Future-Proofing Humanistic Study

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Future-Proofing Humanistic Study
• Joy Connolly (bio)

Let me begin with a proposition that might sound excessive or utopian:

We can ensure that the study of the ancient world has a strong presence in every institution of higher education in the country.

This is very far from the case today. Given current trends in enrollments and majors across many fields in the humanities and social sciences in the United States, you may think it impossible. I agree—if we choose to stick with the current design for the distribution of knowledge in the American research university, where scholars are sequestered by language, region, or country in divisions that passed for common sense in the nineteenth century, where students and scholars were mostly well-off men of European descent.

True, liberal arts colleges, particularly the less selective ones, tuition-dependent schools, large teaching-focused publics, and community colleges, increasingly feature Departments of Languages and Literatures, Departments of Humanities, Departments of Liberal Studies, and the like. But many members of faculty, trained at PhD-granting universities, tend to resent the fact that these generalized groupings are the product of a tangle of budget constraints and undergraduate preference, not scholarly design; and they find serious shortfalls in their own preparation for a career focused on undergraduate teaching. If they wish to publish, they must follow the rules for specialized research set by departments with totally different funding and reward structures. Any major change in their teaching practice risks putting them at odds with their PhD-granting colleagues. And just like their counterparts in PhD-granting schools, faculty in this diverse group of institutions typically pursue their study far from colleagues in the sciences and in departments or schools of fine art, architecture, business, public health, social work, engineering, medicine, public policy, and law.

This almost universally practiced sequestering leads to indefensible lags in the development of scholarship. Take one of the most traditional of humanistic pursuits, textual criticism. Today textual critics must overcome countless intellectual and administrative hurdles if they want to study graphic design, computer science, or the computational edges of linguistics—all fields with [End Page 19] direct relevance to the advancement of how we determine true and false readings and design better ways to interpret and publish texts. Consider the question of why scholars choose to make comparative scholarship so difficult by persistently preferring individual over collaborative work in all the ways we train and reward students and faculty—despite the fact that complex transregional or transtemporal questions cry out for the skills and experiences of a pair or a group. Count how many opportunities we lose to bring humanistic thinking to bear in the design and implementation of teaching and research projects that advance the thriving of urban centers, women's rights and access to health care, democracy, the reform of law, our understanding of political rhetoric and more, now overwhelmingly managed by faculty in the social sciences or in professional schools. Perhaps most exciting, though enormously challenging to carry out in the college and university today, are the potential projects undertaken by faculty working with people outside institutionalized higher education, including high school teachers, artists, and community members—initiatives with the power to transform the role of a college or university in its local environs as well as the way scholarly topics are judged to be legitimate and valuable—or not.

Who will do the work of the reorganization of the university? And where might we realistically start? We can design and advocate for realistic institutional responses to the work of scholars like Wai Chee Dimock and Roderick Ferguson, who note that the Eurocentric design of American arts and sciences is out of alignment with the values, aspirations, and contributions of the contemporary university's diverse student and faculty population. We can take seriously the professional and ethical implications of the racist and imperialist history of the study of Greece and Rome—which, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah and others have shown, helped cement claims about the Western tradition that obscured other cultures—and follow in the path taken by faculty who have already bravely expanded ancient studies to include Egypt, the Near East, South Asia, South...