The Liberal Arts and the Loss of Cultural Memory

R. V. YOUNG, Editor of Modern Age, is Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

The problem has been gradually emerging
over the course of more than two
decades, but with the worldwide financial
collapse of the past two years the threat to
funding of the humanities in higher education
has burst forth as an immediate crisis.
The problem is most acute in Great Britain,
and it has been the subject of several
“commentary” pieces over the past several
months in London’s Times Literary Supplement
(TLS) along with a typical barrage of
wrangling letters to the “correspondence”
section, which gives the TLS its unique
charm. While the commentators approach
the issue from divergent perspectives, they
are unanimous in their concern about what
they see as the virtual abandonment of
humanistic education in favor of education
and research with a direct and measurable
economic “impact.” They are, however,
less specific—and less convincing—about
the intangible and unquantifiable benefits
of educating students in history, literature,
philosophy, the arts, and theology—and
not at all forthcoming about the intrinsic
value of these studies. Perhaps the crisis in
the humanities is not, then, merely a funding
shortfall resulting from obtuseness
and ambition among crass government
bureaucrats and educational administrators;
perhaps it began decades ago when
scholars and teachers in the humanities
forgot the purpose of their studies. This is
ironic because the humanities are, above
all, about remembering.

In the United Kingdom the threat
to academic support of the humanities
takes concrete shape in the new funding
guidelines issued in the Research Excellence
Framework (REF) by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE) towards the end of last year, as
spelled out by Stefan Collini:

In this exercise, approximately 25
per cent of the rating . . . will be allocated
for “impact.” The premiss is
that research must “achieve demonstrable
benefits to the wider economy
and society.” The guidelines
make clear that “impact” does not
include “intellectual influence” on
the work of other scholars and does
not include influence on the “content”
of teaching. It has to be impact
which is “outside” academia, on
other “research users.” . . . Moreover,
this impact must be the outcome of a
university department’s own “efforts
to exploit or apply the research findings”:
it cannot claim credit for the
ways other people may happen to
have made use of those “findings.”¹

Collini provides a number of examples of
what is meant by “impact” in Great Britain
(“for example, improved health outcomes
or growth in business revenue”),
but no one associated with academic life
in America will have difficulty supplying
domestic analogues: university administrators
throughout the country are
obsessed with patents, “partnering” with
large (preferably global) corporations, and
securing research grants from foundations,
private enterprises, or government agencies.

The extent to which this “research”
spending with quantifiable “impact” actually
augments the economy or enhances
society as a whole is a moot point, but it
is undeniable that funding based on such
criteria puts the humanities at a grave disadvantage.
Collini provides among several
hypothetical instances of how “research”
in the humanities might be very good in
itself but still count for nothing according
to agency assessment norms the example
of an excellent book that provides a subtle,
highly regarded interpretation of “what
we might call a three-star Victorian poet
(‘highly innovative but not quite groundbreaking’).”
In the face of administrative
indifference, the author is quite likely to
vulgarize and commercialize his work
in order to attract a popular audience or
simply to give up altogether. Collini does
not, however, provide much of an argument
about the degree to which the study
of Victorian poetry ought to be funded—
or whether it ought to be publicly funded
at all.

In a more recent TLS commentary
Keith Thomas delves explicitly into this
practical question and adopts a slightly
more irenic tone towards the “managers”
of the contemporary university with their
“high salaries” and “barbarous prose,” who
seem to regard “research” far more highly
than teaching—and money more highly
than anything else at all. In Great Britain,
he concedes, throughout their eight-hundred-
year existence, universities have always
been expected to fulfill a “social function,”
usually “to transmit to a select band of students
the knowledge and intellectual skills
that would qualify them for the service of
Church and State. In the medieval universities
. . . the arts curriculum (which included
mathematics and natural science) was envisaged
as a preparatory course that would
enable students to move on to one of the
three higher faculties of Theology, Law and
Medicine, all of them vocational subjects.”²
As the modern version of this rarified
vocationalism, Thomas cites the 1997 Dear
Committee report that specifies four aims
of higher education: “to enable individuals
to develop their capabilities to their highest
potential; to increase knowledge and understanding,
both for their own sake and for
the benefit of the economy and society; to
serve the needs of a knowledge-based economy;
and to shape ‘a democratic, civilized,
inclusive society.'”³

The problem, Thomas maintains, is
that the third goal, with its wholly pragmatic
purpose and its bias toward the
“STEM” subjects (science, technology,
engineering, mathematics), far outweighs
the others: “In this country the arts and
humanities are allocated only 2.8 per cent
of the national science and research budget.
Across the globe, the situation is even
more alarming.”⁴ He proceeds to lament
the virtual non-existence of humanities
programs in many developing nations and
the channeling of bright, ambitious students
into medicine, law, business, and
various technical fields. “Humane scholarship
is a vital activity,” he protests, “for
without it we would quickly relapse into
ignorant solipsism, with no knowledge
of the past or comprehension of other
languages and cultures.” The purpose of
humanist scholars is “to resist the annihilation
of our intellectual heritage,” but also
to “expose myths and to remind us that
there are other ways of thinking and acting
than those with which we are familiar.”⁵

The attentive reader may have noticed
a certain tension in this formulation, but
also a subtle but crucial shift in terms.
Thomas proceeds to make the shift in
terms explicit, but he offers no explanation
and neglects the antinomy among the
aims of such scholarship:

When scientists do research, they aim
to find out things which have never
been known. But much activity in
the humanities is concerned to rediscover
and re-interpret what once was
known but has subsequently been
forgotten. A better word for this is
“scholarship,” with its emphasis less
on new knowledge than on fresh
understanding.⁶

The concept of scholarship in the service
of “fresh understanding” as distinct from
research for the sake of “contributions to
knowledge” flies in the face of the German
model of the research university, which
has increasingly dominated academic life
in the course of the past century.⁷ I am
acquainted with a situation in which an
uncomprehending administrator with a
technical background dismissed the work
of a literary scholar on a Renaissance poet
because it originated in a seventeen-yearold
doctoral dissertation and must, therefore,
be “out of date.”

But what is the value of humane scholarship?
If it is to preserve our “intellectual
heritage”—and let’s assume that Keith
Thomas may have written “cultural heritage”
had he thought more about it—then
that heritage must be intrinsically valuable,
not merely useful or instrumental for some
other purpose. The astronomy of Galileo
superseded the astronomy of Ptolemy, the
mechanics of Newton that of Aristotle; but
the Aeneid did not supersede the Iliad. Both
are intrinsically and uniquely valuable
works in ways that cannot be quantified
and that in some crucial, permanent way
transcend the ephemeral box-office value
of Brad Pitt pretending to be Achilles. The
purpose of literary scholarship—and this is
likewise true, mutatis mutandis, of the other
humane disciplines—is to help students
(not exclusively those enrolled in degree
programs) understand and appreciate such
monuments of human imaginative vision
by explaining their language and structure,
placing them in a broader context of
literary and cultural history, and suggesting
how literary representations of experience
have significance for understanding
our actual lives.

To be sure, there are factual and positive
aspects of literary study, and this is a fortiori
true of, say, history. The Riverside Shakespeare,
as well as numerous other modern editions,
may fairly be said to have superseded the
editions of Pope, Theobald, and even Dr.
Johnson. There are those who maintain that
Gary Taylor and his collaborators on the
Oxford Shakespeare have likewise rendered
Riverside and other modern editions obsolete,
but this is far from a settled consensus
among academic literary scholars—as many
reviews, commentaries, and letters in the
TLS over the past several years will show.
And it would be a rash judgment indeed
to aver that Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical
Tragedy had, for instance, superseded A.
C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. Whatever
reservations one may have about the
latter it remains enlightening and well
worth reading, while the former is simply
unreadable.

Yet many professors of the humanities
fall in with the administrators in wishing
to be evaluated on the basis of “productivity”
and working on the “cutting edge” of
their discipline. I have several times over
the past few years had graduate students
(in an M.A. program in English) inquire
whether I would permit them to cite
scholarship published more than ten years
ago, since this was forbidden by some of
my younger colleagues. In part, this may
merely be a response to the overwhelming
accumulation of publications by literary
“researchers.” To offer a single, simple
example: the last printed copy of the
annual bibliography of the Shakespeare
Association of America that I have seen,
covering the year 2001, listed more than
4,500 published items. If we assume that
researchers have continued churning out
“cutting edge” studies of Shakespeare at
the same rate for the past ten years, it is
clear that keeping up with only a decade of
such scholarship is considerably more than
a lifetime’s work.

This is really not surprising: third- and
fourth-tier provincial branches of state
university systems are requiring assistant
professors to produce “significant publications”
in order to attain tenure. The English
Department at North Carolina State,
where I teach, a land-grant university long
dominated by the colleges of engineering,
agriculture, and textiles, requires “a
book or its equivalent” for tenure. Further
promotion, raises, prestige, and various
less obvious perquisites require continuing,
“peer-reviewed” publication of items
of high “professional visibility”; and now
“post-tenure-review committees” are further
encouraging academic beavers to
continue destroying forests. In addition to
a glut of publications on major figures, a
second result of this pressure to “produce”
is the unearthing of heretofore unknown
or long-forgotten writers, whose value is
of course enhanced if they are women or
“persons of color” or in some way associated
with the concerns of racial or ethnic
minorities. Scholars of Renaissance and
seventeenth-century literature are now
awash in a flood of editions and studies
of such female authors as Rachel Speght
(ca. 1597–ca. 1630) and “Jane Anger”
(fl. 1589). The Tragedy of Mariam, the
Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) has been published
as a companion piece to Othello in a
“Longman Cultural Edition,” presumably
because both depict women killed by their
husbands because of a false accusation of
adultery.⁸ And then of course there is the
increasingly avid academic pursuit of popular
culture, which can be anything from
the advertising of commercial products to
“Rap” to “Disability Studies.”⁹

Since one may reasonably wonder if we
need more than 4,500 bits of “fresh understanding”
about Shakespeare in a single
year or, for that matter, 8,820 about Milton
between 1889 and 2010 (twenty-one
in the first three months of this last year),
as listed in the Modern Language Association’s
online database, one can understand
why one Tim Nau argues in a letter to
the TLS, “Since there simply isn’t enough
money to go around to fund everything,
governments are absolutely right to make
figuring out what causes cancer, say, a
higher priority than deciphering the works
of James Joyce.”¹⁰ It is probable, moreover,
that Mr. Nau is unaware that what he
regards as mere frivolity is actually deepseated
corruption. One can hardly fail to
withhold sympathy from junior academics
harried by relentless and ambitious administrators
who justify their own existence in
ever-increasing numbers by devising yet
more trivial ways for faculty members to
waste their very limited time (a “teaching
portfolio” including, among other
things, a “pedagogical philosophy” and
an account of one’s “pedagogical innova
tions” is a requirement in numerous institutions
of higher learning these days). But
in fact the faculty had abandoned their real
work in vast numbers before the administrative
pressure became intolerable.

In literature, for example, the dominant
force having pushed aside deconstruction
and various other French post-structuralist
fancies, is the new historicism or, in Great
Britain, cultural materialism. By the early
’80s Stephen Greenblatt would define the
new historicism as a “critical practice [that]
challenges the assumptions that guarantee
a secure distinction between ‘literary
foreground’ and ‘political background’ or,
more generally, between artistic production
and other kinds of social production.”
Insofar as he allows that “such distinctions
do in fact exist . . . they are not intrinsic to
the texts; rather they are made up and constantly
redrawn by artists, audiences, and
readers.”¹¹ In other words, neither literature
in general nor specific works of literature
have an inherent nature, purpose, or
meaning—and hence no particular value
in themselves.

Across the Atlantic, cultural materialists
made exactly the same point: “Materialist
criticism refuses to privilege ‘literature’
in the way that literary criticism has done
hitherto. . . . This approach necessitates a
radical contextualising of literature which
eliminates the old divisions between literature
and its ‘background’, text and context.”
¹² Since literature is nothing in and
of itself, the only purpose of literary study
is to exploit it in the interest of political
goals: “cultural materialism does not pretend
to political neutrality. . . . On the
contrary, it registers its commitment to
the transformation of a social order which
exploits people on grounds of race, gender
and class.”¹³ Funding the “humanities”
thus conceived is to support an enterprise
that has no belief in the innate value of
its putative subject and makes its aim to
undermine the institutions that supply the
resources for its continuance. One again
feels a reluctant sympathy for the utilitarian
administrator.

To be sure, cultural materialism is
exceptional for the belligerence of its rhetoric
and its tone of perpetual indignation,
but there is no denying that its obsession
with grievances involving “race, gender
and class” is pervasive in contemporary
universities—above all in humanities
departments. A third TLS commentary
by Martha Nussbaum furnishes sufficient
evidence for the “mainstreaming” of the
cultural materialist call for the humanities
to be expropriated in the service of a
progressive political agenda. Nussbaum is
identified as “Ernst Freund Distinguished
Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the
University of Chicago, appointed in the
Philosophy Department, the Law School,
and the Divinity School.” It is difficult to
think of a more exalted academic position
or one more indicative of magisterial
authority.

Her entire defense of teaching the
humanities, however, is based on the
assumption that “such courses will stimulate
students to think and argue for themselves,
rather than simply deferring to tradition
and authority—and that ability to argue in
this Socratic way is, as Socrates proclaimed,
important in any democratic society.”¹⁴ In
the eyes of a student so educated, “class,
fame, and prestige count for nothing”
(thus the “Ernst Freund Distinguished
Professor of Law and Ethics at the University
of Chicago” scornfully dismisses
“authority and tradition”; “class, fame,
and prestige”!). “Nor does the peer group
count: the Socratic arguer is a confirmed
dissenter, because she knows that the numbers
of people who think this or that make
no difference.”¹⁵

Obviously, the capacity for independent,
critical thought is an important aim
of liberal education—of traditional liberal
education. Unlike Keith Thomas, however,
Professor Nussbaum does not even
acknowledge the preservation of cultural
tradition as an educational goal. Reading
her exaltation of mandatory dissent irresistibly
recalls a recent, ironic bumper sticker:
“Question authority! Don’t ask why; just
do it!” A life perpetually questioning each
and every authority, having abandoned all
tradition, is simply unthinkable and would
result in chaos.¹⁶ But of course Professor
Nussbaum actually has an orthodoxy of
her own, and it is this that seems to her
threatened by the increasing emphasis
on economic “impact” in education. She
admits that businessmen are not unaware
of the educational value of the humanities,
and that often “liberal arts graduates are
hired in preference to students who have
had a narrower pre-professional education.”
¹⁷ Her real worry is that financially
threatened institutions are going to find
that funds are too scarce to support the
program of ideological indoctrination for
which the humanities exist: “serious critical
thinking about class, about race and
gender.”¹⁸ No one will be surprised at the
appearance of this familiar trio.

Professor Nussbaum’s conception of
education is no less utilitarian and exploitative
than the pragmatic programs of economic
development, which she excoriates
for “moral obtuseness.” Her notion of the
liberal arts is based on a curious history of
education tailored for its ideological goal:
“Starting in the eighteenth century, thinkers
in Europe, North America, and, prominently,
India began to break away from the
model of education as rote learning and
pursue experiments in which the child was
an active and critical participant.”¹⁹ Evidently
there was no significant educational
thought between Socrates and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. In the twentieth century the
two heroes of humanist education are John
Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore.

Both men insisted that the purpose of
education was to cultivate a certain kind
of democratic citizen with imaginative
sympathy for others. This is especially the
purpose of arts education, which Professor
Nussbaum plainly sees as a tool for the
imposition of global egalitarian democracy.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is praised for
enabling white readers in some measure
to “inhabit” the “stigmatized position” of
the black race.²⁰ Professor Nussbaum says,
quite rightly, that “artists (unless thoroughly
browbeaten and corrupted) are not
the reliable servants of any ideology, even
a basically good one—they always ask the
imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways.”²¹ But
everything in her essay suggests that works
of art and literature are only important
to education insofar as they can be made
to fit the politically correct multicultural
template of race, class, and gender. Her
attitude is, in principle, no different from
that of cultural materialism: “The reason
for adjusting Shakespeare to radical ends is
that he is an established cultural token. . . .
But it is precisely that establishment status
which proves, always, a hindrance.”²² The
content of study must, in other words, fit
the program, if not economic and financial,
then political.

Professor Nussbaum—and it would
seem that she speaks for many academic
humanists nowadays—appears to think
that the only problem the humanities face
is funding. In her view, everything else is
fine:

It is possible to argue, indeed, that
the liberal arts portion of college and
university education in the US now
supports democratic citizenship better
than it did fifty years ago, when
students learnt little about the world
outside Europe and North America,
or about minorities in their own
nation. New areas of study, infused
into liberal arts courses for all students,
have enhanced their understanding
of non-Western nations, of
the global economy, of race relations,
of the dynamics of gender, of the history
of migration and the struggles
of new groups for recognition and
equality. Young people these days
rarely leave college as ignorant about
the non-Western world as students of
my own generation routinely were.²³

It is difficult to grasp how a literate person
could even take such assertions seriously,
much less actually believe them.
The “study” of Rap and Hip-Hop are not
a substitute for an acquaintance with Bach
and Mozart; the “rhetoric” of advertising
is no substitute for Shakespeare; and as for
knowledge of other countries, the diversity
mavens in contemporary universities have
been busy eliminating foreign language
requirements, which are the foundation
of any sincere attempt to understand other
cultures.²⁴ But students who increasingly
lack basic skills in reading and writing their
native tongue are hardly ready for foreign
languages anyway. Contemporary students
are, in effect, invited to be “critical” of a
tradition of which they are ignorant and
without the requisite intellectual skills.

It is no part of my purpose to endorse
the reduction of institutions of higher education
to glorified vocational schools, but
we must recognize that the crass, ambitious
administrators who fail to see the value
of the humanities are attacking not genuine
liberal learning, but rather the cadaver
of the humanities possessed by an unclean
spirit. Once professors in the humanities
lost interest in the classic works of their various
disciplines, dismissed the distinctiveness
of excellence in cultural achievement, and
denigrated the uniqueness of Western civilization,
then their raison d’être vanished. If
professors can highjack the humanities for
merely ideological purposes, then they have
little grounds for complaining when they
are eliminated for financial purposes. The
men and women charged with preserving
the cultural tradition of Western civilization
have suffered a collective loss of memory.

NOTES

1. “Impact on humanities: Researchers must take a
   stand now or be judged and rewarded as salesmen,”
   TLS No. 5563 (November 13, 2009): 18a–b.

2. “What
   are universities for? From medieval seminary to the
   consultancy campus, universities have served the needs
   of society—but those needs go beyond economic success
   or technological advance,” TLS No. 5588 (May 7,
   2010): 13b.

3. Ibid., 14c–d.
4. Ibid., 14d.
5. Ibid., 15a.
6. Ibid.

7. See the article by Robert C. Koons in this issue
   of Modern Age (52.3) for further discussion of the educational
   degradation wrought by the German “research
   model” of the university.

8. See The Polemics and Poems
   of Rachel Speght, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Women
   Writers in English, 1350–1850 (New York and Oxford:
   Oxford University Press, 1996); The Paradise of Women:
   Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance, ed. Betty
   Travitsky, Contributions in Women’s Studies, No. 22
   (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1981);
   William Shakespeare’s Othello and Elizabeth Cary’s The
   Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Clare Carroll (New York: Longman,
   2003). These are random samples from my bookshelf
   of an enormous academic industry of the last three
   decades.

9. See among numerous other things, Roland
   Barthes, “Soap-powders and Detergents,” Mythologies,
   trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
   1972), 36–38; Houston A. Baker Jr., Black Studies, Rap,
   and the Academy (Chicago and London: University of
   Chicago Press, 1993); and Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing
   Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and
   New York: Verso, 1995).

10. “Letters to the Editor,”
    TLS No. 5590 (21 May 2010), 6c.

11. “Introduction,”
    Genre 15 (1982), Nos. 1–2: 6. Cf. R. V. Young, “Stephen
    Greenblatt: The Critic as Anecdotalist,” Modern
    Age 51 (Summer/Fall, 2009), Nos. 3–4: 262–271.

12. Jonathan Dollimore, “Introduction: Shakespeare,
    Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” in
    Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism,
    ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca and
    London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 4. The book
    was first published by Manchester University Press in
    1985.

13. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “Foreword:
    Cultural Materialism,” ibid., viii.

14. “Skills for
    Life: Why cuts in humanities teaching pose a threat to
    democracy itself,” TLS No. 5587 (30 April 2010): 13c.
    Nussbaum’s commentary is an excerpt from her newly
    published book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the
    Humanities. For a thorough account of the contradictions
    and sinister implications of her educational ideas
    as expressed in an earlier book, see the article by Jeffrey
    Polet in this issue of Modern Age (52.3).

15. Ibid., 13d.
16. See Richard Weaver, “Life Without Prejudice,” In
    Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard
    Weaver, 1929–1963, ed. Ted J. Smith III (Indianapolis:
    Liberty Fund, 2000), 93: “No man in a civilized
    society proves more than a small percentage of the
    judgments he operates on, and the more advanced or
    complex civilization grows, the smaller this proportion
    must become. If every man found it necessary to verify
    each judgment he proceeds on, we would all be virtual
    paupers in knowledge. . . . Happily there is such a thing
    as authority.”

17. “Skills for Life,” 15b.
18. Ibid., 15a.
19. Ibid. 14a.

20. Ibid., 14c–d. The novel is, by the way, a
    fine work of literature, which deserves better than to
    be appropriated for anyone’s ideological program.

21. Ibid., 15b.

22. Alan Sinfield, “Royal Shakespeare: Theatre
    and the Making of Ideology,” in Political Shakespeare,
    178.

23. “Skills for Life,” 15c.
24. Early in her
    commentary (13b) Nussbaum lists “to speak a foreign
    language” among the requirements of liberal learning,
    but it is difficult to imagine how she could not be aware
    of the utter neglect of language learning throughout
    most American educational institutions.