In
the winter issue of Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, a number of distinguished scholars
addressed the distinctively American theme of residential liberal arts
colleges. One of those scholars was Christina Sorum, dean of arts and
sciences at the College and the Frank Bailey Professor of Classics.
Her essay was titled ” 'Vortex, Clouds, and Tongue': New Problems
in the Humanities?”, and we present the following excerpts.
“'Vortex,
Clouds, and Tongue': New Problems in the Humanities?” reprinted
by permission of Daedelus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, from the issue entitled “Distinctly American: The
Residential Liberal Arts Colleges,” Winter 1999, Vol. 128, No. 1.
Inside
and outside the academy the historic debate continues over the proper
subject of study in the humanities, the appropriate methodology to
carry out that study, and the particular value of studying the
humanities. To acquire a contemporary perspective on these issues, I
asked six undergraduates if and why they should study the humanities,
and where this study should fit into a liberal arts education at an
undergraduate residential college. Five students spoke of the
importance of reading the great works of literature, history, and
philosophy (both Western and Eastern) in order to answer the perennial
questions of mankind that are important for individual and human
development: “Literature
presents imaginative and exploratory uses of language; reading,
talking about, and writing about these uses not only exposes us to
different ways of conceiving and expressing human experience, but also
requires us to integrate them into our own lives,” or, more simply, “The humanities are the only place to turn
when we want to study ourselves, to know how and why we live.”
Then,
sounding more like Protagoras than Plato, they presented a utilitarian
argument for the study of the humanities as “language.” One said with great assurance, “The most important skill
students can learn is taught by the study of literature. The study of literature is a study of manipulations of
language. The humanities, in general, concern themselves with the use
of language, teaching us skills like persuasion through reading and
writing about novels, philosophical treatises, and historical
documents.”
In
response to the particular question of the virtue of studying the
humanities in a liberal arts college, they viewed the answer as
self-evident. Said one, “The only authentic approach to the
humanities can occur in a liberal arts college because the institution
itself (ideally) is governed by the same belief as the humanities in
the importance of dialogue.” They noted that the teacher in small
classes engages the students so that they are compelled to grasp the
difficult messages about thought, experience, and knowledge and that
this is unlikely to happen in another educational format.
In
light of these affirmations of the value of studying the humanities,
it is difficult to believe that the humanities are considered to be in
dire straits. But we regularly hear, even at liberal arts colleges
with their long traditions in the humanities, that enrollments are
shrinking, that humanities teachers are demoralized, and that students
resent studying topics that don't seem relevant to their future
careers. It is clear to me — as a classicist, a faculty member, and a
dean — that there are, in fact, major problems with regard to the
faculty, the students, and the curricula that must be addressed so
that the humanities can continue to flourish at liberal arts colleges.
THE FACULTY
The
students quoted above regard the close interaction of faculty and
students in small classes as an essential part of studying the
humanities and as one particular virtue of a liberal arts college.
Yet, while I believe that most faculty at liberal arts colleges
endorse the ideal, seldom do I hear faculty rejoice in this
opportunity. Rather, many perceive themselves as assailed by a variety
of forces that prevent them from fully achieving this ideal.
Primary
among these forces are the increased specialization and
professionalization of the faculty of liberal arts colleges. Almost
all of these faculty have trained at a research university, where
specialization is the mode of study. Students trained in such
institutions emerge into the profession as specialists in one area in
which they continue to work, for they understand that if they are to
be successful they must contribute something new to the discussion,
and this requires the close examination of a topic, of learning more
about it than is already known. Over the years, as more and more of
these young scholars have accepted jobs at liberal arts colleges, they
have brought with them not only their talent but also the professional
mode and expectations acquired in graduate school at research
universities. This mode defines excellence in terms of peer reviewed
publications in scholarly journals or with scholarly presses. And the
peers are specialists.
This
situation certainly does not mean that these scholars are not good
undergraduate teachers; most whom I have known consider their teaching
of primary importance, are successful at it, and enjoy it. But there
is an underlying tension or sense of dissatisfaction in many of these
men and women. They begin their new job eager to profess their topic,
but immediately learn that the special skill of a college teacher is
to be able to translate the significance of the topic — presumably of
a topic that he or she loves — into a context that is meaningful for
the undergraduate. This takes a reorientation of scholarly values, for
the details and complexity that are the essence of scholarly work must
be put aside and the grand scheme — which as scholars they have
learned to distrust — must be put forward.
Furthermore,
many in the humanities will not be teaching their particular topics to
upper level students in seminars. Rather, they will teach introductory
or core courses with large enrollments that cover a broad area in a
brief time and in which they must emphasize not only content but also
basic reading and writing skills. Finally, many of the students in the
classes may not be planning to continue study in the discipline or may
be present only because the course is required.
The
problems posed in teaching by specialization do not, however, have the
same impact on morale and behavior as those posed by the demand —
real and imagined — of remaining a productive scholar in a liberal
arts college. For professors, the time available for research is to a
large degree dependent upon the number of courses they teach. The
teaching load at liberal arts colleges is normally higher than that of
a research university. Furthermore, for humanists, the load can be
especially time consuming because a number of their courses will be
introductory, hence larger and entailing considerable amounts of
graded writing, a time-consuming task. An additional demand upon the
time of all liberal arts college faculty is the expectation that they
will participate in the intellectual life of the students outside of
the classroom with extensive office hours and attendance at language
tables, poetry readings, and philosophy colloquia. Many also are
regularly asked to talk to student groups, join student-faculty
panels, plan trips to museums and theaters, attend student
productions, plan film series, and entertain students in their
homes….
As
both a humanist and a dean of arts and sciences, I believe that
research expectations for humanists at liberal arts colleges should be
encouraged. In fact, I have become increasingly committed to the idea
that liberal arts college faculty must be active scholars, not least
because providing research opportunities for faculty makes these
colleges appealing to the most competitive job candidates. Equally
importantly, scholarship can and does inform teaching in a variety of
ways including exposing the teacher to new ideas, methods, and
information. Furthermore, most of us became faculty members because we
were intensely interested in our fields and wanted to pursue them;
this is an important part of our identity and our happiness. By
engaging in scholarly activity and submitting work for consideration
by their peers, teachers of undergraduates are able to maintain a high
level of engagement and performance in their disciplines.
Consequently, the administration must find ways to enable faculty to
concentrate on their teaching without abandoning their research, and
faculty in judging each other must take a broad and generous view of
what constitutes appropriate research and productivity. Only in this
way will liberal arts college faculty thrive as teachers and scholars
and realize the goals of a liberal arts college education.
STUDENTS
Although
the students with whom I spoke clearly expressed their belief in the
importance of studying the humanities, they do not appear to be a
representative sample.
Nationally, in 1966 humanities degrees were 20.7 percent of
the total degrees awarded; by 1993 they were only 12.7 percent.
The
most frequently cited scapegoat for this state of affairs is
preprofessionlism; students, like faculty, have been soiled by the
mundane reality of getting and keeping jobs. In 1993, 85 percent of
students reported that they had come to college with a specific career
in mind for which they wished to prepare. In 1996, 72 percent said
they went to college in order to make more money. At the same time,
the number of students who reported that they came to college to gain
a well-rounded education and to formulate the values and goals in
their life went down from 71 percent to 57 percent. This pattern
applies to all groups of students, regardless of age, race, gender,
full-time or part-time attendance status, or the type of institution
attended.
This
preprofessional attitude is moderated, according to Alexander Astin's
latest surveys, in students who attend private independent,
Protestant, or Roman Catholic colleges. These institutions have the
strongest “Humanities Orientation,” a measure he defines by
the importance given to teaching the classics of Western Civilization,
using essay exams, offering of general education courses, and
encouraging the use of multiple drafts of written work.
Small highly selective colleges exhibit the strongest
Humanities Orientation, whereas the larger, nonselective institutions
show the weakest. Clearly, in spite of the prevalence of
preprofessional attitudes among the college-bound, liberal arts
colleges are in an optimal position to engage students in the study of
the humanities.
Factors
other than careerism, however, pose significant and potentially more
long-term problems for the humanities, even at liberal arts colleges;
the very styles of learning which seem best suited for today's
students are not those of the typical humanities course. Humanities
are text based, but our students, we fear, are losing the ability to
read. The impairment of literacy — and hence verbal expression —
becomes an impediment not only in the reading of texts but also in the
interchange of ideas, both oral and written, that is fundamental to
the teaching of texts. Furthermore, a study by Charles Schroeder
indicates that more than half of today's students perform best in a
learning situation characterized by “direct, concrete experience,
moderate-to-high degrees of structure, and a linear approach to
learning.” Three-quarters of faculty, on the other hand, prefer
the global to the particular; are stimulated by the realm of concepts,
ideas, and abstractions; and assume that students, like themselves,
need a high degree of autonomy in their work. The implications for the
humanities seem especially significant. No matter how many active and
cooperative learning projects we invent, much of our students'
learning must come through reading, a slow and solitary act, and much
of our discussion must involve ideas and abstractions.
The
mismatch of student learning styles and disciplinary methods in the
text-based humanities is apparent in the difficulty humanities faculty
and students have in benefiting from the current enthusiasm for
undergraduate research. Indeed, active, hands-on learning, with
faculty and students working closely together, and not infrequently
publishing together, is well suited to the sciences. The social
sciences, too, with their emphases on data collection and
manipulation, present to students opportunities of discovery and
active learning in collaboration with faculty. In the humanities,
however, although many students do serious work on senior projects and
theses, and although this work entails meetings and discussions with
the advisor, most of it is done alone, in reading, taking notes, and
writing, and there is seldom external funding available to support
either faculty or students. Furthermore, most seniors in humanities
are not able to produce original work because their language skills
are inadequate or they do not have sufficient literary, philosophical,
historical, or theoretical background. I do not wish to denigrate the
achievements of humanities students or faculty; many of us have had
wonderful intellectual experiences workings with students on their
senior theses, and many students have found the experience
transformative. But the appeal is not to the scientific method of
active discovery that is the model for student learning and
undergraduate research today.
CURRICULUM
…Certainly,
the curricula in the humanities have changed since the 1960s, and the
increased discussion of literary theory and the politics of
multiculturalism, the causes of most controversy, have contributed to
this. Most noticeable is the tremendous increase in course offerings
with a shift in course descriptions away from period or genre to
thematic topics, the inclusion of interdepartmental and
interdisciplinary programs, a globalization of the curriculum, and the
proliferation of course offerings pertaining to minority populations,
ethnic group, and women and gender-related issues.
The
increased number of courses has made the designation of general
education or core requirements a more contentious issue — an issue
that often thwarts the development of general education curricula
themselves. This situation is the result both of a changing world and
of an uncertainty about priorities in teaching the humanities. First,
in an environment that is increasingly multicultural and global in
orientation and experience and in which knowledge is expanding in all
areas, it is difficult to set dates or geographical boundaries on the
content of the humanities, or to ignore the interactions between the
curriculum and the changing social, moral, political, and economic
structures of society. Just as the introduction of French at Union in
1796 and its deletion in 1802 reflected social and political
realities, so do current topics and emphases. Today enrollments are
soaring nationally in Spanish and Chinese — both of which have both a
pragmatic appeal and an immediacy for our students — while those in
Russian, French, and German are either barely maintaining their hold
or falling. Greater numbers of women and minorities are attending
colleges, and courses that address their concerns and locate them
within the intellectual conversation are flourishing. Second, today's
students expect to study the humanities as a way to discover the
“other,” as well as to uncover shared values.
Finally, we cannot with any degree of intellectual honesty
refuse to recognize the existence of new methodologies for studying
texts any more than we can refuse to recognize new techniques in
science.
The
inevitability of curricular change in a changing world appears to have
uncoupled three obligations that motivate many humanities faculty. The
first is to teach students those works that we regard as significant
in our field, the works that have created our disciplinary traditions
and, in many cases, our intellectual environment; the second is to
teach ways of reading or methods of interpretation that will enable
our students to make reasoned aesthetic, philosophical, or political
judgements about texts; the third is to engage students through
consideration of verbal and visual texts in an exploration of
universal human questions and concerns. If humanists truly believe
what they profess — that study in the humanities is an essential
element in the creation of “educated
persons,” that it is important for the development of individuals
apart from their professional training, that it enables people to lead
their lives with understanding of themselves and others, with rational
purpose and sympathetic response — they must take general education
curricula or distribution requirements seriously, for they have been
and will continue to be the way most liberal arts college students
encounter the humanities….Humanists, therefore, must put aside their
distaste for teaching students who are in classes because they are
required and find ways to engage them in these subjects and lead them
to recognize their importance. They must also put aside the arguments
over content that frequently prevent the implementation of general
education courses in the humanities, and create coherence in the
discussion that arises from inclusiveness. It is not, according to
Astin's research, the formal curricular content and structure that
determine how students approach and how faculty deliver general
education courses, but the extent to which students interact with
student peers, and the extent to which students interact with faculty.
These are the types of interactions that can be fostered in the
discussion format of humanities classrooms in small liberal arts
colleges and which can attract students to our disciplines….
UNION'S
STRENGTH
Union
illustrates the resilience of the humanities. The school has a strong
and unabashedly professional engineering program, a long history of
strength in the sciences, and did not become coeducational until 1970. Yet both the “Humanities Orientation” Astin
identifies with liberal arts college and the power of a general
education program to attract more students to the humanities are
demonstrated in our enrollment patterns. The curriculum, a modified
core introduced in 1988-89 that promotes the idea that context is
necessary for understanding, requires that, in addition to a Freshman
Preceptorial, all students enroll in an Ancient, European or American
“History Sequence.” Within each sequence, students take two
history surveys and two aligned courses, one of which must be in
literature. In addition, students must take three language courses, or
three courses dealing with a non-western culture, or participate in a
term abroad. Many of these courses are also in the humanities. Significant enrollment increases that can be directly
attributed to the GenEd program have occurred in history, classics,
and modern languages. The overall increase in humanities enrollments
is 10 percent. Furthermore, since the introduction of the GenEd
program, majors in the humanities (including history), which had
fallen to a low of 14 percent in 1988, have risen to 21 percent.
In
the conclusion of Aristophanes's Clouds, Pheidipides, who eventually
learned the technique of clever argument, attempts to convince
Strepsiades that it is proper for the son to beat the father.
Strepsiades, not surprisingly, rejects the new-fangled learning and
gods and falls upon Socrates' school with ax and torch. Although
vigorous attacks upon new methodologies are not unknown among
humanists today, the use of brute force obviously undermines our tenet
that studying the humanities encourages us to act with rational
purpose and to enter into understandings with others that acknowledge
difference while reaching for a commonality. Consequently, we must find our inspiration not in the Clouds,
but nearer at hand — even, I dare propose, in the current situation
of the humanities at liberal arts colleges. We can note the slowly
increasing number of students in our courses, the positive effects
that general education programs can have on majors, the excitement and
interest generated by new texts and approaches, and, most importantly,
the persistent belief of a number of students in liberal arts colleges
that it is important to study the humanities.
Nevertheless,
we must continue to make our case for the humanities not only to the
public but also to our colleagues in other disciplines. We must
realize that the preprofessionalism of the students mirrors our own
careerism, and must through our own attitudes reassert and sustain for
all students the significance of the humanities. The strong presence of the humanities in general education
programs is one means of doing this. General education acts as a prism
for the goals of the humanities; through a multiplicity of formats, it
introduces students to a conversation that encourages young people to
formulate a conception of the good that transcends their specific, if
honorable, utilitarian ends, and begins for them the process of
answering and re-answering the questions that confound us. And it is in the discussion of verbal and visual texts in the
humanities classrooms of liberal arts colleges that the potential for
this sort of learning most obviously resides.