to study the humanities were to become a professional humanist.

That sounds a lot like a product-market fit problem. Unfortunately the solution laid out there is to reorganize departments. A noble notion, but probably a non-starter. If universities could pivot, let alone pivot quickly, then they would be different beasts entirely. There may be a few who can act on this, but most have entrenched interests and roadblock procedures (not to mention institutional inertia of stasis) such that radical revisions like that are nearly impossible. Interdisciplinary is wonderful in theory; in practice it is difficult or impossible to maintain a career as an academic without committing fully to the insiderism of one's discipline. The people who are left have been rewarded for looking inward, by and large.

But what if we start smaller? What if we start with courses around particular problems? Not ideas, not content, but needs and, what ultimately lies behind needs, problems. This is, after all, not an old idea. Humanism, in the traditional tale, is codified among law students in Renaissance Italy who find in ancient texts ways of speaking that are then brought to bear in their own world. Learning as a vehicle for being "cultured" may be out of fashion today, but that too is an application of humanitas, no matter how much the whole thing gestures towards a practiced unconcern with practicalities.

Problem: It's hard to communicate well with coworkers. Humanities has had answers for that for thousands of years. It is still taught too, if you can get around various academic disciplines that tend to trip over their own feet through overencumbered theoretical apparatuses for explaining what they are on about.

Problem: Technology changes so rapidly it's hard to keep up. Well, there too you might jump at the STEM solution and go learn some more things, but that's kind of like running off to chop wood with a dull axe or fixing a broken garden hose by trying to drink more of the water. Sharpen the axe first. Fix the hose and take only what you need. You need an approach to knowledge and skills, an understanding of the context for technology so that you can more effectively learn the skill itself. Humanities can offer that too.

When we stop thinking about humanities as content we can focus more clearly on the problems that humanistic study informs. But we also have an opportunity for a radically more inclusive humanities. Do we have to teach Plato because he was the source upon which all other philosophy is a footnote? Or do we include him because of the inherent worth of those ideas and the network that grew up over centuries around that. Yes, it becomes possible to jettison Plato, but one would have to think carefully before doing so, based on a calculus of both past and current value. So too other traditions, other moments, can become valued in thinking through problems, starting with the need rather than with the inertia of tradition which has proven so problematic.

For all the talk about inclusive humanities or revisioning the humanities, such discussions go wrong again and again because they can't escape their academic insiderism. Revamp the canon all you like. Does it matter if no one is reading the canon, either old or new?

To those purists who might object that looking to humanities to solve problems or as self-help is dirty and short-sighted and the like, who revel in the value-less-ness of pure communion with the relics of the past, I share your joy. Students share this too. There is value there, in freedom from practical ends. For many students, that removal from the practical plane is precisely the reason for a brief foray into humanities. They've focused so much on their career and training for that career that they are desperate for the sweet relief of something else.

Humanistic inquiry without consequence (for the pure joy of the thing) is not incompatible with problem-solving humanities. Ideally, these occur together, feeding each other. Like the arts, sciences, music, or any other pursuit or knowledge, of course there will be a wide range of thinking about what people want to get out of the humanities. There was never going to be a single answer.

I feel a bit dirty still talking about this as a product-market fit problem. That seems lame, that the beauty of art and literature would be measured in the capitalist swamps. And, sure, all the objections to neoliberalism apply. But the alternative is to lose in that marketplace anyway. Personally I'd rather take a shot and fail to sell then simply give up the game.