Bérubé made me think of saying that.
Here's how it starts.
OK, so here’s my very-belated response to that New York Times essay, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” I tell people that if they didn’t see that article this time around, don’t worry—it’ll come back. In fact, I think I remember the exact same essay being published ten years ago, quoting the exact same people, only then the headline was, “In Flush Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Because then we were in the middle of a robustly globalizing economy and a vertiginous dot com boom—who in their right mind would choose to get a liberal arts education in times like those? And now that the people in the advanced financial sector of that globalizing economy have plunged us all into crisis, somehow the humanities have to justify their worth. Well, I can tell you what’s going to happen ten years from now. The U.S. will be at 100 percent employment, and we’ll have national health care; the Israel-Palestine conflict will be over and done with, and the facilities will almost be ready for the 2020 Olympics in Jerusalem; and we’ll have these great cars—not cars that run on water, mind you, but cars that run on toxic waste and produce fresh water, so that the more you drive, the more you wind up helping to combat cholera in developing nations. It’ll be a great time, I promise. And people will still be wondering: why bother with the humanities?
3 comments:
I'll have to read Berube's full commentary, but I'm not liking what I'm reading so far. I mean, I get the conceit: even in a perfect world, the humanities would still have to justify its value. OK, fine. As a humanities scholar myself, I see reason in that supposition.
But does Berube expand on that thought experiment to consider why the humanities seems to be constantly under the microscope? Rather than project into the future, does Berube consider how this phenomenon is, historically speaking, a recent one? To wit, that it was really only after the culture-cum-theory wars that the humanities began to be held more accountable to a corporatizing university structure?
Anyway, thanks for drawing our attention to the essay. If there's anyone who can tackle these questions, it's Berube -- perhaps the beginning is just a little to flippant for my tastes.
Probably you've already read it by now, but if not, yes, it gets more serious. It's a blog post, not an exhaustive essay, so I'm not sure all of your questions will be addressed, but it's worth a read.
Sorry the flippant intro put you off! I like flippant, from him, anyway, maybe because there's usually a lot underneath. if not in the given post, then nearby.
I should add that I thought the light-hearted nature of the intro would encourage more people to follow the link, rather than, say, my trying to summarize a somewhat dry topic that I'm sure I could have made sound killingly dull.
oh, well.
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