Save the Humanities -- I

Stanley Fish, writing in The New York Times, exhorts college presidents to fight for the humanities. He is prompted by the recent cutting of programs in the humanities at SUNY Albany (programs like French, for goodness sake), and he points out what all of us who work in the Humanities already know: that this tragic assault on knowledge in NY is not new.

Since I began teaching English literature in the mid-90s, I have had to explain to students why they should major in English, and/or what arguments they can use to persuade their parents that majoring in English is not a waste of time, money and intellect. Frankly, despite the alarming frequency of this conversation, I am always somewhat flummoxed by the question: Why WOULDN'T a person study the humanities?

I don't have a magic answer, certainly not one that can save what has been lost at SUNY Albany and other universities like it, but I will fumble through an answer here and try to fumble toward a better one in time.

So, why should a person study the humanities? Because we live in a world with other people, and to do our jobs and to have relationships and to live in this world, we must be able to communicate with these other people. Communicating does not mean forming nice sentences with subjects and verbs, though this is important and is a skill those who study the humanities generally perform quite easily; communicating means having a common vocabulary with which we observe, understand, and discuss what happens in our lives and in the world. That common vocabulary includes words well put together, but it also includes images, metaphors, allusions, what is known, in short, as cultural literacy. A person who studies the humanities is culturally literate.

I want to stress, however, that I am not talking about the version of cultural literacy best demonstrated at cocktail parties where a person might drop a line from a classic work of literature and thus appear erudite. No, we can all say "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" in a knowing way. What matters is knowing where the sentence comes from, what it's original context was and what it's relevance is to a particular moment. To go farther, it's knowing how Dickens's representation of the French Revolution, almost a hundred years after it happened, has a certain nostalgia to it, and when quoting the opening phrase of A Tale of Two Cities, meaning to evoke that nostalgia along with complex meanings of "best" and "worst." And when a person evokes all that meaning, she communicates more profoundly about her own moment, whether a private, personal moment or a public, national moment.

And, of course, I'm just using here the example of quoting a sentence. A person who studies the humanities can do so much more, can communicate with such richness, can understand depths of personal and cultural experience, and can articulate with such nuance and clarity what she understands that whether she's a banker or a baker, her life will be richer and her job better done.

Stay tuned for how the humanities don't offer only a common vocabulary, but how they also give us the tools to value difference.