Why 4Humanities is 4You

Spearheaded by Alan Liu at the University of California at Santa Barbara, an international team of humanists is fighting back against senseless, debilitating self-destructive educational cutbacks which specifically target the humanities.  Called 4Humanities, this advocacy team is organizing itself into a powerful force mobilizing to inspire administrators, faculty, students, citizens, policy makers, and the media with the vitality, importance, and foundational power of the humanities in order to stop higher education from committing its own intellectual suicide.   As I've written before, these kinds of cutbacks are not only reactive and reactionary, but they also shortchange our students and undermine our ability, as educators, to train students in all disciplines for a globally interconnected future. 

Why, now, of all times, when every business school laments that the lack of training in other cultures and in context seriously undermines American international relations and business would you cut the humanities that specialize in the deep understanding of culture and context?  

Why, now, of all times, when science is so complex, costly, and ethically complicated would you undermine scientific training by cutbacks to philosophical and historical thinking, in critical thinking, and in creative, exploratory thinking?  

And, even without those practical affordances, do we really want to live in a culture without those features--the humanities and the arts--that endure and inspire, that make us understand our human capacities in the deepest and most fulfilling terms?  As we've been saying over and over for the eight years since HASTAC was founded, if so many aspects of human interaction, communication, of how we read and write and communicate are changing daily, shouldn't universities take responsibility for understanding those changes, for preparing our students for them?  

If we take technology for granted, if we do not understand our role in shaping the technology in the future, we will have forfeited the the most exciting potential for open creativity and open collaboration on a global scale that humanity has ever known.  From the open source code that helped create the Web, Linux code, the Firefox browser, Apache, and on and on to Wikipedia (making all the world's knowledge available to all the world's people without charge and co-created by all of us) and open source science and social networks that connect us in new ways, we are at a signature moment.  Without humanistic understanding of this moment, we will squander it.    We might even lose it, if we do not understand how imperative it is that we fight to preserve the open web.   We cannot motivate citizenry to fight for the preservtion of the open web if they do not understand its unique contribution and possibilities (and responsibilities) in all our lives.

I recently learned that ten percent of the student body at one of the major Big Ten universities is now Chinese.   They are coming to America not to learn technical skills, which they find are better addressed in their home country, but for an immersive experience of American culture and language. They are experiencing our culture and taking American Studies and other courses to understand us.  How wise!   There is a lesson to be learned there---and the humanities and interpretive social sciences are designed to teach that lesson. 

In the next weeks, you will be seeing many things unroll from 4Humanities, including a Humanities Showcase for the public of numerous projects, programs, pedagogies, and ideas that inspire with their vision and their intrinsic worth and importance to the world we all live in.  HASTAC, centerNet, and many other groups and individuals are joining together to spearhead 4Humanities and, again, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Alan Liu for his inspiring leadership efforts. 

Once again, below, here is the mission statement for 4Humanities.  We hope you will be inspired too:

4Humanities Mission Statement (http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/mission/)]:

4Humanities is a site created by the international community of digital humanities scholars and educators to assist in advocacy for the humanities.  Government and private support for the humanities for research, teaching, preservation, and creative renewal in such fields as literature, history, languages, philosophy, classics, art history, cultural studies, libraries, and so on are in decline.  In some nations, especially since the economic recession that started in 2007, the decline has resulted in major cuts in government and university funding.  Leaders of society and business stake all the future on innovative and entrepreneurial discoveries in science, engineering, biomedicine, green technology, and so on.  But the humanities contribute the needed perspective, training in complex human phenomena, and communication skills needed to spark, understand, and make human the new discoveries.  In the process, they themselves discover new, and also very old, ways to be human.  They do so through their unique contribution of the wisdom of the past, awareness of other cultures in the present, and imagination of innovative and fair futures.  Many people care about the humanities, not just in the educational and cultural institutions directly affected by the recent cutbacks, but also in business, government, science, media, politics, the professions, and the general public.  They believe that society will be poorer, not richer, without the humanities to help us grasp, and evolve, what it means to be human and humane in todays complex world.

4Humanities is both a platform and a resource for humanities advocacy.   As a platform, 4Humanities stages the efforts of humanities advocates to reach out to the public.  We are a combination newspaper, magazine, channel, blog, wiki, and social network.  We solicit well-reasoned or creative demonstrations, examples, testimonials, arguments, opinion pieces, open letters, press releases, print posters, video advertisements, write-in campaigns, social-media campaigns, short films, and other innovative forms of humanities advocacy, along with accessibly-written scholarly works grounding the whole in research or reflection about the state of the humanities.

As a resource, 4Humanities provides humanities advocates with a stockpile of digital tools, collaboration methods, royalty-free designs and images, best practices, new-media expertise, and customizable newsfeeds of issues and events relevant to the state of the humanities in any local or national context.  Whether humanities advocates choose to conduct their publicity on 4Humanities itself or instead through their own newsletter, Web site, blog, and so on, we want to help with the best that digital-humanities experts have to offer.

4Humanities began because the digital humanities communitywhich specializes in making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching as well as to think about the basic nature of the new media and technologieswoke up to its special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy.  The digital humanities are increasingly integrated in the humanities at large.  They catch the eye of administrators and funding agencies who otherwise dismiss the humanities as yesterdays news.  They connect across disciplines with science and engineering fields.  They have the potential to use new technologies to help the humanities communicate with, and adapt to, contemporary society.

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