Humanities and Numbers: A View from Inner Space
Responses
to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences report “The Heart of the Matter,”
released in June 2013 threaten to be as interesting as the report itself. That does not bode well for critical
understanding of the trope “crisis of the humanities.” Focusing on universities and colleges and
degrees earned in broadly defined humanities, commentators avoid
examining the crisis in the contexts of political globalization or global
intellectual economies. The trope is not
significantly displayed or, better yet, deconstructed as a rhetorical device in
the service of disinformation.
Rhetoric
is all, and all commentators on the report are complicitous in producing circus
acts for the American public. Such entertainment retards massive intellectual
implosion among citizens of the United States of America by ensuring that clarity about the state of the
humanities and social sciences remains beyond our reach. America’s proud
history of anti-intellectualism is not damaged.
It is
admirable that David Price and Thomas E. Petri, co-chairs of the Congressional
Humanities Caucus (letter of December 6, 2010) and Senators Mark Warner and
Lamar Alexander (letter of September 27, 2010) requested that the American
Academy of Arts & Science prepare “an assessment of the state of humanistic
and social scientific scholarship and education.” It is striking that the report is shrouded in
genteel civility rather than in rigorous and principled use of statistical
information. The report reminds me of
the literature of exhaustion: the reader is condemned to supply what is
missing. In this case, readers of “The Heart of the Matter” should inspect the
2012 Tables and Figures from the Digest
of Education Statistics ( http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_364.asp ).
Inspection can produce greater enlightenment.
If
Stanley Fish and Michael Bérubé are used as representative voices for the twin
towers of skepticism and optimism, Bérubé’s “The Humanities, Declining? Not
According to the Numbers” (The Chronicle
of Higher Education, July 1, 2013)— http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Declining-Not/140093
is more productive than Fish’s New York
Times blog “A Case for the Humanities not Made” (June 24, 2013) -- http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/a-case-for-the-humanities-not-made/. Bérubé does use information from the Digest of Education Statistics; Fish does not. Neither Fish nor Bérubé truly gets at the
heart of the matter: our long history of using fractured information to
befuddle the non-existent “average American.”
Examine
Table 353 from the 2012 version of the Digest
on degrees in English language and literature and discover that the percentage
change from 2004-05 to 2010-11 is “-4.3.”
For the same period, the percentage change in bachelor’s degrees in foreign
language is “+11.8.” Isolated from a global perspective, the data
only confirms that change has occurred. Neither “The Heart of the Matter” nor
those who comment on it ask if America’s tropes of national security and
military operations are variables needed to understand change. The “crisis of
the humanities” continues to soar in the sweet smoke of rhetoric.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
July 2, 2013
