Report on the Humanities

This is the draft of an article published in Planet S Magazine: May 24 - June 6, 2007 Volume 5: Issue 16

Many Canadian Universities are currently experiencing changes. At one time, members of the Sciences and the Fine Arts, the Humanities and the Applied Sciences, worked comfortably alongside one another. They each felt their field was being respected and given its due. Members of the “less practical” fields felt their work would be valued and accommodated because of an inherent worth – one not dependent on how much money they could bring the University. And it was. But now things are different. An anxious feeling has spread over a large and important part of our Universities.

The seeds of this overgrowth of insecurity in the humanities departments have been around for a while. For a long time now, English and Philosophy students, among others, could expect a certain response upon stating their majors: “So, what kind of job will that degree get you?” But rather than getting better over time, things have gotten worse.

The state of the humanities in Canadian Universities, to put it simply, is not good. Planet S spoke to Len Findlay, an English professor and director of the Humanities Research Unit, about the cluster of fields comprising the Humanities and its condition within the Canadian University system. Exactly what the humanities are and how their importance has been underestimated was a central point of the discussion.

“The humanities are a grouping of academic disciplines with strong historical ties to the liberal arts in the ancient world, to the rise of humanism in reaction against a pervasive and oppressive theology in early modern Europe, and to the development of the modern university over the course of the last four centuries or more. The humanities are usually thought of today as comprising philosophy, history, ancient and modern languages and literatures, and the secularized study of religions. The humanities are strongly text-based and multi-lingual,” Findlay describes.

Of course, most people seem to have an idea of what the humanities are. The problem, though, is that the common view of the humanities is not accurate enough to make it clear how relevant it is to society.

Answering this call for clarity, Findlay plows on. “They focus on the questions and capacities that make us fully and distinctively human: how we reflect, how we express ourselves to ourselves and others, and how we have performed these activities over time and in very different geographical and cultural settings. The humanities are an important part of the human story because they represent continuity with the past and also creative departure from it, to claim new freedoms--as with renaissance humanism—or to assist with understanding new realities. Women’s and Gender Studies, for instance, is often counted as one of the New Humanities which deals with the historical and contemporary consequences of patriarchy and misogyny; and Cultural Studies deals with popular cultural forms often disdained by cultural and intellectual elites resistant to the democratization of knowledge and the expanding access to culture supported by new technologies. The Digital Humanities are another emergent example of rigorous innovation.”

The importance of the humanities lies also in the example it sets. It acts as something that is good in itself, regardless of the kind of monetary rewards, among other external rewards, it may bring. It’s an example we would probably do good to follow in other aspects of our lives.

“The Humanities are important above all because they value enduring questions as well as topical answers, and because they refuse to reduce inquiry to the flavour of the moment, or to reduce value to money. Oscar Wilde was making a quintessentially humanist point when he defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” says Findlay.

Sadly though, Canadian Universities don’t seem to see things the same way. What those in the humanities see as one of its positive features – the fact it doesn’t aim at, or need, much monetary compensation to be valuable – is understood to be a negative one outside.

“The result of this is that in many universities in Canada, the Humanities have been shrunk in terms of tenured faculty, and travestied by academic managers as teaching basic skills with a pinch of cultural luster—the sort of thing that produces a grammatically sound agronomist or a chocolate dipped MBA off to interact with Asia or Africa.”

This trend will decrease the number of humanities students. And as Findlay suggested in pointing out the important role of the humanities in developing our abilities to reflect on ourselves and our ways of being, this would be a great tragedy for us all. And to make matters worse, the fewer number of students that decide to stick around will be confronted with a weakened educational program. Yet, despite this bleak situation, we should not see the humanities as a lost cause. There is, in fact, a lot that can be done to reverse this unfavorable trend.

“Within Canadian universities today, where corporatization, casualization of Humanities labour, and the commodification of all knowledge are rampant, the Humanities need to refuse the reduction of academic value to the ability to attract external funding.” This is where the Humanities Research Unit, of which Findlay is the director, comes in.

Some coordinated effort to disseminate information on the importance of the humanities is needed and the Research Unit continually does just that.

“The Humanities Research Unit gives scholars and graduate students on our campus support in their own individual and group endeavours, both within and across disciplines, while insisting on independence and diversity at a time when integrated planning threatens to produce and reward uniformity of attitude and attribute: integration as species loss, if you will, and planning as picking winners rather than supporting outcomes that must remain for now unclear and indeterminate.”

“The Unit is a very little engine, but it could, can, and will continue to raise questions in order to raise consciousness and enhance understanding of who we are, and why we are how we are,” says Findlay.